Songfacts®:

• In "Fifteen Feet Of Pure White Snow," Nick Cave looks desperately for God and finds only coldness and desolation. Still he cries out, "Oh my Lord, Oh my Lord."
  
  The deity Cave longs for is explicitly the Christian God, as he mentions various Biblical characters by name. "Where is Mona? She's long gone. Where is Mary?" Mona is derived from the Latin "Madonna," which is the Roman Catholic name used for Mary, the mother of Jesus. "Where is Michael? Where is Mark? Where is Matthew? Now it's getting dark? Where is John?" Michael is a warrior archangel that's mentioned multiple times in the Bible and that holds a prominent place in both Jewish and Christian belief systems. Mark, Matthew, and John are three of the four Evangelists credited as authors of the Gospel accounts of Jesus' life (the one Gospel author missing from the lyrics is Luke).
  
  As Cave longs desperately for a sign of God's existence, he tries to connect with anybody who might listen (his neighbor is specifically mentioned) but finds that everyone secretly despises and distrusts each other. His yearning is answered only with silence as he's buried beneath 15 feet of snow, and life seems so cheap that he can't even think of "anything worth stealing."
  
  The snow's "pure whiteness" symbolizes purity – a purity that seems only suffocating and coldly indifferent in the dark night of the soul that Cave experiences in this song.
• "Fifteen Feet of Pure White Snow" appears on No More Shall We Part, the 11th studio album by Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds. It was the second of three singles released off the recording.
• The video for the song shows the band playing in an abandoned building of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Kazakhstan (a Communist country from 1936 to 1991). The people dancing in the video include notable musicians and actors such as Jarvis Cocker of Pulp; Jason Donovan, whose debut album, Ten Good Reasons, was the best-selling UK album of 1989; and Noah Taylor, who played Locke in Game of Thrones and Darby Sabini in Peaky Blinders.
• Following Cave's personal journey, this song is interesting when contrasted with his later material, in which he found faith in God, as noted in songs such as "Frogs" and "Joy."