Dear Natasha, Frank and Anja.

I wrote the line –

I slide my little songs out from under you

on the evening of the 5th of July 2014.

I know this because I refer to it in the Portland section of The Sick Bag Song, the epic poem I composed chronicling The Bad Seeds 2014 North American tour. I wrote –

‘Tonight I wrote down this line in the alley
Behind the Arlene Schnitzer Concert Hall
In Portland, Oregon
Where I smoked and sat,
I slide my little songs out from under you
And I was very happy with that.’

What I meant by ‘very happy with that’ was that I felt a blissful pulse of prophecy calling from the future, that this line, written in an alley, in Portland, had an ulterior destiny that would in time reveal itself.

It appeared again in the Los Angeles section of The Sick Bag Song –

‘I cast a giant shadow against the sky.
Like a miniature deity I gaze into the brown water.
I slide my little songs out from under you.
I am a small god crawling around a giant world,
Becoming an engorged god crawling around a small world.’

But happy as I was with the line, and indeed the whole of The Sick Bag Song, I felt that I needed to position it within an actual song, so I spent the next six years trying to do just that. This became increasingly difficult, as every song I tried to put it in rejected it. It was just too good, I guess, and the other lines knew it. I remember one mercifully aborted song lyric went something like –

‘Praise be your za-zen legs and kundalini stew
I slide my little songs out from under you’

Looking through my notebook I see it even tried its luck in an early version of ‘Rings of Saturn’ –

‘As she jumps up with her leaping brain
I slide my little songs out from under her
Stepping over piles of sleeping children’

But ‘Rings of Saturn’ would have none of it and the line was (thankfully) shunned and, once again, sent into exile.

Then it turned up on a potential B-side from the Skeleton Tree sessions called ‘Life Per Se’, which you saw me trying to teach the band on the 40 minute jam in One More Time With Feeling –

‘What then to do? What then to do?
I slide my little songs out from under you’

But this song, beautiful though it was, didn’t end up on an actual record, so the line still had no place to lay its head.

The line seemed, as you pointed out, Natasha, to sum up everything – a life’s work, a credo, an ideology. I felt the line struck at the heart of the matter – that my songs were small studies in a larger project – the glorification of the ones I love.

In the end it found its way into ‘Night Raid’ from Ghosteen –

‘Sitting on the edge of the bed clicking your shoes
I slid my little songs out from under you’

A near perfect place for it really, as ‘Night Raid’ is concerned mostly with the act of impregnation, of conception, of genesis, and the line –

‘I slid my little songs out from under you’

felt like the feminine counterweight to the overwrought masculinity of –

‘The spurting font of creativity, yeah I know’

This lovely line allowed the yang seed to fertilise the yin egg, up in Room 33, and birth what, in my opinion, may be the most beautiful and joyful song on the album.

But even so, I am still not completely sure the line has found its final resting place. It feels that it was created for a grander purpose, to be chiselled in granite, in a Luminari font, maybe; so, if it comes down to it, Frank, this is what I want on my gravestone –

I SLIDE MY LITTLE SONGS OUT FROM UNDER YOU

unless, of course, I think of a better line in the meantime.

Which brings me to Bad Seed TeeVee – thanks to all of you who have written in about it. Bad Seed TeeVee is in its infant stages, and now the project is up and running, mountains of new footage is flooding in from everywhere. We are besieged! In time, perhaps we will invite fans to send in interesting stuff they have shot on their phones while they were supposed to have been watching the concert. We want Bad Seed TeeVee to become a vast, ever-mutating monster – full of the bold, the beautiful, the berserk and the completely absurd. Thank you all so much for tuning in – at last we all have a place to go!

Love, Nick