Falling and rolling: Nick Cave’s trauma and grief

This article seeks to decode the artistic strategies employed by Nick Cave on two of his recent albums, Skeleton Tree (2016) and Ghosteen (2019), to process the trauma related to the sudden death of his teenage son, Arthur, in July 2015. Understandably, the literary layer of both productions is marked by the author’s grief and attempts to overcome it. However, the lyrics on both albums are also an account of a recovery from a trauma. It is a process composed of four stages: the shock experienced by an individual; desperate attempts to return to the reality before the trauma, which for obvious reasons turns out to be impossible; developing a trauma narrative, i.e. retelling a traumatic event; the beginning of the healing process with accepting the loss as a crucial component. The entire process also assumes a significant participation from Cave’s audiences, as the artist consciously allows us access to an intimate and traumatic experience on a previously unprecedented scale