“It definitely had something to do with my father, that book,” Cave told me in Berlin. “He was an aspiring writer himself as a young man, and literature was a matter of life or death to him. My mother recently showed me a letter he wrote her, about this theater piece he was directing, and it’s written with such intensity — his frustrations with the actors and with the budget and so on. There’s this mania and enthusiasm for the work that’s very beautiful to me. Then, at the end, you find out he’s talking about a school play. So, yeah, the book may have felt on some level like unfinished business. But it took over my life in a way that wasn’t healthy, for me or the people around me. And as soon as I’d finished it, I left Berlin.”

Cave spent the next three years in São Paulo, Brazil, where he moved after meeting the fashion stylist Viviane Carneiro. Shortly after the birth of their son, Luke, Cave returned to London with his family and began to work on a new album, comprising songs about violent death. The album — titled, appropriately enough, “Murder Ballads” — would prove a pivotal one in Cave’s career, furnishing him with his first mainstream radio hit (“Where the Wild Roses Grow,” featuring Kylie Minogue), and propelling him, by way of a duet with the British alt-rock star P. J. Harvey, into a relationship with which he is associated to this day, not least because it resulted, in 1997, in what many regard as his masterpiece: “The Boatman’s Call.”

“People often compare ‘Boatman’s Call’ with ‘Blood on the Tracks,’ ” Cave told me during one of our conversations in Brighton, referring to Bob Dylan’s breakup-themed magnum opus. “Too much for my liking, I have to say. I’ve got no idea what led Dylan to make that album, but in my case, there was a coming together of a particular bunch of unfortunate events — brokenhearted moments but epiphanies, as well — that hit me all at once and became what the record was about.” He smiled. “Not a happy time, particularly. At least I got some songs out of it.”

The 12 tracks on “The Boatman’s Call” chronicle both the dissolution of Cave’s relationship with Carneiro and the arc of his brief but passionate love affair with Harvey, which played out very much in public: The couple’s first kiss took place on camera, during the filming of their “Murder Ballads” duet, “Henry Lee.” The album’s spare, candid songs allowed a listener, perhaps for the first time, to guess at the human being behind Cave’s outsize persona and freed him from the restrictions of the “Old Testament by way of Southern gothic” genre that he, with a good deal of help from Mick Harvey, Bargeld and the rest of the Bad Seeds, had invented.

Since that high-water mark, Cave has released seven studio albums, appeared in three films, written two produced screenplays and published a second novel, “The Death of Bunny Munro”; but possibly the two most pivotal events in that time stand apart from his creative life. Shortly after the release of “The Boatman’s Call,” Cave met the British model Susie Bick, to whom he has now been married for a decade and a half, and he soon kicked heroin for good after more than 20 years of addiction. As Cave himself puts it, in a recording featured near the end of “20,000 Days”: “The first time I saw Susie was at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London. And when she came walking in, all the things that I have obsessed over for all the years, pictures of movie stars, Jenny Agutter in the billabong, Anita Ekberg in the fountain . . . Miss World competitions, Marilyn Monroe and Jennifer Jones and Bo Derek . . . Bolshoi ballerinas and Russian gymnasts . . . the young girls at the Wangaratta pool lying on the hot concrete, all the stuff I had heard and seen and read . . . all the continuing never-ending drip-feed of erotic data . . . came together at that moment, in one great big crash bang, and I was lost to her. And that was that.”