Songfacts®:

• This is the title track of Skeleton Tree, an album recorded over several sessions from late 2014 to early 2016. On July 14, 2015, Cave's 15-year-old son, Arthur, fell from a cliff near the family's Brighton home and died from his injuries. This exploration of grief, written by Cave after the tragedy, evokes a stark image of a tree with no leaves in the pale light of dawn.
  
  Sunday morning, skeleton tree
  Well, nothing is for free
  
  The price of Cave's love for his son is heartbreak. Inside he feels bare, like a skeleton tree, as he steps out again into the waking world. The sorrow will remain with him for the rest of his life, which he accepts in the closing lines.
  
  And it's alright now
  And it's alright now
  And it's alright now
• "Skeleton Tree" was the first lyric Nick Cave wrote after losing Arthur. He sent a voice recording to his longtime collaborator, Warren Ellis, around mid-September 2015. "It was the first time he tried to sing and he'd written chords and a melody," Ellis recalled to Uncut magazine.
  
  When Cave and company resumed the sessions at La Frette Studios in France in autumn 2015, they laid it down as per the demo. "We then tried the song in different ways," said Ellis, "but we couldn't make it work as a band - there was something about the broken and uncertain nature of the demo."
  
  Cave pulled up the demo track from the sessions and he sang over that instead. That's the version which ended up on the album.
• Skeleton Tree received rave reviews from music critics, with Flood Magazine naming it the best album of 2016 and both Uncut and Mojo ranking it third.
• Audiences lapped the record up as well. Skeleton Tree topped the album charts in several countries, including Australia, Belgium (Flanders), Denmark, Finland, Ireland, New Zealand, Norway and Portugal. It also became Cave's highest charting album in the United States, peaking at #27 on the Billboard 200.