Nick Cave to Take Audience Questions on Unconventional Tour
Nick Cave will embark on a unique tour this spring, visiting various East Coast cities to answer questions from fans. The trek, dubbed Conversations With Nick Cave, will comprise four dates in Massachusetts and New York in late April and May.
“The audience can ask me anything and I’ll do my best to answer,” Cave said in a statement. “I do have some things to say. I can always play some songs at the piano if all goes horribly wrong. But, I don’t know, I’ve got a good feeling about this one.”
Cave got the idea for the tour while supporting 2016’s Skeleton Tree album with his band, the Bad Seeds, last year. He felt a deep kinship with audiences and decided he wanted to hear more from them. “There has been a connection happening with the audience through the recent live shows where we have all shown a kind of willingness to open up and I though that a direct conversation with the audience might be valuable,” he said. “The more frank and intimate the questions, the more interesting the evening will be.”
The singer shied away from the traditional press cycle around the album since it followed the death of one of his sons. At the time, he opted instead to allow filmmaker Andrew Dominik to make the documentary One More Time With Feeling about the making of the album and his grieving process. “It wasn’t conceived as a work of entertainment,” director Andrew Dominik told Rolling Stone in 2016. “It was a practical solution to a practical problem. I think there may be a certain voyeuristic interest in what happened to him. But I think his fans are very much interested in how he and his family are doing, and that’s the subject of the film: How they are.”
While on the road, Cave engaged heavily with the front rows of his concerts. One such show served as the basis of the upcoming concert film Distant Sky, which was filmed in Copenhagen. A one-night-only screening of the picture in theaters around the world will take place on April 12th.
The looseness of those shows inspired Cave to embrace the freeform nature of the upcoming tour. “To be honest, I am not sure what is going to happen at these events,” he said in his statement. “I have always loved the Q&A format – not the formal onstage interviews that precede them but the questions from the audience afterwards. The audience tends to ask more challenging, revealing, playful and ultimately serious questions. You never know what you’re going to get. They can be fearless and they can go deep.”
Conversations With Nick Cave Tour Dates
April 30th – Northampton, MA @ Academy of Music Theatre
May 1st – Boston @ Boch Center Shubert Theatre
May 3rd – New York @ Peter Norton Symphony Space
May 5th – Brooklyn @ The Murmrr Theatre