The Sick Bag Song cover art

The Sick Bag Song

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About this listen

The Sick Bag Song chronicles Cave's journey with his band, the Bad Seeds, on a 22-day North American tour. Inspired by John Berryman's Dream Songs, it is an epic exploration of inspiration, creativity, loss, love and death.

The book blends poetry, lyrics, memories, musings, flights of fancy and journal entries. The Sick Bag Song began life scribbled onto airline sick bags acquired during the internal flights taken by Cave during the tour. To some degree a companion piece to his feature doc 20,000 Days on Earth, The Sick Bag Song further explores and develops the mystique of Nick Cave.

©2016 Nick Cave (P)2016 Canongate Books Ltd Music Entertainment

Critic reviews

"About as rock'n'roll as you can get...The Sick Bag Song is shot through with fantasy, fiction, apocalyptic musings and tall stories." (The Sunday Times)
"An epic narrative poem about his travels across North America...Cave is experimenting with a new literary form - a mash-up of prose, poetry, song lyrics and autobiography." (New York Times)
"The Sick Bag Song provides a window on Cave's honesty...Part tour diary and part free-ranging rumination on the business of performance. Capture[s] the mind-frazzling disorientation of 'the road'" (Guardian)
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Nick Cave narrates his masterpiece with powerful emotion. Such a wonderful journey of longing for his beautiful wife while on tour. It’s a beautiful blend of memories, musings, poetry, lyrics, flights of fancy and road journal. It is comic honesty Listen to the Sick Bag song, you’ll love it.

Absolutely brilliant!

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A real journey that keeps you engrossed throughout!! It simply grabs you takes you along for the ride. Through perfectly chosen words, you'll feel like you understand Nick Cave's perspective on the world a little better from listening to this!

An emotional masterpiece!!!

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fabulous. fabulous. fabulous. This is a must. Beautifully poetic from start to finish. 5 Stars

fabulous

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Lovely insight into creativity 'at work'.
The inspiring riff on procrastination will chuckle the guts of readers who also write.

Great creative flow

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Listened to it in one sitting. Nick Cave reading hos own words to you as he pines for his wife on tour and waxes lyrical about it. I reckon I'll listen to it again before long. Just great.

An epic poem

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