Songfacts®:

• Nick Cave's fellow Aussie Kylie Minogue duets with him on "Where The Wild Roses Grow," the tale of a man courting a woman and killing her while they're out together - not a song you would typically hear from Kylie.
  
  Thanks to Minogue's star power, the song became Nick Cave's biggest hit, reaching #2 in Australia and the Top 20 in the United Kingdom, Germany and New Zealand. It also topped the charts in Croatia and Israel.
• "Where The Wild Roses Grow" won the 1996 ARIA Award for Song Of The Year. The ARIAs are the most prestigious Australian music awards. Cave was nominated the previous year for "Do You Love Me?" and the following year for "Into My Arms" but didn't win either. Minogue won the award in 2002 for a very different song: "Can't Get You Out Of My Head."
• This was inspired by the traditional number "The Willow Garden," another song wherein the protagonist murders a beautiful young girl down by a river.
• Cave explained to Q magazine June 2008 about his collaboration with Kylie Minogue: "I wrote Where The Wild Roses Grow because I wanted to see if I could get her to fit my world. I sent a sinister demo with (former Bad Seeds guitarist) Blixa Bargeld singing her part and her management went into meltdown. They told her it was madness. But she heard it and said yes."
• As the album title suggests, the Murder Ballads album is a collection of narrative songs that each tells the tale of a murder.
• Nick Cave and Kylie appeared live on various music shows performing the song and also made a video together. The disparate pair bonded during their time promoting the single and became friends. "It was a miracle that she agreed to do that song," Cave recalled to The Daily Telegraph in 2014. "I think her management wasn't that happy about it – I mean we were just a bunch of junkies sitting in the studio, and she walked in full of life and love and goodwill."
  
  "It was so different to have somebody like that around for a few months, and we had this hit, we became defined by Kylie and Kylie's presence – so that little slice of life is Kylie's, in a way," he added. "We really liked each other."