Paul Kelly Announces New Album Seventy Out November 7 on COOKING VINYL

Seventy Tracklist

1. Tell Us A Story: Part One

2. Don't Give Up On Me (feat. Meg Washington)

3. Rita Wrote A Letter

4. The Body Keeps The Score

5. I Keep On Coming Back For More

6. Take It Handy

7. Happy Birthday, Ada Mae

8. The Magpies

9. Made For Me (feat. Rebecca Barnard)

10. Sailing To Byzantium

11. My Body Felt No Pain

12. I’m Not Afraid Of The Dark

13. Tell Us A Story: Part Two

At seventy, Paul Kelly isn’t looking back — he’s taking stock. Still writing with the curiosity and vitality of someone fully “in the middle of it,” he returns with Seventy, out November 7, on EMI, a deeply personal album framed by a timeless request: Tell us a story. 

Long hailed as one of Australia’s greatest songwriters, Paul Kelly has spent over four decades capturing the beauty, humor, and heartbreak of ordinary lives. On Seventy, he leans into that role with renewed purpose, drawing on classic storytelling traditions — from The Canterbury Tales to The Decameron — where shared tales offer comfort, meaning, and light in the dark. The album plays like a campfire circle or family gathering, each song its own tale: a ghost story, a love song, a joke, a lament. From the scent of apples on a breeze to the dread of a knock at the door, Kelly’s songs feel intimate and mythic all at once, with references spanning Yeats, The Lord of the Rings, Cicero, the French Resistance, and circling magpies.

The album's first single, “Rita Wrote A Letter,” released today alongside a beautiful video featuring iconic Australian actress Justine Clarke, is directed by acclaimed Australian filmmaker Imogen McCluskey and produced by Dollhouse Pictures. A follow-up to his 1996 classic “How to Make Gravy” - a song so beloved and iconic in Australia it has inspired an unofficial national holiday, “Gravy Day” (December 21) - the track arrives nearly thirty years after we first met Dan, Joe and Rita, Kelly, and brings them back with a ghost story that's both tender and darkly comic. Told from Rita and Joe’s point of view, the song revisits familiar characters with wit, heart, and unexpected turns — a reminder that Kelly’s characters, like his songs, often take on lives of their own. “Kelly is interested in the things that spill over the frame of a song, in the way love tends to spread its influence beyond the lovers” writes The Guardian. Watch the official music video below, and find the lyrics here.