You can't trust an artist that just makes good records.
Interpretation
True artistry goes beyond mere skill; it reflects deeper truths and emotions.
Nick Cave suggests that an artist's worth is measured not just by their ability to produce popular or technically proficient work, but by their capacity to convey profound messages and authentic experiences. The best artists evoke true feelings and provoke thought, which requires a level of honesty and commitment to their craft that transcends commercial success.
In practice
During an art lecture, discussing the importance of meaning in artistic expression.
The idea of songwriting is a transformative thing, and what I do with songwriting is take situations that are quite ordinary and transform them in some way. Apart from things like the murder ballads, the songs I write, at their core, are quite ordinary human concerns, but the process of writing about them transforms them into something else.
The writer who refuses to explore the darker regions of the heart will never be able to write convincingly about the wonder, the magic and the joy of love for just as goodness cannot be trusted unless it has breathed the same air as evil.
But if you're gonna dine with them cannibals Sooner or later, darling, you're gonna get eaten . . .
Music is storming, driving, relentless, devotional, slinky, subtle, heartbreakingly-beautiful sounds that, lyrically, switch from the cynical to the sanguine, the defeated to the defiant, dealing in love, war, beauty, children, romance, rejection, Pethedine, poetry, panties, God, Auden, Johnny Cash, cold potatoes, too-much-money, not enough money, writer’s block, flowers, animals and more flowers. But maybe I’m projecting here.
Who knows their own story? It certainly makes no sense when you’re in the middle of it
And I wish that I was made of stone So that I would not have to see A beauty impossible to define A beauty impossible to believe A beauty impossible to endure The blood imparted in little sips The smell of you still on my hands As I bring the cup up to my lips No God up in the sky No devil beneath the sea Could do the job that you did, baby Of bringing me to my knees
He felt as if he were paying for the privilege of music with portions of his life and body. But it was well worth it.
It is true that there are few plays of Shakespeare that I haven't done.
Beauty is perfect in its imperfections, so you just have to go with the imperfections.
The poet never asks for admiration; he wants to be believed.
There are days when I think the National Endowment for the Arts should issue a quota system for the production of plays by women - especially when you realize women buy 70 percent of all theater tickets.
Nothing exists until or unless it is observed. An artist is making something exist by observing it. And his hope for other people is that they will also make it exist by observing it. I call it 'creative observation.' Creative viewing.
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