Nick Cave has shared his new single “Letter To Cynthia” in full online – listen to it below.

The track originally appears on Cave and Warren Ellis’ new seven-inch release titled Grief, based on a letter sent to Cave’s Red Hand Files website.

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“Letter To Cynthia” appears alongside another song, “Song For Cynthia”, and both tracks were inspired by a question that a fan named Cynthia had sent to The Red Hand Files, a site where Cave responds to letters from his audience.

“I have experienced the death of my father, my sister, and my first love in the past few years and feel that I have some communication with them, mostly through dreams,” she wrote in October 2018. “They are helping me.”

Referring to the death of Cave’s teenage son in 2015, she continued: “Are you and Susie feeling that your son Arthur is with you and communicating in some way?”

In a description under the new single, Cave wrote: “In Fall 2018 Cynthia sent this question to The Red Hand Files.

“My reply was the first time I was able to articulate my own contradictory feelings of grief. Letters like Cynthia’s have helped bring me and many others back to the world. I recorded ‘Letter To Cynthia’ and ‘Song For Cynthia’ with Warren in November 2020 at Soundtree Studios in London. They are beautiful pieces and I hope you like them.”

In other Nick Cave news, Cave and Ellis will head out on a European tour with The Bad Seeds across the summer of 2022 – new dates were announced last week.