2024 – Fever Longing Still – Letter from Paul
FEVER PK LETTER
‘My love is as a fever longing still
for that which longer nurseth the disease’*
For close to fifty years I’ve written mostly love songs. I never know what I’m doing until I’m in the middle of it but, looking back, it seems this record is an attempt to present all those kinds of love songs into one forty minute album. Urgent love, patient love, happy love, sad love, deluded love, clear-eyed love, complicated love, the beginning of love, the end of love; love gone wrong, love pretty right, love of clan, love between parents and children, love of oblivion, love of pain, love of revenge.
My songs come slowly, one by one. Each time I write a song it feels like I’m starting again. Each new one seems to have no relation to the one before.
I’ve been playing with my band – or variants of it – for many years. With Bill (bass) and Dan (guitar), for over twenty. With Pete (drums), over thirty. Ash (guitar)and Cameron (keyboards), with whom I started playing seventeen years ago, are the ‘newbies’. Combined, they are a living, breathing encyclopedia of 20th and 21st century music. I think of them as explorers, looking to make each song its own new world.
We are anti-coherence, anti-pattern, anti-order! Our philosophy’s eclectic! We always want to make each song as different as possible to the last. We know that our own limitations and natural bents will make the record ‘coherent’ without us even trying. This set of songs gives my boon companions full range to lay out their palettes, get messy and paint!
I always knew Houndstooth Dress would be the first song. Where else could it go? It’s a party starter. And I always knew Going To The River With Dad would be the last. The trick, in other words the fun part, was how to navigate from first to last, stopping, like Odysseus, at different islands and countries and having extreme adventures along the way.
Play this record loud or soft, at a party or for the quiet listening two. Play your favourite bits or play it all straight through. Play it with the ones you love true.
*From Sonnet 147 by William Shakespeare.
FEVER TRACK BY TRACK
HOUNSDTOOTH DRESS: There have been many songs over the years based on accessories and apparel – Raspberry Beret, Blue Jean Baby, These Boots Are Made for Walking, Famous Blue Raincoat, Leopard Skin Pillbox Hat, Dirty Jeans, Short Skirt/Long Jacket and a whole lot more. My old song Winter Coat belongs to this venerable genre. I think of Houndstooth Dress as the latest in this long line. I wrote it just before going into the studio so threw it to the band without having had a chance to rehearse. Commandeered the piano and taught it to them on the go. Only two chords. In a minor key but not a minor feeling. We got it on the first take as you can hear from the chat at the start.
LOVE HAS MADE A FOOL OF ME: Bettye Lavette, Baby Dee and Jerry Lee Lewis have all had songs with similar titles to this one. It’s an honour to add this mongrel to that pot. The opening line from Joan Baez’s version of the 17th century Scottish folk song Mary Hamilton snuck in disguised on the bridge. Love Bill’s bass on this.
TAUGHT BY EXPERTS: An old song which I’ve recorded a few times over the years – once solo, once for the TV series Fireflies and once for the bluegrass record Smoke from 1999. I always had a hankering to record it with chiming electric guitars, a la The La’s, right in Ash and Dan’s wheelhouse. We cut it at Roundhead, Neil Finn’s studio in New Zealand. Cam had a very nice grand piano to play with. Another genre song you might say. Revenge!
HELLO MELANCHOLY, HELLO JOY: A song of opposites, a paradoxical love song, a series of couplets. John Keats says it all – ‘Ay, in the very temple of Delight veiled Melancholy has her sovereign shrine.’ It’s graced by the inimitable Bull sisters and further enhanced by Pete’s smacking back beat and Ross Irwin’s joyful horn arrangement. Ross himself takes the song out with some Storyville style trumpet.
NORTHERN RIVERS: Another song that starts with opposites. A song of praise both to a landscape and a person. A philosophical love song. Hold love lightly. Karl Wallinger from World Party died earlier this year and this one goes out to him and his glorious Ship Of Fools.
DOUBLE BUSINESS BOUND: We played at Mona Foma earlier this year and they offered us a day’s recording in their studio Frying Pan where we managed to snag this tune. Fittingly, it’s a kind of an out-of-the-frying-pan-into-the-fire song. A hymn to shadows. A leave-taking. A love-letter. The Trojan King Priam’s stealthy visit to Achilles near the end of The Iliad hovers above and below it. Pete and Bill nail the shuffle as only ‘old guys’ on a mission can do.
LET’S WORK IT OUT IN BED: The world is a better place for The Stylistics. Their song Break UpMake Up To lurks behind this one. New Zealand singer songwriter Reb Fountain helped us bring it home. It’s a duet all the way, from woe to go. (By the way, you may want to check out Reb’s extraordinary performance of her song Don’t You Know Who I Am.) Cam arranged the horns. Ash goes all Isley Brothers fuzz guitar on the fade.
