Mick Harvey: Five Ways to Say Goodbye

Firstly, Five Ways to Say Goodbye is great. It’s being billed as Mick Harvey’s fifth solo album – though if you include collaborations, it could be his 11th or more – and it’s his best by some distance. It’s also being heralded as an album that closes a chapter in his career, ending the sequence of number-titled records – all consisting of a mix of Harvey originals and covers – that began with One Man’s Treasure back in 2005. It certainly has a valedictory feel, being an autumnal collection of reflective and poignant songs concerned with loss, aging and the passing of time.

Harvey prefers to call them “pre-existing songs” rather than covers, which sounds oddly euphemistic, but it’s a distinction worth making. The term “cover version,” redolent of tribute bands and moribund legacy artists propping up their careers by dipping into the “Great American Songbook,” feels reductive, whereas many of the greatest ever interpretations of songs have been sung by people with no hand in writing them. After all, classical musicians playing Mozart or Beethoven aren’t playing “covers,” and neither are blues or folk musicians. For artists like Frank Sinatra, Billie Holiday or Aretha Franklin, interpreting songs was seen as a vital part of their creativity. Any serious artist looks at a song through the lens of their own experience and artistry, and so it is with Harvey. Five Ways to Say Goodbye is an entirely coherent album with a pervasive, distinctive character of its own and, without checking the credits, the fact that the songs are the work of a variety of different songwriters wouldn’t be obvious, or even evident at all.

It would doubtless be nice for Harvey if reviews of his work didn’t unfailingly mention Nick Cave; Harvey’s musical sensibility was as much a part of the fabric of the Bad Seeds on the band’s series of classic albums as Cave’s was, and the comparison immediately springs to mind when the lush, somber “Heaven’s Gate” opens the album. Harvey is, of course, a very different singer from Cave, and one of the things that makes his solo work so engaging is the tuneful but unassuming informality of his voice. Cave is a superb interpreter of songs and brings a sense of drama, filtered through hhis brooding persona, to everything he does. With Harvey, it feels like there is no persona, only a person, and it gives his delivery a relatable vulnerability that is central to the powerful emotional impact of Five Ways to Say Goodbye.

“Heaven’s Gate” is a Harvey original, and it’s a beautifully textured song, with cinematic and very Good Son-like solemn strings and low-key acoustic guitar. Lyrically, its end-of-life theme could easily be cheesy, but it isn’t; throughout Five Ways, Harvey isn’t afraid to tackle big themes and big emotions head on, but the results are moving and never simply platitudinous. Even though, in the Willie-Nelson-is-still-touring scheme of things, Harvey isn’t old for a recording artist these days, it’s the kind of album that requires the weight of maturity and experience to bring it to life, and his voice has an appealing, rough-edged warmth that hews meaning from the lyrics without any need for histrionics or overt emoting. The four Harvey originals – “Heaven’s Gate,” “The Art of Darkness,” “Alone With the Stars” and “When We Were Beautiful & Young,” tie the album together, bringing its themes of passing time and bittersweet farewells into sharp focus. Sometimes they even contain echoes of the songs that surround them, as in the beautiful “Alone With the Stars,” which begins as a spare, soft-focus piano piece, but gradually swells with strings and percussion into something more commanding, though still tender. When Harvey sings “Here we are, waiting for the ghost ship,” it’s lovely in itself, but also prefigures his atmospheric reading of the Saints’ gorgeous “Ghost Ships” from their underrated 1984 album A Little Madness to Be Free. As with much of Five Ways, it’s an elegiac song about the passage of time, and Harvey’s performance of it is phenomenal.

There are some other songs from Australian sources; the album’s most luminous and upbeat song – though still filled with bittersweet yearning – is a version of “Nashville High” from Lo Carmen’s 2007 album Rock‘n’Roll Tears. It’s a little more rock-inflected than most of the album, with an intro/tone reminiscent of Tom Waits’ “Jersey Girl.” There’s something Waits-like, too, about “We Had an Island,” a song by Fatal Shore, the Berlin-based band founded by Bruno Adams, whose old group Once Upon a Time supported the Bad Seeds back in the ‘90s. A countryish ballad, the song’s lovely arrangement is imbued with nostalgia and regret, but although unabashedly sentimental, Harvey’s bare, Australian-accented vocals neutralize any cloying quality the song might have had in other hands. An effective, mournful version of Ed Kuepper’s “Demolition” is stark and unvarnished, but there’s more drama in Harvey’s dynamic version of “Setting You Free.” One of David McComb’s (the Triffids) intense solo records, it’s simultaneously grim and upbeat, sounding weirdly – but unintentionally, surely – like a glowering cousin of Freddie and the Dreamers’ sappy ‘60s classic “I’m Telling You Now.”

Harvey’s own “When We Were Beautiful & Young” is exactly what the title suggests – a tender, wistful meditation on the passing of time and the people who fall by the wayside. Again, although sentimental, it’s miraculously un-cloying and has a warmly plaintive tone somehow reminiscent of John Cale’s gorgeous “Charlemagne.” “A Suitcase in Berlin,” originally a 1955 Marlene Dietrich single, tells of a similar pull toward the past, only this time in the form of a love letter to the city where the Birthday Party washed up and fell apart, way back in 1982. The English translation of Aldo von Pinelli’s lyrics seems a little clunky at times, but, if anything, that makes the song feel more vivid and personal. The excellent production, with its rumbling bass sounds and piercing, somber violins, is suitably dramatic, but there’s drama of a more narrative kind in Lee Hazlewood’s “Dirtnap Stories.” A seamy waltz-time ballad, it’s the closest the album comes to sounding like Nick Cave, though that’s more to do with the tone of the song than with Harvey’s performance. Moodier still is Harvey’s “The Art of Darkness,” a sinister, edgy piece of music with powerful, philosophical and surprisingly affirmative lyrics about finding and pursuing one’s own path. The album ends with a piano arrangement of Neil Young’s “Like a Hurricane” that slows the song down to the point where it just holds together. Sung against a background of howling wind noise, it brings the album to an intimate and even romantic close.

Mick Harvey has made a lot of albums – and a lot of good albums – over the years. From his collections of Serge Gainsbourg songs to his collaborations with Christopher Richard Barker and Amanda Acevedo, there’s a strand of understated cinematic melancholy running through his work, and it’s at its most accomplished on Five Ways to Say Goodbye. Arranged and recorded with great skill and delivered with emotion that is intense but not melodramatic, it’s entirely engaging, thought-provoking, moving and satisfying.