Into My Arms

The opening track of The Boatman's Call and the album's first single, issued on 7-inch and CD with Little Empty Boat on the B-side. Cave wrote it while in rehab for heroin addiction: the melody came to him as he walked back from church through the fields, he worked out the chords on the facility's piano, and only then wrote the words. The recording is just piano and electric bass.

It is addressed to a lover. The singer begins by saying he does not believe in an interventionist God, then asks God and the angels to keep the beloved as they are. Cave counts it among the songs he is proudest of, and wrote in the Red Hand Files in 2021 that he was still trying to work out what its first line means. It reached eight in Norway and 53 in Britain, where it went silver, and Mojo ranked it the second greatest Nick Cave song in 2023. Jonathan Glazer directed the video. Cave thought it well made but felt its depressing images overrode the melancholic optimism he meant the song to carry.

Live

The band played it more than a year before the album came out, first at the Big Day Out in Auckland on 19 January 1996. On 27 November 1997 Cave sang it alone at Michael Hutchence's funeral at St Andrew's Cathedral in Sydney, asking for the television cameras to be switched off. It has stayed in the set ever since: setlist.fm logs 467 Bad Seeds performances, their sixth most played song. Cave recorded it solo for Idiot Prayer (2020), and it is on Live God (2025). It is the band's song most covered live, and Emma Louise, Ane Brun, Hyd and Lykke Li have all released versions. The upload in the hypersongs web is the official Jonathan Glazer video, restored in 4K, with the album recording.