ALL THOSE SMILING FACES: Thomas Hardy’s poem Heredity* is the beating heart of this song. Other poems joined the party. Dana Gioia’s Finding A Box Of Family Letters and Wislawa Szymborska’s Letters Of The Dead. Things got crowded just like a family BBQ. Still, I managed to get a few words in here and there. The band are awesome on this, serious, full of intent.
HARPOON TO THE HEART: Back to the fifties for this one, to the playful stylings and stretched-to-breaking-point metaphors of the weird and wonderful hillbilly music of that era. Dan’s double tracked guitar solo pays homage to the likes of Speedy West and Jimmy Bryant, Les and Mary Paul, Chet Atkins and others.
BACK TO THE FUTURE: In the Beatles song Things We Said Today, the narrator imagines a future looking back at the present happy day. Here, the days that held a happy future have passed. Is there a way back to that future? Can Kahlil Gibran’s archer help out with his cosmic arrow? Robert Burns thinks not and tells us so in the bridge, a fragment from his long poem Tam o’ Shanter.
‘Pleasures are like poppies spread
You seize the flower, the bloom is shed
Or like the snow falls on the river
A moment white – then gone forever’
Thanks, Robbie. And thanks, Alice Keath, for singing them old time words with me as only you can.
When the band first played this at rehearsal I thought of Lou Reed’s Coney Island Baby. (‘I want to play football for the coach’.) You can think of this song as emblematic of the album. A mosaic of many different shaped and coloured pieces.
EIGHT HOURS SLEEP: Billy Miller and I have written quite a few songs together over the years, including Firewood and Candles, Rising Moon and Don’t Let A Good Thing Go. He wrote the tune to this one and I found words to fit. Wendell Berry’s poem To Know The Dark** gave us a couple of lines. Shakespeare’s Macbeth, too.
I was listening a lot to the country music podcast Cocaine and Rhinestones before recording this, in particular the episodes on George Jones. George often uses a high soprano voice singing a wordless melody behind him, Walk Through This World With Me (the shorter version) being a prime example. After listening to this song over and over again one afternoon, I decided to call up my favourite high soprano, Jess Hitchcock. She came over to Billy’s house and sang her part in the middle of the lounge room while our dogs (Billy’s and mine) wrestled in the back yard.
GOING TO THE RIVER WITH DAD: Inspired by the opening essay of Noel Pearson’s book Mission. The end days and the early days are one. We’re a long way from Houndstooth Dress. We’re back in childhood, rubbing the sleep from our eyes. At least at the start of the song we are. By the end of the song we’re way past that young child. We’ve passed our parents even.
From Houndstooth to River we’ve taken the long way round. From the city to the country, from the pumping to the pastoral, from Saturday night to Sunday morning. They’re both happy songs but, in different ways. One thing they have in common, though, is a sense of anticipation. And anticipation, they say, is the greater part of happiness. Happiness, too, is associated with the key of C Major, our final key. Happiness and innocence. Some call C Major the ‘key of children’. I like that.
THE BAND:
Peter Luscombe: Drums and percussion
Bill McDonald: Bass
Dan Kelly: Electric guitars, mandolin and harmony vocals
Ashley Naylor: Electric guitars
Paul Kelly: Vocal and acoustic guitars, piano on Houndstooth Dress
Cameron Bruce: Keyboards and harmony vocals. Horn arrangement on
Let’s Work It Out In Bed.
Steve Schram: Recording and mixing, encouragement, adjudication
and ideas.
GUESTS:
Vika and Linda Bull: Harmony vocals on Love Has Made A Fool Of Me
and Hello Melancholy, Hello Joy.
Ross Irwin: Trumpet and horn arrangement on Hello Melancholy, Hello Joy.
Reb Fountain: Vocal on Let’s Work It Out In Bed.
Alice Keath: Harmony vocal on Back To The Future.
Bill Miller: Guitar and vocal, recording and mixing on Eight Hours Sleep.
Jess Hitchcock: High vocal on Eight Hours Sleep.
* HEREDITY – Thomas Hardy
I am the family face;
Flesh perishes, I live on,
Projecting trait and trace
Through time to times anon,
And leaping from place to place
Over oblivion.
The years-heired feature that can
In curve and voice and eye
Despise the human span
Of durance — that is I;
The eternal thing in man,
That heeds no call to die
** TO KNOW THE DARK – Wendell Berry
To go in the dark with a light is to know the light.
To know the dark, go dark. Go without sight,
and find that the dark, too, blooms and sings,
and is traveled by dark feet and dark wings.