Nick Cave will return to North America in spring 2027 with Conversations with Nick Cave, a tour that pairs unscreened audience questions with songs played at the piano. The dates begin April 9 in Vancouver and finish May 21 in New Orleans. General ticket sales begin November 13, with the Montreal show opening an hour later than the other dates.
Nick Cave knows what he will bring on his next North American tour: a piano and songs he can play at it. The audience will bring the questions. His announcement of Conversations with Nick Cave, made on November 6, says that those questions will be unvetted. It leaves a substantial part of every evening open until somebody in the room decides what to ask.
The format returns to a series Cave brought to North America in 2019. He remembered stepping onto stages in a state of mind he found difficult to describe and inviting strangers to ask him things directly. The idea felt unusually exposed to him when he started. Looking back in his announcement, he said that the nights had been healing for him and expressed the hope that the people who came had felt something similar.
Songs give the evenings another means of changing direction. Nick Cave will play material from his catalogue at the piano. A performance at that scale can sit close to a question that has just been answered, even if the subjects have little obvious connection. The format lets him take the room into a song and return to speech when it ends. The order of what happens around those performances can change with the audience.
Cave has continued a version of the exchange through The Red Hand Files, where readers send him questions and he publishes responses. He said the project had grown in reach over the eight years since the earlier American dates and that the conversations had widened in subject. The stage gives that practice a different rhythm. A reader can think before sending a question and a writer can think before publishing an answer. In a theatre, the person who asked is there to hear the response as it takes shape.
The first evening is April 9 at Vancouver’s Queen Elizabeth Theatre. Nick Cave plays Portland on April 12 and two nights in Seattle on April 13 and 14. San Francisco follows on April 16 and 17, then Los Angeles on April 20 and 21. Portland’s show is at Arlene Schnitzer Concert Hall. Seattle gets The 5th Avenue Theatre, and the San Francisco and Los Angeles dates are at their respective Orpheum theatres. The itinerary gives audiences in several cities more than one chance to attend, with consecutive dates in the same theatres.
The tour moves to Minneapolis on April 24, Chicago on April 26 and Detroit on April 27. Toronto gets two nights at Massey Hall, April 29 and 30, and Montreal follows on May 2 at Théâtre St-Denis. The route therefore crosses into Canada at two distinct points. Vancouver opens the tour on the west coast, while the Ontario and Quebec dates sit between the Midwest and the northeastern US shows.
Nick Cave plays Boston on May 4 and 5 and Brooklyn on May 7 and 8. The dates in Philadelphia and Washington are May 10 and 11. Asheville follows on May 13 and Atlanta on May 14, before the run moves to the Ryman Auditorium in Nashville on May 16 and the Orpheum Theatre in Memphis on May 18. The final evening is May 21 at the Saenger Theatre in New Orleans.
The presale was scheduled to open November 11 at 10 a.m. local time and run through November 12 at 10 p.m. General sales are scheduled to begin Friday, November 13, at 10 a.m. local time in most cities. Montreal is the exception in the announcement, with its general sale set for 11 a.m. local time. Both sets of times are given in each city’s own time zone.
Nick Cave also wrote that he would be returning to a different America from the one he had visited eight years before. He left the remark open, which fits an event whose questions will come from the room. The subjects he has addressed in The Red Hand Files offer a sense of how far a conversation can range, although the tour will have a different group of people putting questions to him each evening.
There is a practical reason to return to the piano in an event built this way. It gives Nick Cave an activity the whole room can share after a conversation that may have begun with one person’s question. In the announcement he treated the uncertainty with humour, imagining how much could go wrong once he was there to play and answer whatever came up. In Vancouver on April 9, the first audience will have its chance to decide how that exchange begins.
