Nick Cave Revels in Grinderman's Lyrical Freedom

"It's about something really different," Nick Cave tells Spinner in reference to his hyper-blues rock group Grinderman. "The Bad Seeds [are] hugely important. It's something I love to do, but this is a different thing."

Fans of Cave's work with the Bad Seeds have long obsessed over his music. Albums like 'The Boatman's Call' and 'Murder Ballads' stand out as finer Bad Seeds lyrical endeavors, though there's plenty more to choose from throughout the band's 26-year history. But for Grinderman, a group fleshed out by three other Bad Seeds members, Cave is hoping people won't take his improvised words too seriously.

"There's something more coherent about the Bad Seeds to me," he says. "The lyrics are more thought-out. The duty to the lyric on the Bad Seeds records, that I don't feel on a Grinderman record. I need some sort of semblance of order and narrative structure to a Bad Seeds song."

Cave actually says he feels "subsumed" into Grinderman as a band member instead of acting as the face of the group. "I can be a lot more radical, abstract and dream-like with the lyric writing," he reveals. "The purpose of being that is to stop people from focusing on the lyric as you do with the Bad Seeds. It starts to become something more atmospheric and more about the music. For me personally, I love that about Grinderman."

As Cave finds himself taking on other projects, such as writing novels, scripts and film scores, he's drifting away from music that is meant to be heavy on the words. "I find it more difficult to listen to that stuff and constantly have my ear pulled to the intellectual message of the song," he says. "I'm much more inclined to listen to music that doesn't have any singer at all, or where the voice is used like an instrument. Grinderman feels like the vocal is more in there with the music."

'Grinderman 2' is out now on Anti- Records.