Check out Nick Cave’s playlist of tracks that “stand apart from the rest” – featuring Leonard Cohen, Neil Young and Brian Eno

These 'hiding songs' were referenced in Cave's 'The Sick Bag Song' but have never been revealed before...

Nick Cave has shared a playlist containing songs that he believes “stand apart from the rest of music”. Check it out below.

On Cave’s Red Hand Files website, a fan tasked the Australian musician with compiling a list of “10 of your most favourite pieces of music, by artists other than yourself”. A second user also asked: “Can you put together a list of your top five albums and ask Warren Ellis to do the same?”

In response, Cave instead shared 10 ‘sacred’ tracks he described as “hiding songs” in his poem ‘The Sick Bag Song’. After saying that he’s “never revealed them in their entirety”, he presented a list that includes Leonard Cohen, Neil Young, Brian Eno, and Nina Simone.

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“In my extended poem, ‘The Sick Bag Song’, I wrote about Leonard Cohen and the effect that he had on me as a young boy when I first heard him sing,” Cave posted, before writing words to the poem that speak of his “hiding songs”.

He continued: “Occasionally people have asked me what those ‘hiding songs’ were. I have never revealed them in their entirety. Perhaps, I felt a strange ownership over them and that to release them to the world may constitute a form of betrayal.

“Do you ever feel like that about songs – that they were designed with you especially in mind, and that no one could ever begin to understand them in the way you do?

“My ‘hiding songs’ serve as a form of refuge for me and have done so for years. They are songs that I can pull over myself, like a child might pull the bed covers over their head, when the blaze of the world becomes too intense. I can literally hide inside them. They are the essential pillars that hold up the structure of my artistic world.”

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Cave added: “There are hundreds of other favourite songs, of course, and one day maybe I can do a list of some of those, but not today. Today, I give you the ‘hiding songs’.”

The musician signed off by telling fans that he’d “be interested to know if you have any ‘hiding songs’, and if so what they are.”

Last month, Nick Cave shared an email that he sent Brian Eno in 2017, in which he discussed his stance on the cultural boycott of Israel.

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