Nick Cave’s bandmate and scoring partner cites ‘deeper intensity’ before Minneapolis gig

After talking a lot about how his close collaborator and bandleader has evolved and grown amid tragic events over the past decade, Warren Ellis was quick to clarify one thing that hasn’t changed about Nick Cave.

“He hasn’t grown soft,” the Bad Seeds violinist and guitarist and Cave’s movie scoring partner said/warned. “You’ll see.”

It was valid to think otherwise about Cave, whose concert Sunday at the Armory in Minneapolis will be his first Twin Cities show with the Bad Seeds in more than a decade. A lot has happened in the interim.

Just the mere fact that the wild-eyed Australian goth-punk legend is now 67 might suggest he has lost some of his famous intensity and physicality as a live performer. Way more impactful than aging, though, Cave also has endured what Ellis called “an incredibly real and intense and very sad moment that you wouldn’t wish on anyone.”

The singer’s teenage son, Arthur, died in a tragic fall in 2015. This set him down a path of emotionally guttural yet poignant musicmaking on a pair of albums, “Skeleton Tree” and “Ghosteen.” Then he also unexpectedly lost an older son, Jethro, in 2022 at age 31.

Amid all that, the enigmatic and mysterious Cave turned surprisingly open and accessible. He started an online blog called the Red Hand Files where he answers fans’ questions about loss and struggle. He also went on solo tours and talked openly about his faith and family.

“I’ve watched him grow into a really remarkable person,” said Ellis, a fellow Aussie who joined the Bad Seeds in 1997 after five years of leading his own band, the gorgeously anarchic instrumental rock trio the Dirty Three.

“In the past, Nick’s private life was always his private life,” Ellis continued. “But then suddenly when Arthur died, it was something that was thrown on everybody’s doorstep, so to speak. So the answer to that was in his missives that he sends weekly, answering people’s questions. The answers often say more about him than they do about whatever the question is.”

That new, deeply personal connection to fans has similarly transformed Cave’s shows with the Bad Seeds, Ellis said. He noticed the difference right away when the band went on the road to support “Skeleton Tree” in 2017 (a tour that skipped Minnesota).

“At the first show I think he realized he needed the audience more than ever,” Ellis recounted. “It became a different thing for him. The shows flipped on a dime into something else, something incredibly inclusive and internal.

“There was this whole thing going on with the audience and the outpouring of support and emotion for him, and he responded in an incredibly open, gracious and appreciative way.”

That gratefulness helped define Cave’s newest Bad Seeds album, “Wild God,” a much more hopeful and healing collection that is also one of the band’s most orchestra-leaning collections (with Ellis thus playing a heavy role). Songs like the cinematic “Frogs” and the ornate title track flip biblical end-times references into calls for new beginnings from within.

The new album’s centerpiece is an elegant, choral-laced ballad called “Joy,” which seems to apply Cave’s current state of mind to current affairs around the world:

“We’ve all had too much sorrow, now is the time for joy / And all across the world they shout bad words, they shout angry words / About the end of love, yet the stars stand above the earth / Bright, triumphant metaphors of love.”

Ellis said “Joy” also has become “a real moment” in the live shows.

“I think it’s an incredibly beautiful and meaningful song,” he said. “It’s like a petition and an act of defiance. The sentiment of it is so powerful and spiritual. It’s really something in the set.”

Well beyond that song, he added, lowercase “joy” is also now a central component to the Bad Seeds’ concerts. With a mostly stable lineup since the 2009 departure of guitarist Mick Harvey, the Bad Seeds are touring with Radiohead’s Colin Greenwood filling in for an ailing Martyn Casey.

“‘Wild God’ feels like a jubilant record, and it really has been a joy to play it live,” Ellis said. “And I think it’s had a knockdown effect with the whole live show and the other tracks we play from the catalog. The fact Nick felt good enough within himself to make a record like this one is a real triumph.”

And that’s when the violinist made the point of addressing what hasn’t changed with the Bad Seeds’ bandleader, who’s been known to literally get in the face of fans and sometimes crawl over them.

“It’s not like the early days, when he just seemed to be attacking the audience, lunging at them and flying around,” Ellis explained with audible admiration, “but he’s still very physical. It’s just different now. He’s just as intense, and maybe in a deeper way.”

Here’s a little more of what Ellis had to say about working with Cave, as well as with one of Minnesota’s most renowned indie-rock groups.

On what has made him Cave’s closest collaborator for the past 25 years: “We’ve been in the studio for the last three months working on two TV series and a bunch of other stuff, and we’re still curious about things. We still fire off each other.

“When we first met, I was never one to let an idea go. Nick was that way, too, I noticed. He wouldn’t let an idea go unless he was literally dragged away from it, until it reached the finish line. That’s something that made us migrate toward each other.”

On their scoring work for movies including “The Road,” “Wind River,” “The Assassination of Jesse James” and last year’s Amy Winehouse biopic “Back to Black:” “A lot of it is music that your better judgment would normally tell you not to go down that path. You’re serving something else. You’re serving the film and the director’s hopes for it.

“The scoring work will often inform what we do with the band next. We’ve done a few shape changes by the time we get around to doing another Bad Seeds record, which can make its way onto that record.”

On the likelihood of a Grinderman reunion, his and Cave’s more electrified and manic side band: “If we’re gonna do it, we’d better do it soon! You know, that band is a little more of a young man’s game [laughs]. Although I think it’d be kind of great if we came out bashing again in our 80s.”

On the late Mimi Parker, whose Duluth band Low recorded a hidden-gem EP, 2001’s “In the Fishtank 7,” with Ellis’ old band the Dirty Three: “We toured together when we did ‘Ocean Songs,’ our quietest record, but they were real quiet and dynamic. I really loved playing with them. It kind of forced us to play in a different way.

“I really liked Mimi a lot, too. She was just a really great person — still very young then but also very levelheaded, and with such a beautiful voice. It was really sad news when she died.”

When: 8 p.m. Sun.

Where: The Armory, 500 S. 6th St., Mpls.

Tickets: $84-$134, ticketmaster.com.