These are your actual songs of faith and devotion, and by Cave’s own admission his most personal album to date. Moving away from full-band arrangements and character-based narratives, the album's music and lyrics move towards the more intimate sound of Cave's solo voice accompanied by piano or a few other instruments. The album is entirely piano-based, alternately somber and romantic in mood, making it a marked departure from the bulk of the band's post-punk catalogue up to that point. After a career spent tearing down the world with horror and disgust, Nick Cave finally sounds ready to start rebuilding from scratch.

These ruptures in his life would not only influence the lyrical direction of this next album, but would completely remould The Bad Seed’s musical role, stripping them back to a level of restraint and sparseness which, at this point, was new and scary territory.Stripped down and grown up--though still ghoulish and grave--Cave the storyteller has turned into something of a vampire Bruce Springsteen. His brief dalliance with Polly Harvey, whom he became infatuated with after their Henry Lee duet on Murder Ballads, is referenced on Green Eyes, Black Hair and the more direct West Country Girl. You can change your choices at any time by visiting Cookie preferences, as described in the Cookie notice. By 1997, The Bad Seeds were an eight man strong operation, and yet they saw fit to release this album full of extremely intimate, stripped down, confessional music.

As the 1980s drew to a close Cave was deeply addicted to heroin and writing some of his darkest songs yet.

The album’s dwelling on the fragility of love also collided with Cave’s similarly complicated relationship with religion. It says a great deal about Cave as a person, and The Bad Seeds as a band, that they are willing to stare down these deeply personal situations within full view of the public gaze; to wrestle some kind of artistic redemption from the jaws of emotional defeat. Cave performed "Into My Arms" at the 1997 funeral of INXS vocalist Michael Hutchence, an old friend from Cave's youth, and requested that the TV cameras be shut off for his performance out of respect for Hutchence.

Classic Album Sundays tells the stories behind the albums that have shaped our culture and in some cases, our lives.The video proved an evocative forecast of their troubled but passionate affair, which disintegrated after just a few months together.

and furthermore, with the emergence of acts such as PJ Harvey and The Afghan Whigs, there was a sense that The Bad Seeds had ushered in a new wave of evocative, imagery-based rock songwriting. He has begun to find a quiet grace, and perhaps even beauty, past all the darkness that's long consumed him. As Cave stated, this was ‘the sort of record I’ve been wanting to make for years […] a record which is slow from beginning to end… Very sparse, very raw and beautiful.Recording for the album began at Sarm West Studios in London, United Kingdom in mid-1996, with "The Garden Duet", one of the album's outtakes, being the first song recorded.