Nick Cave has started writing the new Bad Seeds album

Back in October last year Nick Cave revealed that he planned to start writing the new Bad Seeds album after his tour with Warren Ellis comes to an end in mid-December, and in the latest response on The Red Hand Files Q+A site, Cave has given a progress update on the album, revealing that he's been starting to write lyrics since 1 January.

"My plan for this year is to make a new record with the Bad Seeds," Cave wrote. "This is both good news and bad news. Good news because who doesn’t want a new Bad Seeds record? Bad news because I’ve got to write the bloody thing."

He continued, "I started the process at 9am on January 1st. It is now January 6th – nearly a week has passed and I’ve written a few things but they aren’t very good, or maybe they are, it’s difficult to tell. A kind of doldrums has set in, perennial and predictable. It’s the same with every record, I feel that familiar feeling of lack, like I’m a big, dumb blank thing in a suit. I’m grumpy as fuck and Susie has decamped for a week. Anything that resembles a creative impulse is burrowed way down in some mossy, froggy hole, asleep, I hope, not dead. I have to call it forth, provoke it from its slumber. It becomes a nasty, punishing, baggy-eyed business. I’m starting to get an infuriating sing-song voice in my head that actually rhymes, like a madness. Like sadness."

Cave also shared some lyrics he had managed to write over the past week: "Ushering in the new year he knelt down / And crushed his brother’s head with a bone / It’s my great privilege to walk you home / In the rain / Hop inside my coat."

He concluded, "And that felt like it summed things up. Writing lyrics is the pits. It’s like jumping for frogs, Fred. It’s the shits. It’s the bogs. It actually hurts. It comes in spurts, but few and far between. There is something obscene about the whole affair. Like crimes that rhyme. I hope this doesn’t last long. I’m actually scared. But it always does. Last long. To write a song. You hope to God there is something left. You are bereft. I’m going to stop this letter. It isn’t making things better. It’s like flogging a dead horse. Worse. It’s a hearse. A hearse of dead verse. Dead, Fred. Dead."

Last month Cave revealed the story behind the Ghosteen song "Night Raid" on The Redd Hand Files.