“As I said earlier, my artistic life has centred around the desire or, more accurately, the need, to articulate the various feelings of loss and longing that have whistled through my bones and hummed in my blood throughout my life. In the process I have written about 200 songs, the bulk of which I would say were Love Songs. Love Songs, and therefore, by my definition, sad songs. Out of this considerable mass of material, a handful of them rise above the others as true examples of all I have talked about ‘Sad Waters,’ ‘Black Hair,’ ‘I Let Love In,’ ‘Deanna,’ ‘From Her To Eternity,’ ‘Nobody’s Baby Now,’ ‘Into My Arms,’ ‘Lime Tree Arbour,’ ‘Lucy,’ ‘Straight to You’. I am proud of these songs. They are my gloomy, violent, dark-eyed children. They sit grimly on their own and they do not play with the other songs. Mostly they were the offspring of complicated pregnancies and difficult and painful births. Most of them are rooted in direct personal experience and were conceived for a variety of reasons, but this rag-tag group of Love Songs are, at the death, all the same thing: lifelines thrown into the galaxies by a drowning man.”

—Nick Cave, “The Secret Life of the Love Song”