A Guide to Paul Kelly with Paul Kelly

Across a remarkable career that stretches back to the mid-’70s, Paul Kelly’s songs have changed the fabric of Australian society. Here, in his own words, he explores five elements that have defined his work, from finding inspiration in short stories and collaboratively depicting First Nations experiences to creative left-turns spanning orchestral compositions, reimagined Christmas music and beyond. Plus, Vance Joy, Marlon Williams and Julia Stone discuss his impact on their own lives and careers.

“I probably got into songwriting because it feels very free. It’s a very free place to play in, and you can do anything. I liked reading from a young age. I still do. When I started writing songs, I came across American short story writer Raymond Carver. I fell hard for his work and read everything I could get my hands on. Looking back, I can see that influenced my songwriting. I could see parallels between writing songs and writing short stories. They’re depicting the Australian experience both in short forms. You have to get a lot of information across in a short time. “There was always a lot happening around the edges. Often, his stories might end with something about to happen or something unresolved—there was a world to continue outside that story. With ‘To Her Door’, I was aware it was like a Raymond Carver story. It ends at the beginning. Carver’s characters are often having trouble with drinking and kids and busted marriages and so on. So that’s all in ‘To Her Door’. More directly, ‘Everything’s Turning to White’ is based on one of his stories called So Much Water So Close to Home. “My songs are often very character based. I had a start for ‘Rita Wrote a Letter’ which is exactly that line. I’d written that down at least five years ago as an idea for a sequel to ‘How to Make Gravy’. Dan Kelly, my nephew, came over one day with a piece of piano music and a bit of a melody, and it just kicked off. The very first line that came was, ‘I really don’t know how I’m talking/Six feet down and under the clay.’ And I thought, ‘Oh here we go, this is where we’re going. This is going to be fun, he’s a ghost—Joe’s talking from underneath the ground.’ It’s a good example of the way a song can turn out not the way I expected.”

“It’s probably so key that it’s not something I’m even conscious of when I’m writing. But I’m a visual songwriter, so of course my songs have a lot of visual elements in them. Place names are a shorthand way—you say ‘Northern Rivers’ in Australia, straight away you know what Northern Rivers is. ‘From Little Things Big Things Grow’ started with the image of Gough Whitlam pouring dirt into Vincent Lingiari’s hands, so that was a visual image to kick that song off. It’s a really powerful photo. “It’s not conscious; it’s not the first thought. Why would I have come up with ‘From St Kilda to Kings Cross’? It’s the sound of the words. I’m not thinking, ‘I’ve got to write about St Kilda and Kings Cross.’ A lot of the first songs I learned to play were folk songs, they’re often rooted in stories and places, and I like that. “I love Test cricket, so writing about our two most famous Test cricketers, Bradman and Warne, that’s not surprising. The Adam Goodes song, ‘Every Day My Mother’s Voice’, was commissioned by Ian Darling, the director of the documentary The Final Quarter. A lot of the material Ian sent me about Adam was about his mother, so that ended up pushing the song that way, about a relationship between a mother and a child. “A lot of my work in [the First Nations] area has been collaboration—producing Archie Roach’s first record [Charcoal Lane] with Steve Connolly. Collaborating with Yothu Yindi and getting invited up to Arnhem Land. The first thing M [Yunupingu] said to me as I got off the plane was, ‘I want to write a song about the Treaty.’ So off we went.”

“Post was my third album but really the first where I felt I’d found my own thing. I’d been dropped from Mushroom Records. I borrowed money to make that record, it was just acoustic, with Steve Connolly and Michael Barclay. That was a turning point for me, and Steve and Michael formed the basis of my band; they became The Messengers. The next record was Gossip and we started to get commercial radio play, which back in those days was a big thing. “Michael Gudinski talked me into doing a greatest hits record [1997’s Songs from the South]. And that sold like hot cakes. That was a big turning point in terms of general confidence and being able to keep doing shows. At that stage, I was in my mid-forties and you never know how long things are going to last. “Credit to my management, Bill Cullen, and booking agent, Brett Murrihy, they thought it was important to get on festivals. This is the early 2000s. Falls was an early one. And right from the start they [went] really well. It seems like there was a next generation coming up that had been brainwashed by their parents: ‘I remember this song from when I was a kid. I don’t know why, but it seems good.’ “In terms of songwriting, a big thing was putting poems to music, which I had never done before. That began in 2012 with a collaboration with the Australian National Academy of Music youth orchestra and James Ledger, the composer [for the album Conversations with Ghosts]. I’d always thought that to start with words wouldn’t work, I’d always found my songs by singing a melody over chords and gradually getting words to fit. I thought if I had the words first, the melody would be too rigid. But that project unlocked the door. And then I put a Shakespeare sonnet to music. At the age of 58, I’d found a new way to write songs. And every writer wants to find a new way to write.”

