Seventy 

Tell us a story …

So opens, and closes, the new Paul Kelly album: a request – a plea – like a child to their parents at the beginning of a trip, or a group around a campfire at the end of the day. Tell us a story … to pass the time, to soothe the spirit, to explain and entertain. And who else would we ask but the man who has been doing it for 45 years: telling our stories, sharing our myths, creating some more.

“Telling stories is deeply human and has been since we started to become humans,” says Kelly, Australia’s master storyteller. To reaffirm that, he traces this new collection to a couple of inspirations in Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales and Boccaccio’s Decameron, where disparate souls came together to swap yarns and keep the darkness away.

“A bit like what happens my family at Christmas time with people doing an item, singing a song, telling a joke, telling a story, saying a poem, that sort of thing,” Kelly says. “The third song on the record is a ghost story! That’s what you do when you’re sitting around the fire: you might tell a ghost story, a fairytale, a well-known story of a hero on a journey full of pitfalls. Or sing a funny song, which someone might follow with a heartbreaker.

“In a way [this framing] helps every song on the record find its place.”

Songs range from a tale of two old friends sticking fast as life nears its end, and a couple whose unbridled desire keeps finding new paths, to the thrill of breathing in apples on the morning breeze, and the fears of a knock at the door that signals the end. Sources tumble from Lord Of The Rings and the French Resistance to crows pecking at the limbs of Cicero, magpies circling a field like bankers, and one of the great poems of English literature.

Oh yes, and that ghost story, the return of a man we know well from his letter penned in a cell on the 21st of December, scared of a family adrift, and worried no one really knows how to make gravy. Nearly 30 years after we met Joe and Rita and Dan and the dollop of tomato sauce for sweetness and that extra tang, Kelly brings them back in Rita Wrote A Letter.

“I had a song in mind for a long time, I had the idea at least five years ago. I thought it would be great to write a song telling Rita’s side of the story, as the original song is just Joe talking and Rita gets a passing mention,” says Kelly, adding ruefully that he can’t really take credit for, or be blamed, for how these lives have played out. 

“I don’t have control of these things. I wanted to write a song from Rita’s point of view and most of the song is Joe still talking … he won’t shut up.”

But really, it was a gift he couldn’t resist once those first lines came to him and a fragment of New Orleans-ish melody his bandmate and nephew, Dan Kelly, concocted melded perfectly.

“When you are a writer and something like this comes along, you think this is fantastic, so I ran with it. And to me it’s a comedy, but we’ll find out how it lands. I always thought How To Make Gravy was a comedy too and it sort of landed in different ways.”

Comedy or tragedy or somewhere in between, two things link them all. The first is the presence of his familiar band, able to rock or leave nothing but space, remaking songs that might once appeared with an orchestra or one man and a guitar but always “opening up different ways of listening to them”. The second is how everything here is painted in the perspective of a man who turned 70 in January, still feels “in the middle of it”, but has taken the chance to step back and reassess.

Whether it is revisiting a most famous Christmas tale, wondering what kind of world might face his granddaughter (“Why did I want to write her in particular? Because of the name. Her name’s Ada Mae, how could you not write a song called Ada Mae?”) or recounting “the sleep of broken dreams … the taste of muddy streams” of a lover who might lose everything, Kelly is taking stock. After all, as he sings, “the body keeps the score”.

“If you call Seventy a taking stock record, all my different kinds of songwriting are represented in some way,” Kelly says. Not just his songwriting but his reading, his thinking, his aspirations as an artist as much as a man. And nowhere is this better seen than the grand splendour of Sailing To Byzantium, where WB Yeats’ poem is set to music, which Kelly first recorded with the student orchestra ANAM more than a decade ago, but now has the force and curve of a band arrangement.

“Sailing To Byzantium is a rage against annihilation, or a praise to the power of art to withstand the annihilation of time. He writes about the immortality of great art, that it will live on, and that’s how I feel about the poem,” he explains, reveling in its capacity to speak for and across time.

“It’s poem I have loved for a long time. I remember when I first read it I was, what the fuck is this poem about? I love the sound of it, the rhythm of it … ‘Fish, flesh, or fowl, commend all summer long’, ‘that is no country for old men’ - it’s such a memorable poem, a poem that’s full of riches that keep revealing themselves.”

Just like the songs of Paul Kelly and the tales we tell each other when we need them most. Tell us a story …