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Monday, May 12, 2025

A Sense of Doubt blog post #3737 - Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds - The Wild God Tour 2025 - Music Monday for 2505.12



A Sense of Doubt blog post #3737 - Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds - The Wild God Tour 2025 - Music Monday for 2505.12

One of the very best concerts I have ever seen.

We saw Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds at the Moda Center in Portland on Saturday May 10, 2025.

WOW.

As a caveat, I confess that I was not a huge Nick Cave fan. I must say that after seeing Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds live, I am a much bigger fan. I am not sure if I would place them in a top ten favorites all time as I have years and years of adoration and love for bands like the Jam, 10,000 Maniacs, and Cocteau Twins among others. But in a list of current faves or current music I am listening to a lot, Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds ranks in the top five. Granted, I was listening to Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds a lot in the lead up to the concert, especially after filling out all the recent releases in my collection: Ghosteen, Skeleton Tree, Carnage, Push the Sky Away, and of course, I bought Wild God last year when it came out. As I tried to acquire everything in the discography, I discovered that there were still many albums I did not have, and I accidentally bought Dig Lazarus Dig for a second time.

This lack of super fandom may be deceptive given that I recently read Faith, Hope, and Carnage and have been posting about it: 

and



A little history of my experience with Nick cave's music.

I remember when the Birthday Party's single of "Release the Bats" came out in 1981. We got a copy to the college radio station, and several of us were playing it in our shows. I don't think we had it or that I discovered it until either Fall of 1981 (it came out in July, and I was off campus) or even some time in 1982.

And then I kind of forgot about them and Nick Cave for a long time.

It was in the 1990s that I rediscovered the Birthday Party and his new band Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds. Probably 1995. I was in Columbus, Ohio at a comic book convention. the creator Paul Pope liked what we were doing and we had some long conversations. I bought up his first offerings of THB and have followed him and his work ever since. We got talking about music, and he was raving about the Birthday Party and Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds as a massive influence on him and his work. I went back to searching for the Birthday Party after that, but the Internet was not super robust yet, and it was difficult to find great music, especially in Kalamazoo, MI.

Right about this time, "Red Right Hand" debuted and was popular, especially after featuring in both the X-Files and Scream. I bought the album Songs in the Key of X: Music from and Inspired by the X-Files (1996) because I was a huge fan of the X-Files (so was my Dad), which cemented my love of "Red Right Hand." Soon after, still in 1996, I bought The Murder Ballads, my first album from Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds. I liked it a lot, so when Boatman's Call came out in 1997, I bought it, but I didn't like it as much, so my interest waned until 2004 when Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds released Abattoir Blues and The Lyre of Orpheus, a double album tour de force. I liked it, but something about the music, the entire thing, was not my jam most of the time. I am not sure when I bought my first copy of Dig Lazarus Dig, which came out in 2008. Might have been in that year. Maybe later.

Then nothing. Also, Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds didn't release any albums until 2013 as Cave was busy with Grinderman and many soundtracks in collaboration with Warren Ellis, such as for The Road and Lawless. Also, Mick Harvey left the band in 2009, which surely caused upheaval.

Nevertheless, I didn't pay much attention to Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds until Wild God came out and I read an extensive interview with Cave in Mojo and then Faith, Hope, and Carnage.

I liked Wild God a lot, but I did not fall in love with it. Something about the music kept me from fully investing.

I included two tracks in this mix:

I like the song "Wild God" a lot, and I have that one in the mix (linked above). 

I also included my favorite song off the album and maybe my favorite (at that point) Nick Cave song: "Long Dark Night," which sits at sixth in that thirty-six song mix that I started working on after the Nov. 2024 presidential election when Trump beat Kamala Harris, and I was appalled at the idiocy of so many people in our country (I still am).

There's a P.J. Harvey song in that mix, which has been another musical re-exploration of someone whom I have loved more going back to the 1990s and early 2000s, who used to be romantically involved with Cave. Interesting that the last concert I saw was Harvey and then Cave, given their history.

Anyway, as I bought albums to study for the concert I also bought Nocturama and I already owned The Good Son, I also bought a copy of Adam Steiner's Darker with the Dawn: Nick Cave's Songs of Love and Death. I had read and posted about one of his other books, one on David Bowie:

But I didn't really dig into the book on Cave until a day or two before the concert.

It's a great book!!

I had heard of "Tupelo" but I did not know the significance of it to Elvis Presley and the tragedy of the great flood of 1936 when Elvis was born.

I didn't know much about other songs either like "Jubilee Street" and one considered possibly the best Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds song: "The Mercy Seat."

I also learned of some cave's favorite books and major influences that I am exploring or re-exploring for my own work: Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy and Wise Blood by Flannery O'Connor, the latter of which I read in college but may not have been mature enough to appreciate it at the time.

Around that same time, I looked at recent set lists and tour statistics and created the You Tube mix of the potential show below.

As I mentioned "Long Dark Night" was my favorite song off Wild God and maybe my favorite Nick Cave song, but then their performance of "Bright Horses" may have changed that.

I have linked two set lists below. I combined their encores in my mix.


In the show we saw, the main set list was the same as the others.


Bu in the encore, they neither played "O Wow O Wow (How Wonderful She Is)" or "Skeleton Tree" as they had in the previous two shows. But the played "Shivers", a song from the band before The Birthday Party -- The Boys Next Door -- written by Rowland S. Howard at the age of 16, a very famous song, often covered by others, often requested. I added it to my mix.

No opening band, which I love.

The show did not start promptly at 8 p.m. as promised but by around 8:15.

Long show, ending about 11 p.m.

Great fucking show!

Thanks for tuning in.

Enjoy the mix.


May 10 2025
Nick Cave & the Bad Seeds Setlist
at Alaska Airlines' Theater of the Clouds, Portland, OR, USA 
Tour: The Wild God Tour - North America 2025

Setlist

Frogs
Wild God
Song of the Lake
O Children
Jubilee Street
From Her to Eternity
Long Dark Night
Cinnamon Horses
Tupelo
Conversion
Bright Horses
Joy
I Need You
Carnage
(Nick Cave & Warren Ellis cover)
Final Rescue Attempt
Red Right Hand
The Mercy Seat
White Elephant
(Nick Cave & Warren Ellis cover)

Encore:
Papa Won't Leave You, Henry
The Weeping Song
Henry Lee
(Vocal Duet)
Shivers
Into My Arms

A Set List - Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds - Wild God Tour 2025












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- Bloggery committed by chris tower - 2505.12 - 10:10

- Days ago: MOM = 3602 days ago & DAD = 257 days ago

- New note - On 1807.06, I ceased daily transmission of my Hey Mom feature after three years of daily conversations. I post Hey Mom blog entries on special occasions. I post the days since ("Days Ago") count on my blog each day, and now I have a second count for Days since my Dad died on August 28, 2024. I am now in the same time zone as Google! So, when I post at 10:10 a.m. PDT to coincide with the time of Mom's death, I am now actually posting late, so it's really 1:10 p.m. EDT. But I will continue to use the time stamp of 10:10 a.m. to remember the time of her death and sometimes 13:40 EDT for the time of Dad's death. The blog entry numbering in the title has changed to reflect total Sense of Doubt posts since I began the blog on 0705.04, which include Hey Mom posts, Daily Bowie posts, and Sense of Doubt posts. Hey Mom posts will still be numbered sequentially. New Hey Mom posts will use the same format as all the other Hey Mom posts; all other posts will feature this format seen here.
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