The band is a living, breathing thing. It grows in the same way we do as human beings and if it doesn't, it dies. It's important to feed the organism, and one way of doing that is to set musical challenges that keep it alive.
Interpretation
The quote emphasizes the importance of nurturing a musical group to ensure its growth and vitality.
Nick Cave describes a band as a dynamic entity that requires care and stimulation to thrive, much like a living organism. He suggests that regular challenges and creative endeavors are essential to keep the band's spirit alive, highlighting the necessity of growth and adaptation in the artistic process.
In practice
A motivational speech at a music workshop.
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
The moment a man begins to talk about technique that's proof that he is fresh out of ideas.
I sometimes have a horrible fear of turning up a canvas of mine. I'm always afraid of finding a monster in place of the precious jewels I thought I had put there!
To tell of disappointment and misery, to thicken the darkness of futurity, and perplex the labyrinth of uncertainty, has been always a delicious employment of the poets
There are some subjects that can only be tackled in fiction.
A work-room should be like an old shoe; no matter how shabby, it's better than a new one.
I guess I've accepted that theatre is never going to be edgy in the way I want it to be. It's too expensive for a start. And, the audience seems to be complicit in the dullness.
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