Bad Seeds frontman Nick Cave said he’s lost his “rage, anger, and hatred” after the death of his two sons.
The rocker, 65, suffered an unimaginable loss when two of his children died in 2015 and 2022, respectively.
Responding to a fan’s note in his Red Hand Files newsletter, the “Where the Wild Roses Grow” hitmaker said everything was flipped upside down after he got the devastating news.
The fan’s message read: “When did you become a Hallmark card hippie? Joy, love, peace. Puke! Where’s the rage, anger, hatred? Reading these lately is like listening to an old preacher drone on and on at Sunday mass.”
Cave’s response was nothing if not honest.
“I changed,” he wrote. “For better or for worse, the rage you speak of lost its allure, and, yes, perhaps I became a Hallmark card hippie. Hatred stopped being interesting. Those feelings were like old dead skins that I shed. They were their own kind of puke.”
He went on, “Sitting around in my own mess, pissed off at the world, disdainful of the people in it, and thinking my contempt for things somehow amounted to something, had some kind of nobility, hating this thing here, and that thing there, and that other thing over there, and making sure that everybody around me knew it, not just knew, but felt it too, contemptuous of beauty, contemptuous of joy, contemptuous of happiness in others, well, this whole attitude just felt, I don’t know, in the end, sort of dumb.”
The rocker said the loss of his son made him experience “actual devastation.”
“I started to understand the precarious and vulnerable position of the world. I started to fret for it. Worry about it,” he continued.
“I felt a sudden, urgent need to, at the very least, extend a hand in some way to assist it – this terrible, beautiful world – instead of merely vilifying it, and sitting in judgment of it.”
Cave’s son with Susie Bick, Arthur, died in 2015 after he fell from a cliff in Brighton, England. He was only 15 years old.
The coroner noted at the time that Arthur’s death was accidental and that he had taken LSD shortly before his death.
In May 2022, Cave’s elder son Jethro Lazenby died at age 31.
Cave confirmed his son’s passing to NME in a statement, “With much sadness, I can confirm that my son, Jethro, has passed away. We would be grateful for family privacy at this time.”
No cause of death for Lazenby has been revealed yet.