Better Things: Papa Won't Leave You, Henry

"Better Things" is a series of weekly posts, each about one song I really love, by an artist I haven't featured in the previous This Year or Portions For Foxes series. See the introduction for more.

As I come to type here, I'm surprised at myself: I really didn't have Nick Cave in that first-year list? That's the Procrustean splendor of list-making, I suppose - not everything can fit. Things that seem entirely central get edged out.

Better Things is a way of exploring those centers and edges, so, now, I can come back to this compelling, stark, demanding song by Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds: Papa Won't Leave You, Henry.

I've got eight songs by Cave as five-star in my library, so I suppose this could have been the moody clang of Red Right Hand or the more straightforward love of Straight to You or the neo-apocalyptic story of (I'll Love You) Till the End of the World. Or the different levels of moodiness of The Ship Song and The Weeping Song.

But I started to listen to Cave and his band in the early Aughts, when I was chasing after two young sons. I don't think Henry is exactly, or entirely, about a real father and a real son - it's a nightmare vision of a world gone wrong, a travelogue of Hell - but the refrain keeps coming back to that boy:

Well, the road is long
And the road is hard
And many fall by the side
But Papa won't leave you, Henry
So there ain't no need to cry

And both of those things struck me then, and have stuck with me now: the nightmare landscape, and the protective impulse of a father for his son. It's a dark vision, full of surprises and horrors, almost darker than the mind can imagine.

And the tears that we will weep today
Will all be washed away
By the tears that we will weep again tomorrow

The verses are horrors; the refrain is that unsettling reassurance to the son, and the insistence that the singer is, and will keep, walking down that road. The road is a metaphor of course. It's all a metaphor - except the bits that are absolutely true reportage from Cave's own life. That's the tension than makes it: you can tell this isn't just a list of images, a sequence of ideas, some fancy words for a song.