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Nick Cave Digs Himself a Singular Niche

Nick Cave, leader of the band the Bad Seeds, has released his latest CD titled <em>Dig!!! Lazarus Dig!!!</em>.
MJ Kim
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Nick Cave, leader of the band the Bad Seeds, has released his latest CD titled Dig!!! Lazarus Dig!!!.

Love, violence, death and America have always been themes for Australian-born singer-composer Nick Cave — Murder Ballads and Abbatoir Blues are just two of his album titles — so he was perhaps a natural to compose the soundtrack for last year's epically paranoid Western The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford.

Cave also wrote the screenplay and soundtrack for the Australian epic The Proposition, which Roger Ebert described as "pitiless and uncompromising, so filled with pathos and disregarded innocence that it is a record of those things we pray to be delivered from."

Cave appeared in Wim Wenders' 1987 film Wings of Desire, and he's written both plays and novels.

Now Cave has released a new CD with his band the Bad Seeds. The title? Dig!!! Lazarus Dig!!! The inspiration, he says, is the Biblical story of Lazarus' return from the grave.

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