Nick Cave & the Bad Seeds
Push the Sky Away
- Publishing
“Rants and screeds, embarrassing digressions, photographs, drawings and scribbles that in a sane world should never see the light of day”.
This is how Nick Cave describes the contents of the notebooks that he uses to write his songs. These notebooks are precious documents of the creative process. Alterations are typed out and stuck over the originals, creating multiple layers until Nick feels a lyric is near completion, at which point it is rubber stamped.
This super deluxe edition of Push the Sky Away comprised a bespoke linen-bound box set, featuring a unique reproduction notebook which houses the anatomy of the album, song by song. Through this unique format, Nick invited the listener – with unprecedented insight – into the mania of his song writing process.
A labour of love and painstakingly reproduced, HS undertook a complex print process to create the 120-page facsimile (a hybrid amalgamation of the original notebooks). Every page was carefully deconstructed – it’s component parts individually scanned, retouched and then re-assembled by hand. The inside back cover featured a pouch containing a sheet of coloured stickers: During the early stages of production, Cave used a colour-coding system to indicate to our team which fragment of his jottings belonged to which final song, so that the pieces could be brought together in context in the facsimile version.
“Rants and screeds, embarrassing digressions, photographs, drawings and scribbles that in a sane world should never see the light of day”. Nick Cave
