Last week, Bob Dylan made a rare post on X complimenting Nick Cave at his show in Paris with the Bad Seeds. “I was really impressed by that song Joy where he sings, 'We've all had too much sorrow, now it's time to be happy,'” Dylan wrote. “I thought to myself, yes, it is.” A few days later, Cave responded to the Red Hand Files newsletter, calling the post “a wonderful pulse of joy that shot through my exhausted, zombie state.”
Cave noted the “wonderfully twisted” fact that Dylan was uploading to X at a time when much of the left was having a “Twitterectomy” and joining Bluesky in protest of Elon Musk's management of the platform. “The world had become utterly disillusioned,” Cave wrote, “and its feverish obsession with politics and its leaders had created so many adventures that we had been prevented from experiencing the presence of anything remotely like the spirit, the sacred, or the transcendent. that holy place where joy dwells. I felt proud to tour with the Bad Seeds and offer, in the form of a rock 'n' roll show, an antidote to that despair, taking people to a place beyond the horrific drama of the political moment.”
And he concluded, “I was glad to think that Bob Dylan was in the audience, and since I doubt I'll have the chance to thank him in person, I'll thank him here. Thanks, Bob!”
Read Cave's full response in the Red Hand Files.
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