IT WAS NOT EXACTLY A CRI-DE-COEUR but it did have the echo of it when Paul Kelly – almost always referred to as Australia’s premier songwriter, in the same way one of the subjects of his songs, Shane Warne, was automatically preceded by the words Australia’s greatest spin bowler – ended the first part of this interview declaring “I need collaboration. I need people”.
And as he looks toward his biggest Australian tour yet, in stadiums across the country next August and September, backed by musicians who have been around him for decades, supported by musicians a generation or two younger, you wouldn’t argue with him.
But beyond collaboration, Kelly has always sought to draw from many wells in his quest to do better work, do different work, be more. Sought to incorporate other artistic work, be it visual art, poetry and novels, as material to feed into his imagination and regenerate his thinking. Is that how he lives, replenishing his creativity from these other sources?
“Yeah. I love to read, it is sort of my default setting,” Kelly says. “Often I should devote, clear some time aside, to write songs, but I think, ah I’m just going to go to the back of the house, to my favourite nook in the house, and read. But reading’s also how I make discoveries. I read all kinds of things: I read poetry, I read history, I listen to quite a few different history podcasts, I listen to music. I’m curious.
“I don’t feel very deeply knowledgeable about a lot of things, but I try to follow my nose and things that interest me. It’s always been like that and fed into my songwriting.”
If those things have long been part of the Kelly plan, if the man who turns 70 mid January, seemed to have locked himself into a (very successful) path, a well honed pattern, years ago, there may be a shock for you. There certainly was for him.
“There was one big shift about 10 years ago that happened to me when I first started putting poems to music. Other people’s poems to music,” Kelly explains. “That didn’t happen through my intention but I was invited to take part writing some music for a youth classical orchestra collaboration with a classical composer, putting poems to music. That set me on that path; up until then I thought I can’t write a song with the words first, that would be too restrictive, run on too rigid a rail. But I was completely wrong.
“I found that I could put poems to music and the music was free, it could do anything. That’s when I moved on to putting sonnets to music. Ever since then poems have played a bigger role in my records. My record called Nature, almost half the record was songs by other people, as well as my own songs. And then it’s also influenced more lines of poetry to creep into mine. That’s always been there, coming up through folk music which is often borrowed, but I think it has increased in the last 10 years and even now, some songs I write the words first.”
That is no small thing for a songwriter, not least this far into his career, to effectively reverse the way he had written songs. How does it feel to throw out the process?
“It felt … it was a big thrill for me when I realised I can start with the words first. Like you said I’ve been writing songs for over 40 years, and I thought I had a main method: play some chords on the guitar or the piano, see if I can get a nice melody, sometimes with words attached, mostly just sounds. I used to make up melodies and sounds, gibberish, and then get the words to fit.
“Writing songs was getting words to fit those sounds and often the song itself felt like a slight fall from grace, from that thing, that sound that I’d had in my head, but I would push on until I got a song. All writers have their habits, and as I’ve said before I’m a reasonably limited musician so I had to have these habits, and finding a new way to write songs felt like a gift.”
Even if you didn’t know that this had happened in his songwriting, it does fit in with a sense of Kelly, certainly in the past 25 years, being a restless seeker of inspiration and thought. It’s the difference between someone who can write and someone who is inspired to write, for whom writing is an all-encompassing thing – that means not just all the time but pulling in everything around him.
Is that because he is worried about getting stuck or is it because that is how his mind operates?
“I think being a songwriter, the main state of being is being stuck. Songwriting is mostly periods of boredom: I bore myself until I get surprised. But it’s my job,” he says. “When I fill in a form, customs form or whatever, and it asks ‘what’s your job?’ I’m a songwriter. So I treat it like a job and I think a lot of jobs, especially these days, don’t stay the same. You have to upskill, you have to keep learning new things about your job or your job may disappear and you have to learn a new job. That’s part of being a worker.”
Unlike certain managers, certain public-facing business types who know that sounding like you’re doing the right thing – Equal opportunity! Upskilling! Respectful workplace! – might be all the work you need to do, Kelly took the upskilling seriously.
“In 2014 I took most of the year off from performing and I took piano lessons, from a really, really good piano player who is really well-versed in New Orleans-style piano. I practised a couple of hours most days, made great progress – most of it is forgotten now – but for me that was taking a course, as part of my job, to stay up with my job,” he says. “And that definitely fed into the next record, which was Life Is Fine. Songs like My Man’s Got A Cold, that was straight out of my piano lessons. Those piano lessons gave me some songs and it’s like I’ll do anything I can to try and find new ways to write songs.”
“I’ve always learnt other people’s songs, I think that’s part of my job too, figure out how it works. You think you might know someone else’s song but once you actually break it down to the chords and the arrangement and try to sing it, you make these discoveries that can surprise you.
“I spent two weeks learning Stardust, in Covid [times]. It’s probably my all-time favourite song and there are lots of these fancy chords in there that I don’t normally play,” he laughs. “I got onto YouTube and chord charts, I studied Hoagey Carmichael’s, one of his very early, versions, and I worked on playing that song and singing at the same time. It would have been two weeks, and it was such fun.
“And now, I can play Stardust. If ever I’m at a party and someone says, ‘anyone here play Stardust?’, I’ll be the man. Hasn’t happened yet, but I’m ready.”
It’s not his only party trick.
“If anyone says ‘can anyone recite To Be Or Not To Be?’, I’m ready.”
In a pathetic attempt to keep up with someone who has been putting Shakespeare’s sonnets to song, dredged from scattered memories of Bankstown Theatrical Society’s drama classes, I pitch up “the quality of mercy is not strained, it droppeth as the gentle rain from heaven/Upon the place beneath/It is twice blest/It blesseth him that gives and him that takes”, before very quickly running out of Merchant Of Venice lines. But Kelly is far better stocked.
“'T is mightiest in the mightiest; it becomes/The throned monarch better than his crown,” he responds. “His sceptre shows the force of temporal power/The attribute to awe and majesty/Wherein doth sit the dread and fear of kings.
“There are a few more lines, yeah,” he adds, before showing me the quality of his mercy and stopping before I am shamed beyond redemption.
That year spent taking piano lessons, those weeks spent closely examining Stardust, like being able to drop into The Merchant Of Venice, is the kind of stuff that just sits within and will turn up in a conversation, at a party, or during a songwriting session. Everything he took in becomes part of Paul Kelly’s source material.
“I think the best way to write is to worship,” he says. “You can’t be a prose writer unless you read a lot of novels or non-fiction; you can’t be a great poet, unless you read a lot of poetry; you can’t write songs unless you listen to a lot of other songs and figure them out. I think it’s pretty obvious you’ve got to get them into your body, into your bones, your muscles.
“People talk about muscle memory, and it is like athletes: you’ve got to do this thing over and over again and take it in so you do have though songs or those poems in there so that occasionally something comes out that might land in a song. That does happen.”
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Paul Kelly (with Jason Isbell And The 400 Unit and Fanny Lumsden; Reb Fountain) play:
RAC Arena, Perth – August 26
Brisbane Entertainment Centre – August 29
Qudos Bank Arena, Sydney – August 30
MyState Bank Arena, Hobart – September 2
Adelaide Entertainment Centre – September 4
Rod Laver Arena, Melbourne – September 6
Christchurch Town Hall – September 9
Michael Fowler Centre, Wellington – September 10
Auckland Town Hall – September 12
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