The Red Hand Files: Nick Cave Answers Strangers, Unfiltered

The Red Hand Files is a website where you can ask Nick Cave anything and he might just answer, in public, at length, with nobody standing between the question and the response. No journalist framing it. No publicist smoothing it. A stranger asks about their dead brother, or about a chord change, or about whether he likes cheese, and the answer arrives as a small essay.

It is the most unlikely thing on the internet: a celebrity website that is actually about the correspondence.

What is The Red Hand Files?

Cave started it in 2018, essentially as an experiment in removing the interviewer. The pitch on the site is direct: you can ask him anything, there will be no moderator, and he will attempt to answer honestly. Then he did exactly that, and has kept doing it for years.

The questions arrive by the thousand. He answers a handful. What makes the archive extraordinary is the range of what he takes seriously. Someone asks how to survive the death of a child, and the answer is written by a man who has survived the death of two, without a shred of the usual evasion. Someone else asks what he thinks about a particular animal, and that gets an answer too, delivered with the same care.

The form is unusual and it matters. Each entry opens with the question and the asker’s first name and city, then Cave’s reply. Sometimes he answers several questions at once, spotting the shared thread between them. Sometimes the answer is two sentences. Sometimes it is a thousand words about a song he wrote thirty years ago and what he now thinks it was really about.

There is also a strain of genuine comedy in it. People ask deliberately ridiculous questions, and rather than ignore them, he tends to take them literally and follow them somewhere unexpected. The result is an archive that swings from devastating to very funny and back within two entries.

What it has quietly become is one of the better bodies of writing about grief, creativity and belief that exists in public, assembled by accident, one stranger’s question at a time.

What can you do with The Red Hand Files?

• Read the archive from anywhere. Every issue is numbered and stays online. Start at the most recent, start at number one, or just scroll and stop where a question catches you.
• Ask a question yourself. There is a form. No account, no vetting, no proof you are a fan. Most questions are never answered, and people send them anyway.
• Search for a theme. Grief, faith, addiction, forgiveness, writer’s block, the meaning of a specific lyric. The same subjects recur, answered differently each time.
• Read the songwriting answers. Some of the most concrete writing available on how songs actually get made, from someone with no interest in mystifying the process.
• Subscribe by email. New answers land in your inbox when they are published. No schedule, which is part of the appeal.
• Send a single issue to someone. Each entry has its own URL, which makes it easy to send exactly the right one to the person who needs it.

Tips to get the most out of it

Do not binge it. This is the main advice. The entries are short enough to read twenty in a row, and doing so flattens them. One or two at a time, with a gap, is how they land.

Start with a search rather than the archive. Pick a subject you actually care about and search for it. The archive read chronologically is fine, but the site is far better when the entry finds you at the moment it applies.

Read the question carefully. The answers are often responses to something implied rather than stated, and half the craft is in what Cave noticed that the asker did not say outright.

Don’t skip the silly ones. The absurd questions are not filler. They are frequently where the writing is loosest and funniest, and occasionally where it turns serious without warning.

Ask something real if you ask at all. The answered questions tend to be the ones with a genuine problem underneath. Nobody knows the selection criteria, but the pattern is not subtle.

Bookmark specific issues. Some entries are the sort of thing you want to be able to find again in two years. The numbering makes that easy, and searching for a half-remembered phrase later does not.

If you like The Red Hand Files, also try…

• PostSecret: strangers confessing anonymously on postcards, the same raw honesty from the other direction.
• Arts & Letters Daily: a daily feed of essays for when you want long-form thinking without the algorithm.
• The Nicest Place on the Internet: a much simpler act of kindness from strangers.
• Existential Comics: philosophy’s big questions handled with jokes instead of essays.

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