The new Nick Cave Book Stranger Than Kindness is a journey in images and words into the creative world of musician, storyteller, and cultural icon Nick Cave.
One of the world’s most celebrated artists, Nick Cave has enthralled and intrigued fans for more than four decades. With Stranger Than Kindness he reveals his innermost creative process as never before. Vibrant, evocative, and startlingly intimate, this remarkable volume peels back the layers of a unique artist, illuminating the inspiration that drives his work and exploring his many universes, both real and imagined.
Featuring full color reproductions of original artwork, handwritten lyrics, photographs, and collected personal artifacts, Stranger Than Kindness ponders the origins of our deepest influences—what shapes our lives and makes us who we are—and celebrates the curiosity and power of the creative spirit.
The volume, which complements last year’s Nick Cave retrospective museum exhibition, tells the artist’s life story through family photos, pictures of unusual objects he has collected and kept, photos of his lyrics, and sparse commentary from Cave himself. It contains images of early concerts by the Boys Next Door in the Seventies, lyrics he wrote in blood for the Birthday Party in the Eighties, and notebooks he has kept ever since he ventured out as Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds. It’s a rare portrait of the raw ingredients that fuel his intensity onstage and on record.
The images and captions that follow all come from the book, and they show Cave’s journey from his teen years in Australia to the genesis of his most recent Bad Seeds album, Ghosteen. In between those photos are glimpses at some of the connective tissue — diary entries, doodles, scribbled lyrics — that joins his art to his artistry.
From the book Stranger Than Kindness by Nick Cave. Copyright C 2021 by Nick Cave. Reprinted by permission of HarperOne, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers.
