In an interview to coincide with today's release of the Bad Seeds retrospective compilation, Lovely Creatures—The Best of Nick Cave and The Bad Seeds (1984-2014), Nick Cave had this to say about the restriction of narrative song writing:
“The idea that we live life in a straight line, like a story, seems to me to be increasingly absurd and, more than anything, a kind of intellectual convenience [...] I feel that the events in our lives are like a series of bells being struck and the vibrations spread outwards, affecting everything, our present, and our futures, of course, but our past as well. Everything is changing and vibrating and in flux. So, to apply that to songwriting, a song like I Need You off the new album [Skeleton Tree], time and space all seem to be rushing and colliding into a kind of big bang of despair. There is a pure heart, but all around it is chaos.”
