Nick and Susie’s jumping frog

Wild God, Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds’ most recent album, is powerful and energetic because it revolves around joy, the most powerful of all human emotions and feelings. In addition to Joy, there is another song worth mentioning: Frogs. This was the first track written for the album by the Australian singer-songwriter. In a recent interview, Cave spoke about the song, which portrays a couple — himself and his wife Susie — returning home from church one Sunday morning. It’s likely that the scripture reading from that Sunday was from Genesis, specifically the episode of Cain and Abel, as suggested by the song’s lyrics: “Ushering in the week / he knelt down / Crushed his brother’s head in with a bone”. From that point onwards, the song talks about the little frogs, which represent all of us.

The lyrics read: “In the Sunday rain /
The frogs are jumping in the gutters /
Oh, leaping to God, amazed of love /
And amazed of pain /
Amazed to be back in the water again”.

One wonders if Cave has ever read the passage in Orthodoxy by G.K. Chesterton, in which the writer asserts, “The test of all happiness is gratitude.... In fact, all my first views were exactly uttered in a riddle that stuck in my brain from boyhood. The question was: ‘What did the first frog say?’ And the answer was: ‘Lord, how you make me jump! That says succinctly all that I am saying. God made the frog jump, but the frog prefers jumping’”.

Andrea Monda