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#57, "Babe, I'm On Fire," Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds (2003)

on being on fire (metaphorically)

150 Favorite Songs: #57, "Babe, I'm On Fire," Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds (2003)

Here is what you fear about growing old: that you will become boring, tired, and uninspired. That your passions will become hobbies, at best, and then things that you used to do. Your body will break down and your loneliness will become ingrained, and the things you liked best about yourself in your youth will fade away. You'll be left out of touch, disconnected from who you used to be, irrelevant even to yourself, and you'll watch people younger than you be who you wished you'd been. And there'll be no way to get back to it.

Or maybe that's just me. Either way, cool. None of that is what "Babe, I'm On Fire" is about, but that's just because "Babe, I'm On Fire" isn't about anything. It's an exercise, a writing prompt carried to extremes. But it doesn't matter what it's about, because what it says is amazing.

Nick Cave was 46 when he recorded "Babe, I'm On Fire," which isn't young for an angry punk, although it's not bad for someone whose image involved a wise-beyond-his-years persona, too. In any case, it came at a point in his career where it was fair to question if there was inspiration left. The album that preceded Nocturama, from which "Babe, I'm On Fire" comes, was a mature, grim masterpiece about grief and divorce. By contrast, Nocturama is full of Nick Cave pastiche, with songs called things like "Dead Man In My Bed" and "Rock Of Gibraltar." (If you asked Chat-GPT to generate fake Nick Cave song titles, you could easily have gotten either of those.) The album is the last one that the original Bad Seeds lineup would record together, and you can hear the inspiration leaking out through the airholes throughout the record. 

But then there's "Babe, I'm On Fire," and wow. The song is built on a rolling bass riff and a simple lyrical motif: "The [uncomfortably specific character] says / the [maybe a forest creature] says / the [historical figure] says / the [stereotype] [archetype], [generalization] says it / 'babe, I'm on fire.'"

But the band goes through this verse structure thirty-nine (39) times. The band is more alive than it is anywhere else on Nocturama, more energized than it sounded on the restrained No More Shall We Part or Boatman's Call that preceded it. The guitar explodes with feedback and shrill noise, things drop in and out. It's jazz, in a lot of ways, not dissimilar to the motifs you'll hear on "So What,” with the lyrical pattern or the bassline grounding it in consistency as everyone takes turns improvising. 

That improvisational spirit's in the words, too—you don't come up with a stanza like "the mild little Christian says it / the wild Sonny Liston says it / the pimp and the gimp and the guy with the limp says / babe, I'm on fire" while sitting at your desk. And even though it's repetitive (39 times, y'all), there's something sublime in realizing that there were so many ways to put it. One would suspect that he could well have tripled the length of the song (which clocks in just under fifteen minutes) and released it in place of the album, and it’d probably be even higher on my personal list. 

And that's the thing about "Babe, I'm On Fire" that I love so much. Because it doesn't sound like the work of a bunch of men reaching toward fifty. It doesn't trade passion for wisdom, or energy for restraint—it's big and loud and messy and clearly done to scratch an itch that no one else even knew that they had. And when you fear getting old because you fear what it means, it's very encouraging to hear something like this, all spirit and madness. "Babe, I'm On Fire" sounds nothing like a song that Nick Cave would have written at twenty-six. The record he put out that year, From Her To Eternity, is full of a different type of spirit, and it's probably safe to say that the images in "Babe, I'm On Fire" come with decades of life; the urge to do something big and funny and uncomfortable is probably something that had to follow up the previous few years of work that Cave had released. 

So when I listen to "Babe, I'm On Fire," part of what I'm hearing—besides that brutal guitar and those weird-as-shit verses—is the sound of a band that refuses to be written off. It's the sound of someone growing older uneasily, a theme that would continue as Nick Cave started up Grinderman and generally just got louder and more beard-y as he aged. When I think about what growing older might sound like, most of the things in my head don't sound anything like "Babe, I'm On Fire." And that just makes me like this one more.