Nick Cave says he was "disgusted" by The Boatman's Call because he felt he "had exposed too much"

In the latest response on his fan Q+A site The Red Hand Files, Nick Cave has expressed why he once felt "disgusted" by parts of his 1997 album The Boatman's Call, and how he has found a new appreciation for the songs since performing some of them during last year's Idiot Prayer livestream show filmed at Alexandra Palace.

The fan, called Elina, asked Cave, "What were you disgusted by back then? What do those songs mean to you now and what made you revisit them?" Cave responded, "Artistically, my hand was forced by a convergence of events that felt so calamitous at the time that I could not find a way to write about anything else. It’s not that I had any desire to write a ‘break-up record’, but these events just rammed the ramparts of my songwriting and seized control."

"After The Boatman’s Call came out I experienced a kind of embarrassment," Cave continued. "I felt I had exposed too much. These hyper-personal songs suddenly seemed indulgent, self-serving amplifications of what was essentially an ordinary, commonplace ordeal. All the high drama, the tragedy and the hand wringing ‘disgusted’ me, and I said so in press interviews."

He also wrote, "In time, however, I learned that the disgust was essentially the fear and shame experienced by someone who was swimming the uncertain waters between two boats - songs that were fictional and songs of an autobiographical or confessional nature. A radical change was occurring in my songwriting, despite myself, and such changes can leave one feeling extremely vulnerable, defensive and reactive."

Cave added, "Of course, I no longer see The Boatman’s Call in that way, and understand that the record was a necessary leap into a type of songwriting that would ultimately become exclusively autobiographical - Skeleton Tree and Ghosteen, for example - but, conversely, less about myself and more about our collective ‘selves’. When I sang the The Boatman’s Call songs for the Idiot Prayer film, they no longer felt like cries emanating from the small, yet cataclysmic, devastations of life. They became more about a spiritual liberation from the self, about something broader and more comprehensive - not transcendent exactly - but expansive, in that they collected us all up in the commonality of the experience they attempt to describe. At least, I hoped so."