Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds - Tender Prey LP

The period leading up to and culminating in the making of Nick Cave & the Bad Seeds' fifth studio album, Tender Prey, was a profusely fertile time for all the individual band members, overloaded with so much peripheral creative activity and personal turmoil that the entire long process of recording and mixing the album was encompassed by tumult. Inaugural recording for Tender Prey took place on September 7, 1987; the last remaining mixes were completed on March 14, 1988. Cave was deep into his novel at the flat he shared with Die Haut bassist Christoph Dreher on Dresdener Strasse in Berlin's Kreuzberg district, when the embryonic form of what would become "The Mercy Seat" first came to him. Scribbling on an open pad next to his typewriter, Cave wrestled with the lyrics over the next several months, the epic literary sprawl of his novel subtly seeping into the song as he labored over them both simultaneously. "The Mercy Seat," Cave recollects, "...felt like something that I was writ