Though the love song comes in many guises – songs of exultation and praise, songs of rage and of despair, erotic songs, songs of abandonment and loss – they all address God, for it is the haunted premises of longing that the true love song inhabits. It is a howl in the void, for Love and for comfort and it lives on the lips of the child crying for his mother. It is the song of the lover in need of her loved one, the raving of the lunatic supplicant petitioning his God. It is the cry of one chained to the earth, to the ordinary and to the mundane, craving flight; a flight into inspiration and imagination and divinity. The love song is the sound of our endeavours to become God-like, to rise up and above the earthbound and the mediocre.

Note: Nick Cave’s 15 year-old son, Arthur, died on July 14, 2015, from injuries sustained in a fall from a cliff near his home in Brighton.

Nick Cave wrote “Nick the Stripper.” He also wrote “Love Letter.” That one man is responsible for both is heartening because, although many people can relate to a song like “Love Letter,” far fewer can relate to something like “Nick the Stripper,” and those who can relate to both seem to me a precious elect. Because my life has been lived between these poles, and my sense of what it is to be a man was to a great extent modeled on my father and Nick Cave.

Of course when I was young I took my father for granted. I always loved him and thought he was a good man, but, like all children do, I suppose, I pitied him a little for his naïveté. It’s only now that I’m as old as he was when I was born that I’m coming to understand my father’s achievements, and how much I have to learn, and what a fine teacher he was.

My father was easy to admire. A veteran of aerial combat in the the Second World War, he was a strong, gentle man who never raised his hand or voice against me. Born Presbyterian and converted to my mother’s Catholicism, he was nonetheless an open-minded liberal of the old school and treated me with indulgent paternal respect through all my experiments with hard-left politics and the more arcane branches of alternative culture. He certainly gave my half-baked ideas more attention than they deserved and I know now that this was his kind wisdom shining through.

As I passed from my teens into my early twenties, though, I developed a nihilistic contempt for conventional society. It was easy for me to see what was wrong with the world, and, since I had as yet nothing significant to lose, I sought solace in violence of the soul and disorder of the senses. Nick Cave and the Birthday Party were the gods of this universe, and tracks like “Nick the Stripper” reflected my fear and disgust and gave them voice: “Hideous to the eye…hideous to the eye…he’s a fat little insect…a fat little insect…and, oh—here we go again.”

I remained a huge fan of Nick Cave through his early albums with the Bad Seeds, but it was Henry’s Dream and Let Love In that really spoke to the romantic drifter I felt myself to be. The emotional palette of “Papa Won’t Leave You, Henry” seemed completely familiar when I first heard it, even though my actual life was, of course, nothing at all like the hallucinatory melodrama described by Cave. “Nobody’s Baby Now” expressed almost too perfectly the bittersweet longing of all my love affairs, which had made them seem precious and doomed from the start.

A few years later I moved across the country and turned my back on the overheated bohemian life I’d led since my teens, becoming in some ways more conventional, in some ways more resigned, in some ways more absurd. I lost track of Cave for a while and was lukewarm on The Boatman’s Call when I caught up with it. I missed the grandiose thundering of the earlier albums; the more delicate, piano-based compositions were lost on me. And No More Shall We Part was more my thing, but I had coarsened and dulled over time: I didn’t feel music like I used to.

And then my mother died.

At first I heard “ Love Letter ” as a straightforward example of the doomed romantic sub-genre that was one of Cave’s specialties. I might have recalled a lost love of my own, stoked the fires of sentimental sorrow.

In the days after my mother’s death I heard the song anew, as if it had been written about her: “Come back to me…come back to me…oh Baby, please come back to me.” I played it incessantly, torn apart by longing and loss.

