Top 6@6 Week 31 Headliner Poll: Post Your 6 Fave Songs by Nick Cave

Cafe Society
21

(I’ll Love You) Till the End of the World
Straight To You
The Weeping Song
The Mercy Seat
Do You Love Me?
Papa Won’t Leave You, Henry
(which I see are all pretty popular choices…if you can call anything Nick Cave ever did “popular.”)
G.B.H. Hornswoggler
posting from a town full of men with big mouths and no guts…

22

I’ll confess, I know more of his songs than I like. Those I do like:

  1. Where the wild roses grow
  2. Right Hand Red
  3. There Is a Light
23
  1. Red Right Hand
  2. The Curse of Millhaven
  3. Mercy Seat
  4. Up Jumped The Devil
  5. Long Time Man (from the underrated Your Funeral, My Trial)
  6. Deanna
24
  1. Red Right Hand
  2. Mercy Seat
  3. Tupelo
  4. (I’ll Love You) Until the End of the World
  5. Papa Won’t Leave You Henry
  6. Where the Wild Roses Grow
25

That’s a Dylan cover. Doesn’t count.

26

I feel like a traitor for only picking six, but here goes, in no particular order:

Mercy Seat
As I Sat Sadly By Her Side
Red Right Hand
Curse of Millhaven
Ballad of Betty Coltrane
Oh My Lord

27

Who said cover versions don’t count?
Pesch & gex gex selected Johnny Cash’s cover version of Mercy Seat jest a coulkpe weeks ago and Three (#2, #4 & #5) of my picks in this poll are covers.
This isn’t a song-writers poll…is a “what are your favorite tracks” poll. In past threads, there have been at multitudes of cover versions that people have voted for & they’ve always been accepted, counted and tallied.

28

Also, Adam P., Long Time Man is a Tim Rose cover. Many of Nick’s best songs are either covers or reworkings of older songs.

29

My favourite Cave album, “Kicking against the pricks”, is all cover versions.

30

Hm, didn’t know that about Long Time Man. I’ll have to check that out.

I don’t make the rules when it comes to these polls but it seems to me that if you were to let cover versions in, you’d have trouble with future best-of lists. Take Nirvana, for instance. Two of my favorite songs of theirs, Where Did You Sleep Last Night and The Man Who Sold the World, are both covers. You could even make the case that those are their best songs. But where would that leave Lithium, All Apologies, Dumb, Rape Me, and other songs that don’t approach the artistry of the songs Cobain covered in the Unplugged show but are still great in their own right?

Covers are sometimes meant as homage (Cobain singing the Bowie song) and sometimes as amusing, irreverant twists on classics (Sex Pistols cover of Sinatra’s “My Way”) but they’re never meant as stand-ins for original songs.

31

The Ship Song
Where the Wild Roses Grow
The Mercy Seat
The Weeping Song
Red Right Hand
Hallelujah

32

From the Your Funeral…My Trial CD: “Long Time Man; words by Nick Cave; music by Mick Harvey and Nick Cave”. Not a Tim Rose cover.

33

Adam, if you look closer, that’s referring to the track Scum, which is certainly a Bad Seeds original. It would have been funny in a way if they had taken credit for LTM, seeing as the late great Tim Rose took full credit for at least a couple of songs that he only adapted or rearranged.

For more info, check out this page on the excellent Original Seeds disc.