Stranger Than Kindness
Produced by
Stranger Than Kindness Lyrics
Bottled light from hotels
Spilling everything
Wet hand from the volcano
Sobers your skin
Stranger than kindness
You caress yourself
And grind my soft cold bones below
Your map of desire
Burned in your flesh
Even a fool can come
A strange lit stair
And find a rope hanging there
Stranger than kindness
Keys rain like heaven's hair
There is no home, there is no bread
We sit at the gate and scratch
The gaunt fruit of passion
Dies in the light
Stranger than kindness
Your sleeping hands journey
They loiter
Stranger than kindness
You hold me so carelessly close
Tell me I'm dirty
I'm a stranger
I'm a stranger
I'm a stranger to kindness
About
“Stranger than kindness” deals with themes of passion and desire, but also depression and suicide.
The title may be in reference to Tennessee Williams’s play, A Streetcar Named Desire.
The main character, Blanche du Bois, has an affair with a teenage student and, as a result, acts as a kind of prostitute in seedy hotels before being thrown out of town. Her last line in the play, to a doctor that takes her away to a mental institution, is ‘Whoever you are, I have always depended on the kindness of strangers.’
Nick Cave has later wrote a book by the same title.
Q&A
Find answers to frequently asked questions about the song and explore its deeper meaning
We really hit on something there. We found it really beautiful – to me there’s some really delicate, strange abstracted kinds of songs, that I loved. One of my favourite Bad Seeds songs is ‘Stranger Than Kindness’, which has a kind of unearthly beauty about it, and I think that’s largely because I had nothing to do with writing it. I mean by that I don’t understand it so much, and it remains mysterious to me, and very beautiful – Anita Lane wrote it, and Blixa wrote the music. I really want to say something about Bargeld’s guitar playing, because on those first four records the stuff he was doing was extraordinary. He had this knack of making the guitar sound like anything other than a guitar.
– Nick Cave, Uncut
Fever Ray has covered the song in her 2009 self-titled album.
- 1.Sad Waters
- 2.The Carny
- 4.Stranger Than Kindness
