Music, Creativity, and Grief

A moving conversation between Nick Cave and Stephen Colbert, spanning music, creativity, and grief. When asked about the power of music, and what it means to him, Nick replied, “music is a thing that makes things better. It’s one of the last legitimate opportunities we have for a transcendent experience really left to us.”

The lead singer and songwriter of Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds faced a parent’s greatest loss. His deeply personal and profound reflections resonated with my creative spirit and grieving heart following the recent loss of a dear friend. We’re all in a “vulnerable, precarious place” in this world. Let’s lead with our hearts.

(On grief) There’s a decision that we need to make..this is not particular to me, this is ordinary stuff that eventually in one way or another we all go through this these sorts of things and we have a choice. On some level there is a desire to turn inward and to sort of wrap ourselves around the absence of the person that we’ve lost, as if there’s some sort of nobility in [doing so], and I think this is a very dangerous situation.

We must be able to turn ourselves the other way, and look at the world and understand that we are part of the world and it is essentially full of people who have lost things. It is the sort of vulnerable, precarious nature of each of us, and that we need to understand that is what we are. I’ve found by looking at the world in that way, I saw the world not as a cruel place but as an extraordinarily beautiful place to live in. – Nick Cave, musician and author of Faith, Hope and Carnage