Nick Cave has been extremely busy in the last couple years. With thirty years in the music industry, the 50-year-old Australian native has just released his 14th studio record, "Dig, Lazarus, Dig!!!" which follows the screenplays, soundtracks, and musical projects that have been a part of his lengthy recent output. The man does not sit still for long, and now on tour to support the new album, the legendary dark indy rocker will be in the District very soon.

"Once I write a song I can see how I view the world," Cave said. "It's a mysterious craft."

Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds will be performing at the 9:30 Club for two engagements on October 5th and 6th. Cave follows in the path of many singer-songwriters who carved their way using a spoken-word style of narration to put storytelling in song: Jim Morrison, Bob Dylan, Lou Reed, Patti Smith, Bob Marley, all of which were influences of his. Although, his presentation is a little darker than his predecessors, the result is similar in content as he takes his experiences and gives them to listeners in his own haunting way.

"I've given myself license to find a new way to write a lyric," Cave said. "They're narrative in nature but personal at the same time. Inventing characters is dead simple, but it's not so easy to create songs that operate on a subconscious level."

The title track of the album is a song about taking the biblical character, Lazarus, and reincarnating him in New York City during the seventies. Cave tends to use abstract ideas in his work to create surreal environments in a way foreign to most types of modern music.

"There's this painting by James Ensor that depicts Christ entering 1889 Brussels," he said. "It's similar to what I've done with the Lazarus character. Take him out of the Bible, put him in a contemporary environment."

Prior to the new release, Cave and fellow Bad Seed Warren Ellis composed the score for the Brad Pitt film, "The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford." Last year, with some members of the Bad Seeds, he released a solo project of sorts dubbed "Grinderman."

"Once we'd made the Grinderman record, for some reason it became a matter of great urgency to get a Bad Seeds one out," he said. "But it did take me a couple of incredibly frustrating months to find a way that it could be different from what the Bad Seeds had done before and also not be a repeat of Grinderman."

Though a departure from the typical Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds album, Grinderman was a way for Cave to experiment and create music differently than he had in the past endeavors.

"Grinderman was deliberately spare and simple, so it gave us the opportunity to do something more expansive," he said. "This album has a whole lot of highly electric shit all over the top of it. Also, the Grinderman record was mostly ad-libbed, so I wanted to go back to writing complex lyrics that work on several different levels, even though people probably don't really want this kind of stuff anymore."

On top of his busy musical output, Cave has also been actively involved in screenplay writing. He wrote the 2006 film "The Proposition," a gritty Western set in the Australian outback that featured Guy Pearce and Ray Winstone.

"Music is exhausting, but screenplays are so easy," he said. "You're delivering something to somebody else. You don't have to suffer through the agony of the birth of an idea. You get rid of all that stuff. It's much more enjoyable."

Aussie friend Russell Crowe even gave him a go at penning a sequel to "Gladiator," that took him three weeks to write. Cave admitted Crowe hated it.

"I really enjoyed writing it, but the idea was doomed to begin with," he said. "I had the gladiator character as an eternal warrior that could never die. He turned up in Vietnam."

However, Cave's true passion still lies in the creation of music and he hopes that he continues to craft songs that not only appeal to his fans but also remain his own signature sound.

"I think I hope that every record I've put out has been very distinct and unique," he said. "I like the fact every time you hear a new Bad Seeds record, you have to sit down and work it out if you still like the Bad Seeds."

Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds, 9:30 Club, 815 V. St. N.W.
October 5 & 6

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