The latest instalment in Nick Cave‘s website Red Hand Files, where he answers questions from fans, has arrived, and it’s… a doozy, tbh.
Concurrently asked “What is shyness?” and “What was your first date with your wife like?”, Saint Nick answers both in predictably poetic fashion.
“Shyness is the tentative sound of the orchestra tuning up before the symphony begins. It is a beautiful, fractured piece of music in itself. It is the orchestra attempting to find its shared intent and is over all too quickly if you ask me,” says Cave at the beginning of his response.
Later in the post, Cave elaborates on his first date with wife Susie Cave, calling the dinner an “awkward and hesitant affair” because “we both intuited, on some deep level, that we stood at the threshold of another life that would stretch on indefinitely into the future.”
“We did not know what that life would be, and it was undeclared between us, but our mutual shyness was the orchestra tuning up, with its flutters and discords, as it tried to find its shared melodic objective. In the end, I did what was a potentially life-deranging act and lunged hideously and impulsively through the membrane of our mutual shyness, grabbed my future wife and kissed her. She responded in kind and our shyness dropped away and, well, the symphony began.
“Shyness became the firewall through which we walked to a strange and different world, and here we are, together.”
No, shut up, you’re crying.
It’s not the first time Cave has used the website to discuss a personal topic. Last year, he penned an entry on dealing with the grief of his late son Arthur’s passing.
You can read the latest instalment in full here. Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds released 17th album Ghosteen earlier this month.
