Last year, Nick Cave And The Bad Seeds released their 18th album Wild God, whose penultimate song “O Wow O Wow (How Wonderful She Is)” begins with the line, “She rises in advance of her panties.” The beloved musician has apparently been receiving a lot of complaints about this, and Wednesday he confronted the issue on his Red Hand Files blog.

In Cave’s response to a fan who expressed disdain toward the song and questioned if the word “panties” should ever be a lyric, Cave writes that “as its creator I feel the need to defend it — not just out of some paternal urge, but because I have always thought the line was rather good. Truthfully, when I wrote the first verse of ‘O Wow O Wow,’ I was so pleased, that I took the rest of the day off!”

“The opening verse is, of course, a recollection of my younger days with Anita — in this instance, she rises naked from our shared bed,” he continues — a reference to Cave’s former girlfriend and collaborator Anita Lane, who died in 2021. He goes through each line, sharing what it means to him, before concluding:

This simple, silly, happy verse brings Anita’s playful nature to the fore. The vocal delivery echoes the clumsy first line, which is out of time and rhythm with the track, giving the verse its sweet, goofy naivety. For me, it recalls a time when innocent love could be such. The discomfort of the “panties” line is, in a way, the point — it represents a kind of freedom or unburdening, a way to exist outside the constraints of good writing or good taste or good behaviour and become something emergent and disorderly.

He adds that his lyrics are “attempts to keep those who have passed away at the vanguard of our being, not just as vague and shadowy ghosts but as fully embodied incantations of our love.” Read his full post here, and revisit “O Wow O Wow (How Wonderful She Is)” below.