See Nick Cave Sing Heartbreaking New Song ‘I Need You’
Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds kick into a fuzzy, heavy, almost atmospheric groove at the onset of “I Need You,” but it quickly becomes something else when Cave begins singing. “Nothing really matters when the one you love is gone … I need you,” he sings almost independently of the rhythm. His voice cracks, sounding almost as though he’s almost on the edge of tears. The track appears on the group’s just-released Skeleton Tree.
The video culls from One More Time With Feeling, a documentary about the making of the record and how Cave, his wife and his band have handled the death of his teenaged son Arthur who died last summer when he fell off a cliff in Brighton, England. Filmmaker Andrew Dominik (The Assassination of Jesse James, Killing Them Softly) shot it in 3-D and black and white with a few shots in color. The film is getting limited screenings through Sunday. More info about the screenings is on a website devoted to the film.
Cave previously released another performance from the film, “Jesus Alone,” which is equally sorrowful. And he has released a trailer for the film, which shows him parsing loss. “What happens when an event occurs that is so catastrophic that you just change?” Cave asks in the clip. “You change from the known person to an unknown person. So that when you look at yourself in the mirror, you recognize the person that you were, but the person inside the skin is a different person.”