My Top 1000 Songs #751: The Mercy Seat

[I've been writing up my Top 1000 songs on a daily basis--you can see them all in descending order by hitting the All My Favorite Songs tag.] 

Took a few days off from this reverse-countdown, but dammit we've got 250 more songs to cover before we can rest... 

Nick Cave (& The Bad Seeds, to be complete) is one of those artists I absolutely respect, and all the right people totally revere his work, but I've never been a serious listener. (See also, e.g., post-60s Dylan, Tom Waits, Captain Beefheart, John Prine, Scott Walker, etc.) I've got a few of his albums, but to the extent I listen, I tend to stick with the greatest hits.

But "The Mercy Seat"? Good lord, what a song. Off 1988's Tender Prey, it's an emotional gut-punch, one of those things (like, say, Neutral Milk Hotel's Aeroplane, or Pink Floyd's The Final Cut) that I prefer to ration, deliberately playing on infrequent occasions to avoid diluting its impact. It's a dark, goth, film noir soundtrack of a song, sparse and haunting but gradually building, as Cave relays the final reflections of a convict wired up in the electric chair, awaiting the pull of the switch.

"And the mercy seat is waiting, and I think my head is burning. And in a way I'm yearning, to be done with all this measuring of truth. An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth. And anyway I told the truth, and I'm not afraid to die."

Holy crap, what a stunning motherf*cker of a song.

Live: