but my name was Elisa Day - the musical horror storytelling of Where The Wild Roses Grow
broadside (murder) ballads for the modern man
*Takes off film writing hat*
*Puts on music writing hat*
Plot twist, they are both clown hats, just in different colours.
(read my dissection of the horror storytelling in Ethel Cain’s Ptolemaea here - if you’re slightly confused as to why I refer to it a couple of times, this is why)
but first: what is a murder ballad?
In brief, according to Wikipedia, murder ballads are a subgenre of the traditional ballad (a form of verse, often a narrative, set to music) form dealing with a crime or a gruesome death. The lyrics tell the story of a murder, often including the lead-up to the crime and the aftermath.
Many originated in Scandinavia, England and lowland Scotland during the pre-modern era. Where the Wild Roses Grow is inspired by the traditional Appalachian murder ballad Down in the Willow Garden/Rose Connelly - a version of Down in the Willow Garden serves as its B-side.
flashback: October 1995
It’s interesting to have a quick look at where both Nick Cave (and the Bad Seeds) and Kylie Minogue were in their respective careers before they joined forces for Where The Wild Roses Grow. You’d be forgiven for thinking it strange that Kylie, up until that point mainly associated with PWL/Stock Aitken Waterman style big bright pop songs, was teaming up with Cave, a goth statue of a man whose music is closely intertwined with topics like death, religion, love and violence.
But Kylie had long since been working on pushing herself away from that early image; PWL had not renewed her contract (believing she was “not moving in a direction that was going to be successful” which, I would bloody love to go back in time and play 1992 Pete Waterman Padam Padam, I genuinely fear it may kill him) and so, in 1993 Kylie signed with Deconstruction Records, a label best known for their work in house and underground dance music (have you ever heard of a little song called Children by Robert Miles? Yeah, that’s them.) and in September 1994 released her eponymous fifth studio album with them. It marked a significant departure from her earlier sound, with critics praising her vocals as Kylie experimented with a variety of collaborators for this dance-pop album.
You have only to listen to Kylie Minogue’s lead single, the masterful cathedral of a song that is Confide in Me (guess what my favourite Kylie Minogue song is, go on, guess) to understand the path to Where the Wild Roses Grow on her end of the equation. Kylie was already leaning into a darker, sultrier mode - and here enters Nick Cave.
Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds sprung out of the demise of Cave’s former band, the Birthday Party. The band was at the time fresh off the back of 1994’s Let Love In, an album which gave the world a little song called Red Right Hand, which in the chronology of the band’s singles is the one immediately preceding Where the Wild Roses Grow. (Red Right Hand has its own attachment to the world of horror films as it’s used in all bar one of the Scream films - additionally, it is famously used as the theme for the critically acclaimed BBC period crime drama series Peaky Blinders).
Cave, in his own words, had a quiet obsession with his fellow Aussie, and had been trying to write a song for her for about six years, but nothing had really felt appropriate. Until, during the making of their ninth studio album, Murder Ballads, Cave had a stroke of inspiration after listening to the aforementioned Down in the Willow Garden.
the song structure
Where the Wild Roses Grow starts with a sweeping orchestral string intro, before settling into a gentle waltz. The storytelling happens purely through the lyrics (as we previously discussed, with Ptolemaea, the lyrics and the instrumentation/production choices are working together to tell the story), with Cave and Minogue taking turns as narrator.
The story in the song takes place over the space of three days, giving the song a structure of chorus (as intro) - first verse/second verse (day one) - chorus - third verse/fourth verse (day two) - chorus - fifth verse/sixth verse (day three) - chorus to fade. Let’s have a closer look at those sections.
day one
In the story, on the first day, Cave’s unnamed narrator first meets Minogue’s character (who we know is named Elisa Day). Cave sings about how he knew from the first day he saw her that “she was the one”. Elisa looks into his eyes and smiles, and he notes her lips to be the colour of the roses growing down the river (all bloody and wild).
If we were to think about the circumstances the two characters meet, it may be that the narrator (I’ll call Cave’s character this moving forward) meets Elisa at a party or a gathering. “from the first day I saw her I knew she was the one” still sounds somewhat romantic in this first verse, as we are yet to find out of his intent to murder her.
