HE SHAKES HIS HEAD at the idea, but there’s no doubt about it: Paul Kelly is a national treasure. Born and raised in Adelaide – where there’s now a laneway named in his honour – since the ’70s, Kelly has been charming audiences from Melbourne to Memphis with his preternatural ability to paint a picture through song.
His sonic portraits of Australia are sometimes gritty, often romantic and always relatable; they tell the stories of regular people, uniting us in ways few artists have been capable of. Appointed an Officer of the Order of Australia in 2017 for distinguished service to the performing arts and the promotion of national identity, Kelly has recorded nearly 40 albums, led multiple bands and collaborated with artists from Archie Roach to Neil Finn and Ziggy Ramo. Meanwhile, tracks like ‘Dumb Things’, ‘To Her Door’ and ‘How to Make Gravy’ have become unofficial Australian anthems – ‘Gravy’, which tells the now-iconic story of a prisoner longing to be with his family at Christmas, is currently being made into a feature film. Starring Daniel Henshall, Brenton Thwaites and Damon Herriman, the film will also feature a cameo from today’s interviewer, collaborator and good friend of Kelly’s, Aussie hip-hop luminary and proud Yorta Yorta man Adam Briggs.
If anyone was going to coax a good yarn out of Kelly, it would be Briggs. Though they come from different generations and musical genres, they share a strong bond; their desire to create social change through music has seen them share many a stage, including at the Now & Forever concert that Briggs put on in support of the Indigenous Voice to Parliament late last year, when the two performed a politically charged hip-hop-inspired rendition of ‘Dumb Things’.
In conversation, the musicians are just as engaging as they are when performing. Recently, they got together at Kelly’s house in Melbourne to chat about his new album, Fever Longing Still, his songwriting process and, ahead of Kelly’s 70th birthday in January, whether slowing down is something the man who’s been called Australia’s “poet laureate” thinks about. Briggs, take it away.
Adam Briggs: You just played some shows in the States. Does your set list change when you’re over there, compared to here? Or do you stick to your guns?
Paul Kelly: It sort of changes from tour to tour, here and there. But it’s probably more free-ranging over there. When I play concerts here, I always have to play ‘To Her Door’. There’s less pressure to play it over there.
AB: You mean, they’re not screaming at you to play ‘To Her Door’? Sometimes, when people do that to me, I’m like, “Fuck, I don’t even remember that song”.
PK: They do [laughs]. But we obviously don’t play there as much as here. And that’s the thing: you gotta keep the song in your head, in your body and under your fingers, so you can play it at a moment’s notice . . . I could play 150 of my songs, I reckon, if you asked me.
AB: Where were you when you wrote ‘To Her Door’?
PK: I was living in Sydney. I can remember when I wrote it, ’cause I’d been asked to sing at this event with just all poets. And I thought, Oh, God, I better impress these poets. At that time, I was reading a lot of Raymond Carver, the American short-story writer, and I guess that was leaking, or feeding, into my songs. I always think of ‘To Her Door’ as my version of a Raymond Carver story. These stories had a lot going on around the edges, and they would often end up unresolved. So, when I wrote that song, I had this ending that was like, Are they going to get back together? Or will it not work out? So, it’s an open-ended song. I can’t remember having a particular feeling about whether it’d be a popular song or not. I find it hard to tell if it’s gonna be popular.
AB: Did it hit straight away?
PK: I think it did. It got radio-play straight away. It came out around the time of ‘Before Too Long’ and ‘Dumb Things’, so it got radio-play straight away.
AB: Back in the good old days. What was your process then? Because now, the process has completely flipped. Kids will record 500 songs before they do one show. So, between your apartment in Sydney, how long was it until you were in the studio recording ‘To Her Door’? Did you play it to the poets?
PK: Yeah, I wrote the song and played it. I can’t remember how it went – I think it went okay. It wouldn’t have been too long between writing a song and recording it. I made five records in five or six years around that time with the band. So as soon as we had enough, we would go and record. There wasn’t a big gap between writing a song and recording it. These days we just try to get the parts, play the song. But I think that comes down to playing for 30, 40 years. It did take me a while to feel comfortable in studios. Especially when I first started, a studio was like a thousand bucks a day.
“You gotta keep the song in your head, in your body and under your fingers ”
AB: That’s what I mean. We had to save up to be able to record our first stuff. We’d do 500 shows before we did one studio session because we couldn’t waste that much money to fuck around in a studio.
PK: We used to play a lot of new songs live, because we were touring a lot at that time. So, you could tell – Oh, yeah, this one’s working. You can sort of feel it the way it lands with the crowd and amongst yourselves.
AB: ‘How to Make Gravy’ is being made into a film, and you’re talking about how ‘To Her Door’ is a short story-inspired song. A lot of your music lends itself to a cinematic experience.
PK: I’m a visual songwriter. I mean, the songwriters who influenced me when I was first starting out were visual. Songwriters where you could see – like Lou Reed: you could just see the streets of New York in ‘Waiting for the Man’. Chuck Berry. The Kinks’ ‘Waterloo Sunset’. I guess I’m naturally drawn to that kind of song. Songs where there’s people you can see and places you can see.
AB: Do you find that your songs are character driven?
PK: Yeah, they are pretty much character driven. That’s how I write: imagining, I guess, most of the time. Imagining someone in a particular situation. But very few of my songs are directly autobiographical. That doesn’t really interest me.
AB: What about ‘How to Make Gravy’?
PK: That’s not my story. I mean, the atmosphere of the song is probably a lot like my family. I have a big family, we have big Christmases, but I think a lot of people have those kinds of Christmases. The only real true thing in that song is the gravy recipe – that was from my first father-in-law. And that’s a real recipe. You know, add a little tomato sauce to it. I still get grief from foodies about that tomato sauce.
