Waiting For You Limited edition lyric sheets

'Just before I started writing the lyrics for Push the Sky Away my long time friend Jillian Burt made me a beautiful bespoke notebook as a gift. It was a lovely thing with its distinctive glazed cover and lined exercise book paper. These notebooks have become absolutely fundamental to my song writing process.

My process of lyric writing is as follows. For months I write down ideas in the notebook with a black Bic medium ballpoint pen. At some point the songs begin to reveal themselves, to take some kind of form. At this point I type the new lyrics into my laptop. Here I begin the long process of working on the words, adding verses, taking them away and refining the language. The song, in time, finds itself, and it becomes clear that the obsessive tinkering is having a detrimental effect—the song has arrived at its destination. At this stage I take one of the yellowing back pages I have cut from old second hand books, and on my Olympia typewriter, type out the lyrics. I then glue it into my bespoke notebook, number it, date stamp it with a Trodat date stamp, and sticker it. The song is then ‘officially’ completed.

Last year, I lost my beloved Ghosteen notebook with all the scribblings and typed lyrics in it. I have no idea what happened to it. It was very distressing for me at the time. A few months ago, in lockdown, I sat and re-typed all the lyrics, date stamped, stickered and numbered them, in an attempt to reclaim them. This process reconnected me to the words that I had lost. I have made these typed lyrics into prints.'

Nick Cave