Skeleton Tree

The last track on Skeleton Tree, with words by Cave and music by Cave and Warren Ellis, and the album's second single in November 2016. Over piano, calm drums and strummed guitar, the singer calls out across the water and listens for an echo, and the song ends on a fragile reassurance that everything is all right now.

Cave wrote about it in the Red Hand Files in 2025, answering a reader's letter. He said the song was a late addition to the album and the first he wrote after Arthur's death. He saw the title as a bleak image of crucifixion, a tree on which no one is saved, and at the time heard nothing in the song but nihilism and emptiness. He has not really listened to the album since. Years on, he hears the song's insistent beauty, and wrote that the echo he once thought empty was "simply drowned in the roar of grief".

Live

The band first played it at the opening show of the Skeleton Tree tour in Hobart on 13 January 2017, Cave's first concert after Arthur's death, alongside other songs from the album. It came back in the first encore of the Wild God tour's North American opener in Boston on 15 April 2025, and setlist.fm logs 91 Bad Seeds performances. The upload in the hypersongs web is the album version.