“This depleted man transformed from this sort of suffering individual into something really extraordinary”: Nick Cave recalls meeting his hero Johnny Cash

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Nick Cave has talked about his experience meeting and recording with Johnny Cash towards the end of the Man In Black’s life.

During Tuesday night’s Late Show With Stephen Colbert, Cave recalled how after Cash covered his 1988 single The Mercy Seat on his American III: Solitary Man album, he was invited to duet on the a cover of the Hank Williams song I’m So Lonesome I Could Cry for the American IV: The Man Comes Around album.

“Just to be clear – Johnny Cash was my hero. I used to watch him as a child,” Cave said. “They played The Johnny Cash Show on TV in Australia. I got to sit there as a child and see this man with a voice – there was something about this voice that just followed me all my life.”

“When I got there quite early at the studio and when he arrived – this was close to when he actually died – and he was not well at all. When I saw him, he was a sort of terrifying apparition of a man so different to the man I thought him to be.”

He continued: “He sat down with me and he said, ‘Look, you know, I’ve had the flu, I’ve had laryngitis, I have no voice. I’ve never asked Jesus for anything, but I had to perform with you today. Last night I dropped down on my knees and I said, ‘Jesus, I got to sing with Nick. Give me back my voice.'”

Fortunately the old man had woken up - in his own words - ‘singing like a bird’. “Then he sat down,” Cave recalls, “This depleted man, and just transformed from this sort of suffering individual into something really extraordinary, literally before my eyes. It was as if all the frailty melted away, leaving only the essence of the man I’d admired for so long.”

The Colbert interview also sees Cave talk, movingly, about his own experiences of grief and the ‘transcendental’ power of music.

The Bad Seed is currently doing the media rounds in support of his upcoming album Wild God, which lands at the end of this month. The record, described by Colbert as “a joyful, uplifting kind of record” is his eighteenth in all with the Bad Seeds, and their first in five years since 2019’s Ghosteen.