Ermahgerd! We now have the track listing, I just pissed myself and it’s a big mess everywhere, just joking!
Skeleton Tree Track listing:
1. Jesus Alone
2. Rings Of Saturn
3. Girl In Amber
4. Magneto
5. Anthrocene
6. I Need You
7. Distant Sky
8. Skeleton Tree
I just have post this, I get so excited by seeing track listing before hearing the albums for some mad reason. This is just the same again and what a great bunch of words which I guess that’s all that they’re at the moment.
That’s only the third time Jesus makes it into his song titles and he/she/it is alone now. The first was way back in 1982 with The Birthday Party’s track on Junkyard album with Big-Jesus-Trash-Can. Off course God made into his song titles a little more but is that the same thing? The last time was in 2008’s Jesus Of Moon from the Dig, Lazarus, Dig album. Which kind-off leads to the second track on the new album. Saturn and it’s rings is the most far in own Solar System he’s gone, the Moon popped up a few times before like the last track just above and Moonland was also from the same album. Grinderman did the year before that with Man On The Moon on the self-titled album. Then we go back to 1984 with The Bad Seeds debut album From Her To Eternity and/or the b-side to the Elvis Presley cover In The Ghetto, flip it over and find The Moon Is In The Gutter. After that Cave’s only made it to Mars on that same Grinderman album he when to the moon on too, Honey Bee (Let’s Fly To Mars) was track eight and Man On The Moon was number nine. Countless girls appear in Cave’s song titles but none in amber before. Magneto is the very first comic character that’s made into his song titles, it’s the bad guy from the X-Men too. I remember when he was asked to write a song for one of the 90’s terrible Batman squeals, someone said to him to write about want he thinks about Batman which the answer came as “I don’t think anything about Batman at all” or something along those lines.
Right next up is Anthrocene, is he making words now? Because my spell checker is going crazy saying I’ve forgot the letters p and o right in the middle of this word. So cut straight from a dictionary “Anthropocene adjective relating to or denoting the current geological age, viewed as the period during which human activity has been been the dominant influence on climate and the environment”. Anyway the next track is called I Need You, want can I say about that? Well not much at all but I can think of a Bob Dylan, Madonna and Marvin Gaye have all got songs titled I Want You, is that the same thing? I bet they’re alot songs named that too. Distant Sky is track seven and off course the last Bad Seeds’ album was called Push The Sky Away but Nick’s now main man Warren Ellis old band Dirty Three’s album called Ocean Songs from 1998 had a track called Distant Shore, I guess not the same thing really, hey? But it’s a fun fact you know. The last song is the title track and that two albums in a row Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds have done that with. One more thing before moving on the the next thing it is eight track album and it’s the first one since 1986’s Your Funeral, My Trail album.
Andrew Dominik spoke so belief about the project last week on Cave’s website:
“When Nick approached me about making a film around the recording and performing of the new Bad Seeds album, I’d been seeing quite a lot of him as we rallied around him and his family at the time of his son’s death. My immediate response was “Why do you want to do this?” Nick told me that he had some things he needed to say, but he didn’t know who to say them to. The idea of a traditional interview, he said, was simply unfeasible but that he felt a need to let the people who cared about his music understand the basic state of things. It seemed to me that he was trapped somewhere and just needed to do something – anything – to at least give the impression of forward movement.
I took the record away and listened to it trying to work out a way into the whole thing. In the end I agreed to do it if I could shoot it in black-and-white and 3D. Nick’s response was, “I fucking hate 3D” or something like that. I showed him old black and white photos viewed through a stereopticon from the 50s. I told him I wanted to make a film where these sorts of photos came slowly to life. I felt that the stark black-and-white and the haunted drama of these 3D images perfectly addressed the disembodied sound of the record and the weird sense of paralysis that Nick seemed to exist in at the time.
To achieve this effect we built a special camera, a massive, lumbering piece of equipment that’s almost comic lack of mobility added to the eerie drift of the film itself. No one has ever seen a 3D black-and-white non-animated feature film in modern times – for as far as I know, no such thing exists. It is both modern and from a distant age – much like the Nick Cave & the Bad Seeds’ new record, Skeleton Tree, actually.
Nick came to Los Angeles and watched the film. His response was obviously conflicted. How could it not be? In the end he said, “leave it as it is” – which we did. He said that it was obviously “made with love” – which it was and finally, “to make sure they see it in 3D.”
Then couple of weeks ago we got the trailer for One Time With Feeling:
This is like part three now in my Shall Be Released posts just about this one album/movie, we have been drip feed the info over the last few weeks/months so now with four weeks before it all drops in own laps. I don’t know what else they can possibly tell us maybe a tour, fingers crossed? Because they have said before no songs/singles will be released before the film and One Time With Feeling is playing the night before. His website is saying “take a first look at the Skeleton Tree artwork” but sorry to tell you guys now you’ve put that out weeks ago, don’t you know? But I’ve included again below.
What’s can I say now with hopefully the last post about this coming album/film before listening/seeing it? Well, The Bad Seeds in the trailer I can spot is well, Nick off course sitting at his grand piano and standing at the microphone, he’s doing all the talking too. Warren Ellis get’s a few close-ups and then a violin solo right at the end. It’s Martyn Casey on bass guitar in the background and overhead shot of Thomas Wydler on the drum kit so that’s rhythm section. That’s only a four piece band line-up of The Bad Seeds which is the smallest line-up in such along time. We also do get to see a close-up of string section of the orchestra so we might just be getting something of a piano/strings album musical? Musical the trailer gives nothing away, is this something for a song or just a bit of warm-up before the main set? Which is them performing the new album for the camera crew so we all can sit and watch it screening in a dark cinema. It’s been made clear Cave’s giving NO promo interviews for this new album so all he’s saying about it is in this film itself.
p.s. I might do something like a countdown here on my thingy to the release of Skeleton Tree/One Time With Feeling or something like that the week before. I’ve got a lot Cave stuff I could share, OK?
a1000mistakes 