Wild Gods & Empty Trainloads of Sky

Nick Cave, Gillian Welch & David Rawlings and Hard Won Joy

It’s a rare and wonderful thing to long-anticipate albums that upon their arrival deliver much more than you could ever have expected. Nick Cave & the Bad Seeds Wild God has done this for me. Gillian Welch and David Rawling’s Woodland has done this for me.

Anticipation tends to have several different effects on us and on how we view an actual thing that comes to us that we’ve waited for. Often times the anticipation and excitement…days, weeks, months, maybe years in the making…reaches such a soaring fever pitch that when the “thing” arrives, there’s no way it can ever deliver what anticipation promised. Or sometimes we successfully temper our anticipation, but the “thing” is lackluster and now we must grapple with the reality that our hopes have been dashed. So it goes sometimes.

In a culture of immediacy, not only do we want our joy and we want it now, but we also many times feel that if we’re forced to wait and anticipate, we deserve a grand delivery of the product. Joy is a word that is often thrown around in our culture in a rather haphazard fashion. You’ll hear self-help gurus and influencers talk of manifesting daily joy. You’ll hear of mood boards and vision boards and all manner of daily affirmations and goal setting. You’ll hear of those who find joy in the grind. You’ll hear of finding joy when you completely detach. There’s a lot of ways that people throw the word around, but the one thing that each alleged path to joy fails to recognize is how hard fought and elusive true joy actually is.

Nick Cave & Gillian Welch/David Rawlings have traditionally been unafraid to engage with the darker, spookier ends of human existence. The lyrics and literal voices of these individuals at times conjure other-worldly, Old Testament biblical authority, and feelings of haunted unease. The music of these artists is best not when you play it in the background, but when you engage directly with it. It can be challenging and jarring. It can be uplifting and freeing. Sometimes you may not feel it because it speaks to something a little too truthful. It can be hopeful and then again it can say you can toil away and still end up at the bottom of the dark, damp well.

But these albums, as filled with cautionary tales and hints of spookiness as they still are, are more focused on that peculiar type of hard fought joy than anything any of the artists has ever recorded. And I think that’s partly because these artists have had to fight through darkness to realize what true joy is.

Gillian Welch and David Rawlings have recorded much of their critically and popularly vaunted catalog in their own Woodland Studios outside of Nashville. The studio suffered an extensive amount of damage with recent tornados and the duo took to the hard work of rebuilding what was lost. The album Woodland is an homage to the studio and one has to think, its resiliency and rebirth.

The album feels like an extension of all they’ve done before, but it also feels lighter and more adventurous than some of their earlier works, of which I’m a tried and true fanboy. The song, “Empty Trainload of Sky” sets the tone and paints a picture of mystery mixed with wonder. What exactly is an empty trainload of sky? In my head it is a wide blue sky that peeks in and out of open boxcar doors on the brightest of sunny days. The song is a steady, chugging contemplative song that mixes both the metaphor of the struggle—the freight train, with the metaphor of hope and optimism—the sky. And empty? Well that word can mean a lot of things—both relating to loss and the possibility of fresh possibility to refill something.

You wouldn’t blame Gillian and David if they did every song based off of their near perfectly blended harmonies. And yes, there’s plenty of that here, but what truly makes this album soar is how individually melodic each of their voices is allowed to be. There is an intoxicating freeness to how their voices sing out alone, but then a stunning power to when they actually do meld together in harmony. You are forced to anticipate it a bit, but because of that, and often because of how subtly they deliver the harmonies, you’re rewarded with a joy that is true because it wasn’t handed to you. And it is fleeting, but it always comes back around.

Nick Cave’s story is filled with a great deal of tragedy. He has lost two of his children and has suffered through bouts of addiction. There is a darkness and anger to much of his early work, and given all that he’s been through, one could understand if darkness and bitterness was infused into his current work.

But instead, much of his more recent work grapples with mystery and tends to the larger spiritual/existential matters that humans face. Much of it is still sad and much of it belies a loneliness and deep sense of sorrow, but not Wild God.

You could say that the “Wild God” is the title character that runs throughout this lovely piece. This is not a vengeful god. This is not Old Testament stuff. This is spiritual playfulness that celebrates leaping frogs and cinnamon horses. This is a smiling god with stars for a halo coming to sit on the edge of your bed, inviting you to take one of the celestial bodies and toss it far out into the universe. This is loving someone so much that you can’t help but say “Wow” over and over. This is considering loss and darkness and reaching out into the void, searching for a hand to latch onto, and realizing that the mysterious, impish, and beautiful Wild God is in all things…living and dying and in between…and the joy found in that Wild God is joy that is earned through the experience of it all. Joy isn’t something that is simply manifested, it is something that is earned through tears, sores, uncertainty, and the admission that this life can be so cruel and so hard.

And though joy is fleeting, it always comes back around. The choir is never far from Cave’s deep woeful moans. The long gray hair of the Wild God flows unkempt in the breeze—laughing, dancing, and weeping uncontrollably.

Immediate gratification makes us feel good. But is feeling good actually a sign of joy? A drunk can feel happy when in the throes of a binge, but that happiness is an illusion. Happiness and joy aren’t the same thing. You can chase happiness and receive little bursts of candy-coated endorphin rushes from that which comes easy, but if it’s JOY you want…capital J-O-Y…then you’re going to have to put in the time, be patient, be willing to get knocked down thousands of times and be ready to reemerge anyway. Joy makes you wait sometimes. But Joy is bigger than happiness. It’s “Ode to Joy”, not “Ode to Happiness”. Happiness is handed to you and can be bought. Joy has to be fought for and uncovered slowly and carefully. It’s easily spooked. It’ll go back into hiding if you’re too eager to approach it.

But joy will reward you in ways that are lasting. When we connect to joy, we connect to something eternal. We connect to the spirit of the wild god, riding that empty trainload of sky. And these are two joyful albums that will stand the test of time. I can tell the spirit they were written in. I can hear the scrapes that were endured to write these masterful songs. And I imagine, like joy itself, these albums will continue to endure in the spirit of giving.

Albums like this don’t come along often. And to have two so close to one another is remarkable. And while yes, Tom Petty was right, “The waiting is the hardest part”, sometimes it’s all worth the wait. My hope is one day we can be less a culture of immediate gratification and more a culture of imminent gratitude.

You may have to fight long and hard for it, but joy always comes back around. Be most thankful when it does.