Robert Smith Is a Big Ol’ Book Nerd

If you couldn’t tell by everything about him, Robert Smith is a bookworm — the kind of guy who used the pandemic as an excuse to read John le Carré’s entire 26-book oeuvre and to finally tackle War and Peace. (He didn’t care much for the latter.) As the Cure’s front man and primary songwriter, Smith’s never been shy about drawing blatant lyrical inspiration from his favorite books and poems. The band’s very first single, 1978’s controversially titled “Killing an Arab,” is a riff on Albert Camus’s The Stranger, in which a then-20-year-old Smith attempts to condense a few key scenes from the novella into a post-punk portrait of apathy. Since then, every Cure album has offered a glimpse into whatever bookish brew of anguish and elation is swirling around in Smith’s mind at a given moment in time. There’s even an entire website dedicated to tracking literary references in Cure songs.

Last week, the Cure returned with their first album in 16 years, Songs From a Lost World. Notably, it’s only the second Cure album (after 1985’s The Head on the Door) on which Smith has sole writing credit on every song — a feat that apparently did not come easily. “It’s the one thing that as I’ve grown older, I’ve found much much harder to do — write words that I want to sing,” the 65-year-old told the BBC. With a little help from his literary inspirations, he eventually found ones he did want to sing, and the result is the band’s best album in decades — a richly textured, patient meditation on death and the passage of time.

However age may have changed him, much about Smith’s songwriting remains the same, and Lost World brings with it a classically Smithian spate of literary and historical reference points, some of which probably went over my head. Below are the ones that I did catch.

Smith has described “Alone” — the stunning, Disintegration-esque opener to Songs From a New World — as the song that unlocked the entire record for him. After struggling to find the right words to open the album, he perused an old notebook and found that some younger version of himself had transcribed the poem “Dregs,” by Ernest Dowson, a 19th-century English poet who met a tragic end at 32 after his father died of tuberculosis and his mother hanged herself. (Did you think Smith wouldn’t be drawn to outrageously ill-fated poets?) Much like “Alone,” “Dregs” contends with oblivion, the ghosts of the past, and “the end of every song man sings.” Perhaps a century from now, “Alone” will pay it forward by freeing another lonesome poet from writer’s block.

“It doesn’t matter if we all die,” Smith sings at the beginning of “One Hundred Years,” the paranoid freakout that opens 1982’s Pornography. The line’s nihilism is emblematic of the Cure’s early albums, which often confront the specter of death with absurdism and existential angst. Smith couldn’t have known then that, 42 years later, he’d release the song’s inverse, “And Nothing Is Forever” — an earnest ballad about a promise he made to be by a loved one’s side when they died. Over swelling strings and a treacly piano motif, Smith sings about his world growing old and holding someone for the last time in “the dying of the light.” That last bit, of course, is from Dylan Thomas’s “Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night,” about resisting death even when you’re at its threshold. Despite the shout-out, Smith seems more at peace. “It really doesn’t matter,” he sings, echoing “One Hundred Years” before turning it on its head: “if you say we’ll be together.”

Okay, I admit this reference is somewhat subliminal, but Smith really wants you to know that he fucking hates drones, and what could be more Bradburyian than that? “Drone:Nodrone” is the album’s most aggro tune, cutting through all the rumination on death with heavy guitars as Smith spirals out: “I’m breaking up again / I feel it in the air.” In the press materials for the album, Smith explains the song was inspired by an experience he had behind his house when a camera drone flew by. “It disturbed me,” he writes. “It was a horrible reminder of the intrusive, surveilled nature of the ‘modern world.’” Smith has shared his admiration for the Fahrenheit 451 author a few times, and once explained to Spin why he turned down the opportunity to have lunch with him: “He gave me a signed copy of Something Wicked This Way Comes, but he wouldn’t come to the concert. He said it wasn’t his thing. I thought, Well, if he’s going to be such a staid old bastard anyway, then lunch isn’t my thing.”

Right after “Drone:Nodrone,” Smith invokes Bradbury more explicitly on “I Can Never Say Goodbye,” a song about the unexpected death of his brother. Over funereal keys, Smith sings of “shadows growing closer” and “dreamless sleep” before directly mentioning his brother: “Something wicked this way comes / to steal away my brother’s life.” The first part of that is spoken by one of the three witches in Shakespeare’s Macbeth and was later repurposed by Bradbury as the title of his 1962 fantasy novel, Something Wicked This Way Comes. The line’s vagueness — what’s coming, exactly? — serves the song’s general framing of death as incomprehensible.

In interviews about Songs From a New World, Smith has indicated that there could be at least two more Cure albums coming, thanks to the amount of material the band stockpiled during the long gap between their last two releases. Given how long he teased Songs of a Lost World for, that’s a bit of a “fool me once” situation. But if this does end up being the band’s last album, you could hardly ask for a better capstone than its closing track, “Endsong,” another Disintegration-esque, ten-minute slow burn on which Smith doesn’t start singing until after the six-minute mark. When he does, it’s to describe an experience he had staring up at the moon the summer he turned 60, thinking about how it’s somehow the same moon he looked up at during the Apollo 11 landing when he was a kid, even though the world isn’t the same and neither is he. Accepting mortality is one thing, but across the album, Smith can’t seem to square the many versions of himself he’s been over the years with the person he is now. Invoking Dowson again, all he knows is that at “the end of every song,” he’ll be “left alone with nothing.”

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