Songfacts®:

• Nick Cave (From The Sun March 7, 2008): "'Today's Lesson' came about because I wanted to write a lyrically chaotic song concerning the received masculine erotic desire on women."
• Nick Cave (From Mojo magazine April 2008): "It came from a series of stories - from my wife, Susie, and from Marilyn Monroe. (Marilyn) talked about noticing that, once she'd started to mature, she made people happy - which was actually the way that Susie put it. It's always felt that Marilyn died of other things than a simple drug overdose, that it was the extent of the male attention, which a human can't really take without something bad happening. You only have to look at certain women in the media these days, the way they're pursued. It's sickening."
• Nick Cave elaborated to Q magazine June 2008 as to how his wife Susie, at the age of 12, realized she was sexually potent when lorry drivers started parping their horns at her. He explained: "The song's about the pleasure and pain she took in that. There's a great French film about a fat girl who has a beautiful sister. They share a room and the beauty is always bringing men back and having lots of sex. Then one day the beauty and her mother are stabbed and beaten to death by a psychopath and the fat one is dragged into the woods. When the police find her there's a little smile on her face. It's perverse in the extreme. But I'm interested in what male attention and libido does to women."
• Nick Cave (From lastbroadcast.co.uk interview): "The song 'Today's Lesson' has a fairytale quality. But it's an evil fairytale. It's an evil song. The male attention in that song has crossed a kind of line and it's evil. It's malign and destructive but the song kind of bops along, you know. There's a fair amount of, sometimes intentional, sometimes unintentional kind of counterpoint that's being used between the music being a certain way and the lyrics being another way." >>

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