Shivers Down My Spine

the genius of Cat Power and an old song’s winding journey

One night in November 2021, I was up late drinking wine and scrolling twitter and in a moment of weakness I posted an engagement-bait prompt tweet. I asked people to share a favorite piece of music not on streaming services, and someone I don’t know mentioned a passage from Cat Power’s 2019 performance at Glastonbury, in which she combined the traditional folk song “He Was a Friend of Mine” with the Velvet Underground’s “Oh! Sweet Nuthin’” and “Shivers,” originally by Nick Cave’s pre-Birthday Party band the Boys Next Door. There was a YouTube and a timestamp. 

I played it and experienced a happy and familiar feeling that is always accompanied by a thought: This music is now part of my life. What I mean by this is that the song moves me deeply, and I know immediately I’ll be returning to it over and over for the foreseeable future. This instantaneous love is for me somewhat rare—more often, my appreciation for something develops gradually. But here, I knew on that first listen. Then I played it again. 

I’ve written about my fascination with songs built on two chords, how when listening to a good one, the song seems to expand and take in more and more, until it finally becomes a meditation/treatise/exemplification on/of life itself. There’s a relationship between harmonic structure in music and ways of seeing the world. This Cat Power medley has three chords, not two, but the correlation between the harmonic structure and the emotional effect is just as profound. Though the “Say a prayer for Jimmy Brown” lyric in the medley comes from Lou Reed’s “Oh! Sweet Nuthin’,” the arrangement brings to mind the slower version of “Sweet Jane,” another song from the album Loaded, which happens to be very close to the chord progression of “Shivers.” I remember playing a version of the progression when I was first learning guitar; it has that skipping feeling where the transitional chord is barely touched on, a little tap you let you know it’s there while the other two chords do most of the emotional work.

I hadn’t heard “Shivers” before that night. It was written by the Boys Next Door’s bassist, Rowland S Howard, and it’s a famous post-punk artifact that has been covered many times, but somehow it missed me. Something great about living a long life immersed in music—there’s always something new to discover, some lost classic you missed or something that sounded just OK 25 years ago that now blows your mind.

Poking around to learn more about the song, I came across a book called Urban Australia and Post-Punk: Exploring Dogs in Space. It’s a series of essays about the 1986 Richard Lowenstein film starring Michael Hutchence of INXS. I remember when the movie came out, probably because I read about it in SPIN or Rolling Stone, but I’d never seen it. Dogs in Space apparently had enough resonance in Australia to generate an academic book about its impact on culture there, and one of its essays, by Lisa MacKinney, is about “Shivers” as featured in the film.

It’s a great piece, and in it she touches on the track’s harmonic structure and how it conveys the song’s meaning:

However, where these songs use the sub-dominant (IV) as a stepping stone (hence the sub-) to get from the tonic (I) to the dominant (V), ‘Shivers’ uses the dominant (V) as a passing chord or stepping stone between the tonic (I) and the sub-dominant (IV), rendering the dominant (V) peripheral and, in fact, not dominant at all. This inverts the standard rock power dynamic in favour of a two-chord tonic/sub-dominant (E/A) progression that simply rocks gently back and forth, like a boat swaying left to right in a sea breeze but not moving from its mooring.

This lack of resolution in conjunction with the metronomic movement back and forth between the E and A chords establishes a harmonic stasis that is maintained throughout. This simultaneously creates a sense of tension and of languid torpor that functions as a marvellously effective method for conveying musically the themes and concerns with which ‘Shivers’ is preoccupied.

MacKinney also writes of Howard’s ambivalence toward the song’s success, how he felt that Cave’s highly dramatic interpretation distorted its essential humor. As she points out, the first line, “I’ve been contemplating suicide,” is a dark-hearted goth-rock all-time opening line, but then Howard followed it with “But it really doesn’t suit my style.” He was poking fun at the self-seriousness of a certain type of melodramatic teen, and he would have known a lot about this type when he wrote the song, because he was only 16 years old.

Cave took Howard lines and sang them from the perspective of a kid who couldn’t see or understand anything beyond the desire and pain of the present. His version didn’t allow its narrator to laugh at himself, it was too caught up in this moment of torment. Cave is such a gifted singer, he transformed the song completely, and his reading informs how we’ve heard it ever since, no matter who is singing it. 

Howard’s song traveled from his teenage bedroom to a recording studio where the Boys Next Door were cutting their album, where Nick Cave changed it and passed it on. “Shivers” then made its way to the Lowenstein film, where it appears twice, once in its original version and again as sung by Marie Hoy, singer from the fictional band in the film’s story. From there, as told to Chrissie Hynde in Interview Magazine, it traveled to the other side of the world and found Chan Marshall, age 13, living in one of many Southern towns she called home during her itinerant childhood:

My big sister worked at a video store, and she brought home this video cassette called Dogs in Space. Michael Hutchence was the lead actor and it was shot in Melbourne. There were two artists that I learned about from that movie. There was Nick Cave’s first band, Boys Next Door with Rowland Howard. In the movie there was this girl with her hair all teased and she was singing the lyrics to “Shivers.” And then at the end of the movie, a really awful thing happens, but it’s beautiful the way it’s filmed, and I wasn’t sad because the song that they chose was [Iggy Pop’s] “Endless Sea.” 

“Endless Sea” wound up on Cat Power’s 2022 album, Covers. She has yet to record “Shivers” in the studio, though this medley version has become a regular part of her setlists. At Glastonbury, the version of the song that found me decades after her encounter, she prefaced it with “He Was a Friend of Mine,” but she only does that sometimes. Her take includes lyrics from INXS’s “Never Tear Us Apart”—“We could live for a thousand years/But if I hurt you, I'd make wine from your tears”—and I have to think it’s the Dogs in Space connection, an homage to Marshall’s first meeting with the song. There’s something beautiful about that, how after seeing that video as an 8th-grader, this song traveled with her until she started performing it herself decades years later, and she wove in words from another song with a loose and entirely personal connection to that initial exposure. You get the senses that she trusts such connections implicitly and allows her memory and unconscious to stitch these patches together.

This version from earlier in 2019, taken from a concert at the Enmore Theatre in Sydney, is now the one I listen to most. The sound is clearer, better to hear Adeline Jasso’s achingly lovely guitar refrain (it comes from a radio broadcast, which is on YouTube and Spotify in Australia but is not, alas, available in the U.S. If you have a recording of the whole set to share, please get in touch). And it’s extra special because she brings “Shivers” back to its home.

Her performance of this song, and the backstory we piece together about how her hybrid came to be, is an embodiment of this thing I’m talking about: This music is now part of my life. Marshall is one of the great song interpreters of our time because she hears things in songs that others do not, instinctively makes connections between them, and finds ways to articulate what she hears in her own expression. Pulling back a little bit, I can’t help thinking her words are in part describing the experience of music itself, trying to capture that lightning-in-a-bottle moment when a song becomes everything. “We give you…shivers,” I think I hear her singing at one point, and let me tell you, she is absolutely right.