However, there are red flags from the get-go - he compares her lips to the roses growing down the river “all bloody and wild”, like he’s seeing her as something not quite human. He is elevating her in his head, and a seed of doubt is immediately planted.
The second verse is from Minogue’s perspective - her voice is soft, almost whispery, making Elisa’s perspective immediately sound vulnerable. She sings of the narrator showing up at her/Elisa’s bedroom door and coming in - perhaps this happens later on the same evening as the first verse. She is nervous, trembling, as the narrator will be her “first man” (underlining her vulnerability quite boldly), but she is reassured by his sure embrace and the careful way he wipes her tears.
It feels from the off that the narrator has honed in on Elisa because he perceives her as innocent and naive, a pure beauty with lips that remind him of wild roses (similar to how, in Ptolemaea, Isaiah sees Ethel as a pure, yet fallible mythologized being that he wished to possess).
day two
Cave, again, as the narrator buys Elisa a flower on the second day of their courtship. He is deceptively sweet, clearly in awe of her beauty (she was more beautiful than any woman I’ve seen), and asks her if she knows where the wild roses grow, using a softer language than at the end of his first verse and describing them to her as sweet, scarlet and free.
Minogue sings as Elisa of the single red rose presented to her by the narrator. He asks her to give her “her loss and her sorrow” and she nods in agreement, lying down on the bed as he asks him whether she’d follow him if he showed her where the wild roses grow.
We’re to presume that they once again make love, with the narrator having successfully convinced Elisa to follow him to the roses.
day three
For day three, the narration switches turns, as this time Minogue starts. The telling thing about this particular section is that while Minogue-as-Elisa sings “on the third day”, while Cave’s narrator starts his verse with “on the last day".
Elisa remains unaware of what is about to happen (and how could she be aware, how could she know what awaits her?) as they trek to the river. The narrator shows Elisa the roses and they kiss. Elisa tells the audience that the last thing she heard was the narrator muttering something (most likely the thing that Cave mentions in the following verse, “all beauty must die”) as he loomed above her clutching a rock.
As mentioned, Cave’s narrator remarks this is the “last day”, the day on which he will execute his plan of murdering Elisa. He kisses her one last time, punctuation the “all beauty must die” remark by placing a picked rose between her teeth, between the lips he’d described previously as having a similar colour to the roses from the riverbank. He has, in a way, picked her, the rose-like beauty and virginal quality ruined by him. She lies dead on the riverbank, a rose condemned to rot with a rose condemned to rot between her teeth.
chorus
As mentioned, the chorus starts the song as well as bookending every duo of verses. It’s a simple chorus, made devastating by Kylie’s vulnerable, fragile voice. As Elisa, she sings:
They call me The Wild Rose
But my name was Elisa Day
Why they call me it I do not know
For my name was Elisa Day
Like a missive from the afterlife, she wonders why she has been given a nickname - it is reminiscent of both the song’s ballad ancestry and the way true crime cases tend to nickname both victim and perpetrator. Viewed this way, it could be read as a beyond the grave request to keep her name alive. As final chorus fades out, she repeats my name was Elisa Day, reiterating her name over and over again.
It could also be read as her death coming so quickly she has not got time to process what happens to her, and she is doomed to spend her afterlife wondering why, when talking about her death, nobody recalls her name.
Personally, I prefer the former reading, but your mileage may vary. Maybe, upon reading the lyrics, you’ll find your own idea of the story in between its lines. But whichever way you find that idea, there is no interpretation that finds a road out of the tragedy of Elisa Day’s end at the hands of her lover.
a quick note on the video
Shot by American music video director Rocky Schenk (who also directed the video for Henry Lee, Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds’ collab with PJ Harvey also on Murder Ballads), the video takes inspiration from Sir John Everett Millais’s painting Ophelia (1851-52). The video appears to take place in the aftermath of Kylie/Elisa’s murder, as she lies on the riverbank; the scenes are intercut with Kylie/Elisa seemingly singing from the afterlife, a ghostlike figure pondering her fate.
A serpent crawls through the water onto Kylie’s body. Cave’s narrator character is seemingly in turmoil, but places a rose between her teeth at the end of the video.
It looks like a single tear rolls down Kylie/Elisa’s cheek.
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Yes!! I love the whole Murder Ballads album, it’s such a wild ride. But this song is my favorite. Really awesome breakdown!