2024 – Apple News – “Fever Longing Still” track by track by Rod Yates

TRACK BY TRACK

‘Shakespeare Creeps Into a Lot of My Songs’: Paul Kelly Runs Hot on ‘Fever Longing Still’

This release is the singer-songwriter’s 29th album. “I see the record as a showcase for the band as much as anything.”

Paul Kelly didn’t know his 29th studio album would be about love until he’d almost finished making it. “We recorded the album over the past three years,” the singer-songwriter told Apple Music. “When I have six or eight songs, I get the band together and we go into the studio for a week or two to do them. They’re all quite different to each other. So, I wait until I’ve got enough songs and see which particular group of songs would work together.”

On this occasion, they were the ones “about different kinds of love.” Fittingly, Kelly took the album’s title from Shakespeare’s Sonnet 147, which he explains is “about the ups and downs of love.” The opening line is ‘My love is as a fever, longing still for that which no longer nurseth the disease.’ Shakespeare creeps into a lot of my songs here and there, lines and ideas. He’s my favorite writer.”

Despite its singular lyrical theme, musically Fever Longing Still is a diverse affair, from the raw joy of “Houndstooth Dress” to the dreamlike quality of “Going to the River with Dad”; from the weariness of “Double Business Bound” to the jangly pop of “Taught by Experts,” a bluegrass rendition of which features on Kelly’s 1992 album with Uncle Bill, Smoke. “I see the record as a showcase for the band as much as anything,” he remarked. “It takes the listener on a journey to quite a few different places.” Here, Kelly walks Apple Music through that journey, track by track.

“Houndstooth Dress”

“This song was taught to the band in the studio, and that’s what you hear on the record. I’m showing it to them, and they just jump on. We thought, ‘Should we edit the start and tighten the song up?’ But then I thought this would be a really great way to start the record, showing the band the song, how it starts off slow, and then we finally find the right groove for it and off we go. It felt like the perfect opener.”

“Love Has Made a Fool of Me”

“I think we’ve all had that feeling of relationships gone wrong, or maybe a series of failed love affairs. That’s where that song is coming from. I’ve had the title for a long time. I wrote it down and thought, ‘That would make a great song title.’ And finally, I got ’round to it.”

“Taught by Experts”

“For some reason, I hadn’t got around to recording it with an electric band. I always knew there was a good, full-band, chiming-guitar version of that song. There’s a great song by The La’s called ‘There She Goes,’ so that was in our minds when we recorded. It’s a revenge song, I guess—a love revenge song.”

“Hello Melancholy, Hello Joy”

“That was one of those songs I took to the band, and I didn’t know what it was, and the band made it into something I couldn’t have imagined. That’s really the fun part of that song for me. I asked Roscoe Irwin from The Cat Empire to make a horn arrangement, so that took it to another place. The lyrics are just a series of opposites, which is implied in the title. A song full of paradoxes, I guess.”

“Northern Rivers”

“It’s inspired by a particular person, but as soon as I start writing a song, it becomes fiction. So, I’m not really trying to write autobiography or stick to the facts. I’ve had the line ‘The more I know her, the less I do’ for a long time. I’ve just been waiting for it to find its place in a song.”

“Double Business Bound”

“I don’t really know what the song’s about. Kenneth Branagh did a movie called Belfast, which is about him growing up, and there’s a scene with him and his grandfather, and his grandfather hasn’t got long to live. And his grandfather says, ‘I’m going nowhere. You won’t find me.’ And I thought, ‘That’s a beautiful line,’ and that’s the first line of the song. And the rest of it is imagining someone on some kind of secret mission.”

“Let’s Work It Out in Bed”

“We did that song at Neil Finn’s studio, Roundhead. We went to New Zealand for a week and recorded there. I always thought that song should be a genuine duet of two people singing together. I just needed to find the right voice. And Reb Fountain was the right voice. I don’t think there’s too much subtext in this song. I think it’s pretty on the surface.”

“All Those Smiling Faces”

“The last verse of the song is pretty much [Thomas Hardy’s poem] Heredity paraphrased. I guess the biggest contribution is from this poem called Finding a Box of Family Letters by an American poet called Dana Gioia. I was halfway through writing this, and a couple of lines from his poem jumped into the song: ‘Get on the floor and dance, you don’t have forever.’ And he also had a line in his poem about, just out of the frame a band is playing. So, that came into the song. At that point, I realized it’s not just a little quote—I need to go and get his permission if I’m going to write these lines.”

“Harpoon to the Heart”

“I guess it’s a song of unrequited love where the narrator has this strong feeling for someone who hardly knows they exist. I like songs that mix sadness and happiness.”

“Back to the Future”

“When young lovers are first together and everything’s rosy, they start talking about the future, and they make plans, and there’s a whole world of life that they can both see. But then, sometimes, people break up. In this case, the couple broke up, and the narrator of the song is looking at that future and thinking, ‘I wonder if we could get back to that future.’ It’s a play on words.”

“Eight Hours Sleep”

“There’s a Bic Runga song called ‘Get Some Sleep.’ Beautiful song. So, that in some ways [inspired] this song. I often have periods of insomnia. I’d written down the idea for a song called ‘Eight Hours Sleep’; eight hours sleep is a beautiful, unattainable goal. And then, I was at my friend Billy Miller’s place, and he had a piece of music which he played me. I said, ‘This is a beautiful melody. Can I try and put some words to it?’ So, that’s how that song started. The music is all Billy’s, and the words are mine. A little Shakespeare crept into that song as well—Shakespeare writes about the great healing effects of sleep in Macbeth after Macbeth has just committed the murder. So, there’s a few little influences in that song.”

“Going to the River with Dad”

“The inspiration came from an essay written by Noel Pearson, which is the foreword to this book of essays called Mission. At the start and the end of the essay, he writes about his father and about going fishing with his father. So, that contributed to the song. And my memories also of doing things—I didn’t go fishing with my father, but I remember getting up early to go and play football, that kind of thing of getting up before the rest of the house is up, and you’re the special one ’cause you’re going out with Dad. I love singing it, and I know it’s going to be a song I sing till the day I die.”