#83, “The Sorrowful Wife,” Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds (2001)

150 Favorite Songs: #83, “The Sorrowful Wife,” Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds (2001)

I’m going to recommend, if you haven’t heart “The Sorrowful Wife” before, that you click that link up there and give it a listen before you read this. There’s a moment in this song that’s very important to how and why the song works, and it’s very unexpected in the context of the song, so consider this a spoiler warning—I wouldn’t want you to be denied the chance to hear that moment for yourself before reading about why it’s so meaningful to me.

Okay, on to it.

Marriage is hard. I don’t think I’m talking out of turn or telling anyone anything they don’t know to say that. It’s amazing, a way to form an incredibly deep connection to another person rooted in love and mutual respect and the decision to forge a life that will be spent together, ostensibly forever. But all of those things are also hard. To grant, and to accept. Sometimes really hard. There are a lot of moments when it’s easy, but in any lifelong relationship where every aspect of yourself is wrapped up in someone who is not you—someone who will have different views and values around things like cleaning and money and sex and whether to have children, who will occasionally be self-contradictory because you are, too, who you will have to learn how to negotiate and compromise on those things with, and with whom you will develop some patterns that may not ultimately be entirely healthy because of those contradictions or failed negotiations or unsatisfying compromises—there will be difficulties.

“The Sorrowful Wife” isn’t explicitly about any of that, but it is very much a song about marriage. What’s more, it’s one that captures the lived experience of being a married person very well. It starts off quiet and pleasant, if a little uneasy, with Nick Cave singing, his voice a little raw, with no accompaniment until he starts on the piano, playing a minor-key dirge with some sparse drums and a violin behind him. And he sings about being married and spending your days with a partner who is going through it, the sorrowful wife of the title who is spending her days with tasks that keep her busy—weeding the garden, rearranging the furniture, counting days down as she tries to make sense of whatever it is that’s caused the emotional distance that’s at the heart of the song. There’s no chorus, just a repeated motif—three verses that set a scene, and then end with a line about “my sorrowful wife, who is [quietly tending her flowers/shifting the furniture around/counting the days on her fingers].”

But then, in the third verse, the pattern breaks, and this is where the song becomes something special. Cave sings, “Who is counting the days on her fingers,” then repeats it as he had at the end of the first two verses, but he doesn’t finish the line. It stops at “who is counting the days on her….” and then it trails off, and the piano comes back, turned way up in the mix, a sharp, high note that’s a little bit painful, like he’s just pounding the key rather than go on and on about watching her count the days on her finger, and the song erupts. The guitar comes in, crunchy and distorted, playing the same sort of staccato rhythm as the piano, and Cave does his sing-scream, as the tone just flips instantly from this sad dirge to an impassioned cry.

But he isn’t screaming at her—he’s screaming at himself. The sentiment isn’t “what’s wrong with you,” the line he sings is “come and help me, babe,” it’s “I was blind,” it’s “I was a fool, babe.” He’s not singing about observing her as she copes with whatever it is that has her feeling so sorrowful anymore. He’s not passively watching it happen. He’s still powerless, maybe, to fix it, but he’s in it.

I don’t think screaming “help me, babe” is going to fix a marriage, but neither is sitting around dicking around on your piano feeling sad when you know that your partner is going through something. The emotional journey of the song feels very true to my experience of the difficult parts of marriage—how you go from passively feeling sorry for yourself to saying “okay, there’s a big problem here, let’s fucking figure it out.” Those moments aren’t often coherent or well-articulated, but they’re an outpouring of genuine feeling that can act as a catalyst to fix things. I’ve been married for long enough now that I’ve been on both sides of it—I’ve been the one shifting the furniture around and the one that’s watched her count the days on her fingers—and when things get that hard, it pretty much always takes one of us plugging in the electric guitar and delivering the “come on and help me, babe” verse to shake out of it.

The first time I heard “The Sorrowful Wife,” I heard that cut-off in verse three as anger, or rage, or something, but I’d never been married. Now, though I don’t hear either of those things in it. The song gets loud, but all I hear is frustration turned inward, not out, and that plea of “help me, babe” sounds sincere to my ears. It’s not the most joyful part of living your life entwined with another person whose struggles will inevitably become your own, but it’s a real one, and I think “The Sorrowful Wife” captures an impossibly difficult feeling to explain with a lot of compassion for both parties involved.