Nick Cave responds to ‘admirably perverse’ Bob Dylan post: ‘There’s been such an excess of despair’

Nick Cave has described the “lovely pulse of joy” he experienced upon seeing a post from Bob Dylan praising one of his recent live shows.

The legendary singer-songwriter has become newly active on his official X/Twitter account, and on Tuesday 19 November reflected on witnessing Cave and the Bad Seed’s performa at the Accor Arena in Paris, France.

“Saw Nick Cave in Paris recently at the Accor Arena and I was really struck by that song ‘Joy’ where he sings ‘We’ve all had too much sorrow, now is the time for joy’,” Dylan wrote.

“I was thinking to myself, yeah that’s about right.”

The “Mr Tambourine Man” artist, 83, was referring to the track “Joy” from Cave’s latest album Wild God, which was released to critical raves earlier this year.

Dylan has been attracting intrigue thanks to his sudden flurry of activity on Elon Musk’s social media site, which has included recommendations for restaurants in New Orleans, a tribute to late comedian Bob Newheart, and a mysterious shout-out to a woman named Mary Jo.

Cave, who is a noted Dylan fan, has since shared a post to his Red Hand Files website, revealing that he had not been aware that the fellow musician was in the audience at the time.

“I was happy to see Bob on X, just as many on the Left had performed a Twitterectomy and headed for Bluesky,” he wrote, alongside a photo of him meeting Dylan at Glastonbury Festival in 1998.

“It felt admirably perverse, in a Bob Dylan kind of way. I did indeed feel it was a time for joy rather than sorrow. There had been such an excess of despair and desperation around the election, and one couldn’t help but ask when it was that politics became everything.”

Cave said he believes the world has grown “thoroughly disenchanted, and its feverish obsession with politics and its leaders had thrown up so many palisades that had prevented us from experiencing the presence of anything remotely like the spirit, the sacred, or the transcendent – that holy place where joy resides”.

He felt “proud”, then, to have been able to offer “an antidote to this despair” through his live shows with The Bad Seeds: “One that transported people to a place beyond the dreadful drama of the political moment.”

Cave concluded his Red Hand Files post with the observation that, since he was unlikely to get the opportunity to thank Dylan in person, he would do it through his website instead: “Thank you, Bob!”

In a review for The Independent, critic Helen Brown awarded Cave’s album Wild God five stars, writing: “Many people find Cave’s recent output too ambient and rambling – the songs lacking traditional hooks and structure.

“This album doesn’t try to win over any of those doubters... Throughout Wild God, the rattling fire of Thomas Wydler’s drums and the rolling undertow of Martyn Casey’s bass keep up the heat beneath the gracefully meandering, melodic arcs of Cave’s piano, [Warren] Ellis’s violin, synths, flute and loops, Jim Sclavounos’s spine-tinglingly resonant vibraphone, and George Vjestica’s tender guitar.

“Melodies flood through the music and then disappear like currents. Wild God can feel fathomless, but it leaves you buoyant.”