AB: Oh, well, man. I’ve seen broccoli on pizza. There are no rules. Is your songwriting process the same now as it’s always been?
PK: It’s still pretty much the same. It’s still mostly boring myself until something surprises me. Most of the time, because I’m limited musically, I just bore myself. And when something surprising happens, it’s like, “Right. I’ve got something”, and then you chase it down. But I think most of the time, for me, songwriting is mostly boring.
AB: Are you enjoying it as much? Or is it like give and take? Because my thing with my career is, I’ve always appreciated and strived for longevity. So, is it still the same kick, or is it different for you now?
PK: It’s the same kick. It’s the same thing. I always reach to make that thing with other people that I couldn’t have done by myself. That is still the biggest charge and joy for me. I really like my band. I call them my squad. I mean, not every record is with exactly the same people, but there’s a group of musicians . . . we’ve just played together a lot, so we have a sort of shorthand with each other. We can argue with each other, you know, which I think is really important. You gotta be able to look down at your shoes and say, “No, I don’t think I’m gonna play this one”.
“Very few of my songs are directly autobiographical. That doesn’t really interest me”
AB: Did you ever have a song where the band was like, “I don’t know about this one, PK”, but it turned out to be ‘How to Make Gravy’ or something?
PK: I wrote a song called ‘Someone New’. And I remember playing that one to the band and they just didn’t say much. “I wanna sleep with someone new / I wanna sleep with someone else”, is how it went. So, I just took it away. I filed it. And then I brought it out for a solo record – it was a record called Spring and Fall. It was more of an intimate record. It was telling a story from start to finish, so I could put that song in the middle of a story. And it was the story of a break-up, so I found a place to put it. But they didn’t want to touch it [laughs].
AB: What keeps you sharp? What keeps you motivated? Is it creating new stuff?
PK: I think just learning other people’s songs. I like to memorise things. So, I memorise poetry. If I like a poem, I just try to keep it in my head. And just having a play, just going to the guitar and playing, or going to the piano and playing. If you don’t keep in touch with that part of it, then . . . nothing.
AB: Are you still a fan of music? Do you still enjoy going to shows and getting lost in that?
PK: That still happens to me. I’ll go out less now than I used to. But I still fall in love with songs. You hear a song and you go, “Wow”. That still happens.
AB: How many albums do you have now?
PK: It depends how you count them.
AB: Well, from start to finish usually . . .
PK: Well there’s live records . .
AB: You’ve gotta count the live records. They all count.
PK: Okay. Over 30. And that’s including collaborations. Yeah, I’d say 30, probably nudging 40 by now.
AB: I don’t know about you, but my records have always felt like a time capsule of the moment. Do you have a record that captured a moment in your life, where you remember the guy you were then?
PK: I don’t know, because I don’t see my songs as autobiographical, so I don’t associate a record with my life at the time. I just want to write great songs, and I want to create a world with each song. I don’t have the idea of tying it to my life, so I don’t really know how to answer that one.
AB: Do you strive to make the perfect song each time?
PK: I don’t know if there’s such a thing as the perfect song. I mean, I guess there are so many perfect songs.
AB: They’re out there. I’ve heard ’em. I think people would say ‘To Her Door’ is a perfect song. It’s got the right amount of melody, the right amount of pace, the right amount of emotion.
PK: But to me, I don’t feel like it’s a perfect song. I feel like it’s a song that works. For me, the songs of mine that I rate are the songs that I know work. You know, you go on stage, solo or with the band, and you’re like, This is a good tool to have in the toolbox. But if you’re asking me, “What’s your perfect song?”, I think the better way of thinking about it is, you’re not gonna have a good song unless something happens that you didn’t see coming. You’ve gotta have something that surprises you, either in the writing or in the studio with the recording.
“You’re not going to have a good song unless something happens that you didn’t see coming”
AB: What’s been your biggest surprise so far?
PK: I think ‘How to Make Gravy’ was a very big surprise.
AB: Great title, though.
PK: I didn’t name it. I didn’t have a name for it.
AB: Who named it?
PK: Well, I wrote it, but I didn’t know what it was called. And then I just thought, How to Make Gravy, because the recipe is in the song. But I think someone else suggested it.
AB: Are you working on an album right now?
PK: Well, I’ve got enough . . .
AB: You’ve got enough for the next one?
PK: There’s a great Slim Dusty phrase. You know, he made a hundred records, and I remember one of his band members said that every time Slim came into the studio, he’d say, “Now, have we got any offcuts?” He’d always be saying, “We can use stuff from that recording session we did last year – we can use some offcuts from that”. I’m an offcut guy. I don’t record with an album in mind anymore, ’cause every song that comes along seems to be completely different to the last one. So, I just record them and I’ve got them. And then on my computer, I’ve got what I call the odd-sock drawer. And then when I’ve got enough odd socks that start to match up, songs that start to be a bit more in tune with each other, it’s like, Oh, we’re on the way to a record here.
AB: Are they from years apart? Is your odd-sock drawer full of records from 10 years ago to now?
PK: Yes. But the oldest recordings on Fever Longing Still are three or four years old. But the oldest song on it, ‘Taught by Experts’, is about 30 or 40 years old. But I’d only recorded it in bluegrass – I hadn’t recorded it in this way.
AB: Do you reckon you’d ever retire?
PK: Uh . . .
AB: I know the answer.
PK: No, probably not. I mean, I might retire from touring. But singing, writing . . . that’s my way of being. It’s what I do.
Fever Longing Still is out now.
Editor-in-Chief: Christopher Riley
Interview: Adam Briggs
Creative Director: Grant Pearce
Producer: Sofia Sallons
The November/December print issue of Esquire Australia is on sale November 7. Find out where to buy the issue here.
