Nick Cave & the Bad Seeds - Into My Arms

"I don't believe in an interventionist God."

Album: The Boatman's Call [10th album]
Recorded: London, England
Genre: Singer-Songwriter, Piano Rock
Album Release: March 3rd 1997
Single Release: January 27th 1997
Length: 6.15
Producer: Nick Cave & the Bad Seeds, Chris Scard & Flood
Vocalist: Nick Cave [age 39]
Label: Mute Records (BMG)

Music Video


Live from Songwriters Circle in 1999

Charts, Streams & Sales

Australia (singles): #26
Australia (albums): #5
UK (singles): #53
UK (album): Certified gold (over 100,000 units sold)
Worldwide Sales: 500,000 + (source is Donna Vergier, formerly of Mute Records, via Billboard)
Spotify = 112,000,000 +
YouTube Music = 34,000,000 +
Nominated for Single of the Year at the 1997 ARIA Awards

Credits

Details

• Into My Arms was wrote while Nick was in rehab. He is an atheist. He went to church one Sunday to fight off the boredom and on the way back it hit him. He wrote the song later that day. The piano and the melody came first and later the lyrics, wrote in a small room in the rehab centre.
  
• The album uses less instruments than earlier Bad Seeds records. The songs have more space between the notes and the lyrics are more personal, more introspective and the tempo is slower.
  
  
• At the end of the 90's Nick Cave got clean. After a near twenty year heroin addiction he did what every good songwriter is supposed to do, write songs, full time. Cave even rented a small, neat office in London where he would write five days a week from nine till five. He kept office hours, a fact I imagine a younger punk rock version of himself would find mortifying, he finally started treating songwriting as a proper job and he reaped the best work he had ever produced.
  
  'Into My Arms' is such a powerful song that some people play it at their weddings while others want it played at their funerals. The songs on The Boatman's Call and No More Shall We Part benefit from a new found clarity in their songwriting, an overall coherence that wasn't there before. It's no wonder that Cave now recommends sobriety as the lifestyle of choice.
  
  
• Cave says that he is proud to have written the song.
  
• The music video is directed by Palm d'Or nominee Jonathan Glazer. Nick Cave, while admiring the professional production values, didn't think the video captured the songs optimism.
  
• There is a cover version by The Flaming Lips, who have teamed up with the singer Nell.
• There is a cover version by former The Who frontman Roger Daltry who about which said "I like his version but I don't think he sang it as a singer. He keeps a dark side to the song which is great for Nick Cave but I heard something different in it."

Artwork