He sits at the piano between verses, picking out a counterpoint to the guitar. (My husband would later describe it as “the most intense five minutes of my life.”) Cave eases into the story of “Jubilee Street” almost gently, ambling up and down the stage, grasping hands from the audience like a preacher.
The roof had been blown off of the place at least twice in the evening already-the rendition of “From Her to Eternity” alone was a barn burner. “Watch him blow the roof off this place,” he whispered. When he walked out onstage, the air coalesced around him immediately and took on a certain charge-oh, I realized suddenly, deliciously, I am at church.Īn hour or so later, Warren Ellis plucked out the opening strains of a song I’d never heard, what ended up being “Jubilee Street.” I felt Tyson’s body tense next to me.
I’ve always been what I would describe as an “enthusiastic but casual” fan of Nick Cave I’ve appreciated his music since college, but it wasn’t written on my heart in the way that other music was, and I had never seen him play live. I was unfamiliar with the song when I walked into the Barclays Center with my husband and our friend Tyson this October. But the live version is something else entirely. “Jubilee Street” as recorded is a masterpiece, practically a clinic in the art of buildup and release. At the end of the verse, the strings drop into your stomach, and Cave abandons the narrative entirely, gliding into a litany that reads as a prayer: “I am transforming. The second verse ratchets up the tension-the tempo quickens, tightening the loop, layering on a high-pitched, keening drone. The lyrics come at the subject obliquely, all dire imagery and fever dreams, and Warren Ellis’s guitar winds its way up your spine, wrapping itself around your shoulders like an embrace, or maybe a shroud. In keeping with the lurid, red-lit demimonde that the Bad Seeds have built over the past thirty-odd years, it features a sex worker, a desperate john, a murder. Like most of Nick Cave’s work, it’s a story-song, and it treads well-worn territory. “Jubilee Street” is the fourth track on “Push the Sky Away,” Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds’ album from 2013. Photograph by Luigi Orrù / contrasto / Redux Performances like Nick Cave’s pull it firmly back to where it belongs: in the realm of spiritual experience.
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