There was no confusion in my heart between romantic love and my love for my mother. It was a leap forward in my understanding (though I didn’t know it at the time.) “Love Letter” helped me grieve for my mother by opening my heart to a greater love than I had yet known. I saw her as a young woman, as the woman my father loved, as a person in her own right. I saw how I had taken her for granted, and how she had loved me despite all that, how she would always be a presence in my heart, how she would never leave me. There were dark years ahead, but the seed planted in my heart by that song has grown and now, years later, the branches give shade and solace.

When I returned home for my mother’s funeral I walked into my father’s house and held him and he wept, just for a moment, the second time I had ever seen him do so, and I asked him how he was, what would happen, and he said, “I’ll go on. That’s what living is.”

There’s a charming passage in a video of Nick Cave, in the studio with the Bad Seeds, recording And No More Shall We Part. Cave is wearing a pale yellow argyle sweater. One of his sons is in the vocal booth with him. Cave is gently ribbing him about something, and at one point flashes him a smile of such guileless love and brightness that it is impossible to believe this man is known as the Prince of Darkness.

But of course there’s good reason for that nickname. There’s “Nick the Stripper.” And “Hard On For Love.” And “Stagger Lee.”

Oh my…”Stagger Lee.”

And here is Cave’s genius, and the core of what he has taught me: that one can open one’s eyes to the darkness and not be consumed by it. That the road leading in also leads out. That the light at the end of the tunnel is Love.

I saw this picture before the death of Arthur Cave, but I didn’t pay much attention to it. I thought, yes, yes. Bourgeois Cave. Very nice. And even though I’m still a huge fan, and I find his late-in-life domesticity both inspiring and wise, some small part of me probably would have been rolling his eyes. Because some small part of me is still Nick the Stripper, and is suspicious of anything safe, anything conventional.

Now that tragedy shrouds it, the picture breaks my heart. I see the aging father, still with some trappings of the rock and roll roué: the rings, the open shirt, the pendant. I see the wrinkles on his face, on his neck. I see his simple happiness, the quiet everyday joy of being with loved ones. And the boy’s face, aglow and open, delighted by some lightness between them, some joke, a shared moment, the love of his Dad.

Before I was thirty I never considered having children. The idea was ridiculous. “The world’s a hell, what does it matter what happens in it?” And why would one further burden oneself with children, let alone subject them to the same grief? So, having found no solace in sex, and having abandoned rock and roll, I committed myself to all that was left, and fed my drinking addiction till it began to dominate my life.

But then my daughter was born.

It wasn’t like a magic wand was waved. Having children doesn’t solve life’s problems: it can make them much worse, or at least harder to bear. And for the first years of my daughter’s life my drinking grew worse, until finally I realized there was no way out but to stop completely. But if it were not for my daughter I don’t know what I would have done, or what I had to live for.

When I walk in the park with one of my boys strapped to my chest, I feel how fragile they are, their delicate bones.

Sometimes, unbidden, I imagine how easily they could be torn limb from limb by some wild animal, or by a human device, a bomb, a drone, a gun. I’m overwhelmed with fear and love: I want nothing painful to ever happen to them and I know I would give my life to save them. But then I couldn’t protect them anymore. And of course I know to be born is to suffer, and I feel the weight of what I’ve done, my part in bringing them into this world where nothing is ever known and no one is safe.

And children will overturn your life. They’ll devour your time and tire you out. They’ll test your patience. They’ll keep you up all night and sometimes they’ll bore you to tears. They’ll take money from your purse and sometimes worse—they’ll tell you they hate you, they’ll run away. And sometimes they’ll just die, and your world will end, and nothing will help, and then your task will be to understand ruin.

But my children have taught me patience and forbearance. They’ve shown me my weaknesses and this has given me strength. They’ve opened my heart. When I want to generate love for all beings I start with my wife and my three children—this is where my heart resides. They have taught me loving kindness and my dearest wish now is to spread that love to all beings, to everyone, seen and unseen, beast or human, angel or devil. To all beings, everywhere.

And now, most of all, in his sorrowful hour, to my beloved teacher, Nick Cave.