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Last week, Bob Dylan made a rare post on X complimenting Nick Cave on his show in Paris with the Bad Seeds. “I was really struck by that song ‘Joy’ where he sings ‘We’ve all had too much sorrow, now it the time for joy,’” Dylan wrote. “I was thinking to myself, yeah that’s about right.” A few days later, Cave responded in his Red Hand Files newsletter, calling the tweet “a lovely pulse of joy that penetrated my exhausted, zombied state.”
Cave noted the “admirably perverse” fact that Dylan was posting on X, at a time when much of the left was undertaking a “Twitterectomy” and joining Blue Sky, in protest of Elon Musk’s stewardship of the platform. “The world had grown thoroughly disenchanted,” Cave wrote, “and its feverish obsession with politics and its leaders had thrown up so many palisades that had prevented us from experiencing the presence of anything remotely like the spirit, the sacred, or the transcendent—that holy place where joy resides. I felt proud to have been touring with The Bad Seeds and offering, in the form of a rock ‘n ’roll show, an antidote to this despair, one that transported people to a place beyond the dreadful drama of the political moment.”
He concluded, “I was elated to think Bob Dylan had been in the audience, and since I doubt I’ll get an opportunity to thank him personally, I’ll thank him here. Thank you, Bob!”
Read Cave’s full response in the Red Hand Files archive.