2024 – Paul Kelly Is Still Learning On The Job – by Bernard Zuel

IN A PLOT PROMISE to rival any being offered by the streaming services, by the end of this conversation, Paul Kelly and I will be trading quotations from a play where a (fake) lawyer, a moneylender and a shopkeeper trade in debts, honour and attempts to suborn logic or love. Action! Drama!

It’s an old-fashioned set of notions, bound by traditions and habits, supposedly fixed in our laws and behaviours. And yet – sometimes subtly, sometimes in a rush – they are always changing, mutating, adapting, and renewing. Something like songwriting. Something like the way across the dozen songs on his new album, the oft-sensual and regularly pop-filled Fever Longing Still, Paul Kelly dips into his (many) pasts and comes up feeling familiar, and yet not exactly.

Such thoughts are prompted as Kelly peers over my shoulder to the record and CD shelves and cracks a smile of tolerance as much as amusement at my inability or unwillingness to quit this habit. So is he still a purchaser of music?

“Occasionally,” he concedes. “Probably more vinyl now. Box sets with liner notes and things like that.”

One of the things people like me love about box sets is often you can trace the development of a song through the years, through various iterations of arrangement and lyrics, sometimes new melodies and tempos, occasionally production choices that speak of their time or stand apart from it. In one way it supports the idea, that songs never die, that songs never finish, because there is always a different time, a different line, the new way to resurrect it.

Given there are some songs that go back years, and some songs that sound like they might have existed decades ago, on Fever Longing Still, is that how he feels about songs: that they a living thing?

“Very much so. I feel that about my songs: they change in how I sing them over the years; there are different ways you can record them. Some songs, the recordings I feel are fixed and I wouldn’t go back and re-record them, but I know they end up changing through performance. But there are other songs that are more, what would you say, malleable: you can do different versions of them.

“I’m often in the habit of revisiting songs of mine and doing them in different ways, and there are songs that we have tried over the years [in the studio] that I feel we haven’t quite got them, so we’ll go back and revisit. There are a couple of songs on this record where that happened.”

What was it about these songs, which probably were 90 or 95 per cent right, but couldn’t build a bridge to completion?  How did he identify what wasn’t right, or is it only obvious years later when a new approach is taken?

“The hardest song on this record for us was All Those Smiling Faces: we did a version and thought it’s not quite right. The lyrical structure in the verses, I knew that was all right, but there was something musical that wasn’t working,” says Kelly. “We realised later that was because there were these long gaps between the lines: it’s a line, and then there’d be a gap, you’d say another line, and there was a gap. That works for a while, but when there are five verses, by the third or fourth verse I felt like I can’t just keep going with this structure. 

“But we kept on trying to make it more interesting by putting different things in the gaps between lines and then we realised, it only started working when we started chopping it up.”

Sounds brutal.

“I never feel like I’m making a record until you start cutting pieces up,” he grins. “In the old days it was like, cutting tape, and then it feels like, ah, we’re making a record, we are chopping pieces out. Once we started chopping things out of Smiling Faces we sped up the narrative and it all worked but it’s funny, it took us a long time to realise that and it was pretty much staring us in the face.”

How does someone who has been writing songs for nigh on 50 years, and recording for more than 40, not see that? How does a songwriter of his abilities and musicians of such ability as those in his band – the likes of Bill McDonald, Dan Kelly, Ash Naylor, Peter Luscombe and Ash Naylor on this track – especially given their years working together, not see something so obvious?

“You know, I’ve got no idea. It’s like every record I make and I proof read the cover and the cover art, and other people proof read it and look at it, and inevitably there is a mistake when it comes out,” says Kelly. “When you are looking at something for so long, sometimes you just don’t see it properly. So we were staring at that song too long that we couldn’t get the right distance on it. Again, it came from John O’Donnell [ex head of EMI] who I might send a song to because I value his thoughts. He really liked the song, he said I think it’s the single, but I think you need to play it faster.

“He was sort of right. He obviously sensed it wasn’t quite right: it was a song that started out sounding great for the first couple of minutes and then it just got old. That’s obviously what he was picking up on, and thought a tempo change would be right. I knew the tempo was right but that gave us a little spark to think, okay let’s get the razor out.”

Is it proof that no one ever really knows anything? That there is never going to be a point where he could say, yep, I’ve nailed this songwriting thing, I can come in tomorrow and this is all under control?

“No, it never feels like that,” Kelly says adamantly. “There are a couple of things to say about. In terms of writing songs, I don’t really know what I’m doing until I’m in the middle of it. Going into the studio is always experimental: take the songs to the band and none of us know how they are going to turn out. We would have rehearsed them beforehand and got a bit of a roadmap, but sometimes it changes in the studio. So, yeah, I think if you knew what you were doing right from the start there would be not much life in either the writing or the recording.”

Discovery is an ongoing thing?

“There is always a part of a song that takes you by surprise, it’s the part that comes at you sideways that makes a song or gives a song life. And that also happens with the recording,” he says. “The wider point is why I like collaboration, because you get ideas coming from more than one person. From outside the band as well as inside the band. 

“That’s important to have, for me anyway. I need collaboration, I need other people.”

  … Not just other people, but other sources. Other wells to draw from. As we’ll see in part two of this interview tomorrow where Paul Kelly also reveals how this late in his career he encountered a revolution in his work. “Finding a new way to write songs felt like a gift.”

PART II

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.”