The Sweetest Embrace
Nick Cave's guest vocal on a song about the end of a relationship.
Barry Adamson, from Oedipus Schmoedipus (1996)
- Written by
- Barry Adamson, Nick Cave
- Released
- 1996
- Length
- 4:46
- Album
- Oedipus Schmoedipus
Nick Cave co-wrote The Sweetest Embrace with Adamson and sang it. The Quietus said that Cave gave a considered acceptance of a relationship's demise, and NME that he gave it his crooniest shot on a charmingly downbeat song. In frieze, Michael Bracewell heard a Scott Walkeresque rendition ending on the lines "I just don't want you no more, and that's the sweetest embrace of all."
The two had a long history. Adamson was in the first line-up of Cave's Bad Seeds, left in the 1980s, and returned to play on Push the Sky Away in 2013. In the early 2000s he played two nights at the Queen Elizabeth Hall in London, the second called These Are a Few of My Favourite Themes, and Cave came along and sang that night.
More songs by Barry Adamson
The Man with the Golden Arm, Set the Controls for the Heart of the Pelvis, Something Wicked This Way Comes, Achieved in the Valley of Dolls
Sources
- Memento Mori: The Strange World Of... Barry Adamson, The Quietus (2018-10-30)
- Barry Adamson: Oedipus Schmoedipus, NME (1996-07-27)
- The Mancunian Candidate, frieze (1997-01)
- Oedipus Schmoedipus, Wikipedia
- Barry Adamson interview, 2014, Brighton's Finest (2014-10-03)