Nick Cave Adjusting To Electricity

"Of course, with a new instrument it sets up a whole different way of writing songs," Cave said. "Most of my songs that I was writing on the piano were in the flat keys, for example. They were a nightmare for anyone to play. When you start playing the guitar suddenly you realize why rock and roll songs are the way they are. And that changed the sound of the band. Even when songs weren't ballads with the Bad Seeds, they're still largely written in these strange keys. Even the rock songs, you can still tell they're written on the piano. So the guitar was brilliant in that way."

Echoing a punk aesthetic, Cave added that becoming proficient on guitar can have a downside. "The better you get, the more you just start sounding like an ordinary guitarist," he said. "There are certainly guitarists that transcend that and do really find their sound and all that sort of stuff. But I think I had actually more of a 'sound' when I didn't know how to play guitar than I do now that I kind of know how to play." - more on this story

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