“I’m a very limited musician. I can play basic chords on the piano. I’m a good rhythm guitar player, but I don’t know many fancy chords and don’t really play lead guitar. All writers tend to fall into their own habits, so I’m always trying to find ways to break habits. In 2014, I took a whole year off and had piano lessons, most of which I’ve forgotten now. But I got quite a few songs out of learning sort of New Orleans-style piano. Try anything different to break your habit—that’s my philosophy. “With Professor Ratbaggy [and] Stardust Five, the ethos was to write with the groups that made those records. Ratbaggy came out of jamming and Stardust Five as well. The Christmas album [Paul Kelly’s Christmas Train] is something I’m very proud of, which I don’t say about my records generally. The beauty of Christmas is it has every kind of song. There are oldie ones and hymns and carols, secular songs, old folk songs, so I wanted to represent all that. I wanted to represent the Jewish traditions, the Muslim traditions. I got Waleed Aly to recite a passage from the Quran; Lior doing the Hebrew song. It was something I loved doing. “I was just doing these records—Seven Sonnets & a Song, Conversations with Ghosts, the Merri Soul record [2014’s The Merri Soul Sessions]—and John O’Donnell, who was head of EMI at the time, said, ‘Paul, are you just going to give us a normal record?’ I was planning it anyway, and that was Life Is Fine. It’s been very fruitful, bouncing around between normal records and oddball records. They feed each other.”

“I think all writers want to be surprised. Collaboration is a way of being surprised. Say there’s two parties to the collaboration, you come up with something that neither of you could have done by yourself. I’ve always been pretty open to it. I think I’ve got a bit more confident with it, more relaxed about it. Songwriting is play, and play is generally purposeless, aimless. So I go into a collaboration with that approach—this may not work, and if it doesn’t, it doesn’t matter. Just have fun with it. “The key is openness, humour and not fussing about the result. Goin’ Your Way with Neil Finn was a surprise in that we had this idea that we were going to be each other’s band, and we fulfilled it. We’re very different songwriters, we hadn’t worked together that intensely and closely, so there were nerves going into that. And it became this glorious couple of weeks. I got to play the opening chords to ‘Don’t Dream It’s Over’ every night. That was one of the scariest moments of my life, doing that the first time! “[Working with Paul Grabowsky on 2020’s Please Leave Your Light On] was exciting and challenging, because he’ll take a song and he’ll throw it up in the air and land it completely differently. I had to learn new ways to sing some of those songs. It’s a test of a song if it can be done in different ways and you can sing it in different ways. I like having songs like that.”

Aotearoa New Zealand singer-songwriter Marlon Williams remembers the first time he heard Paul Kelly. “In about 2004, dad brought home an Uncut magazine from the library,” he tells Apple Music. “The accompanying CD had ‘Winter Coat’ on it. I burned it to my computer and played that song over and over again.” Meanwhile, in Melbourne, a young James Keogh—aka Vance Joy—was also falling under Kelly’s spell. “As a kid, we had Under The Sun, and I listened to ‘Dumb Things’ and ‘To Her Door’ on repeat, and a lot of the other songs too,” he says. Though neither had begun their songwriting journeys in earnest, Kelly would become—and remain—a key influence. “When I learned how to play ‘Dumb Things’, the chord progression stuck out to me,” says Keogh. “It just felt really inventive and unexpected. The turnaround in the verses, those four or five chords, is [so] cool.” Singer-songwriter Julia Stone, who considers “I’m on Your Side” from Spring and Fall her favourite Kelly track, remains captivated by his artistry. “I think what makes Paul a great songwriter is his ability to tell a story that, even though it lyrically describes something from his life, mind or heart, it reaches our sense of self. We all know that part of us in the story. The person who’s done the dumb things. We are that family at Christmas. We are the broken man asking forgiveness. That’s the magic of Paul: He paints a picture of someone else and we see ourselves.” Keogh cites “To Her Door” as an example of the same: “It’s like a whole world in a song in three minutes, and that’s what you aspire to do. That’s as good as it gets.” Williams, who collaborated with Kelly on “Tapu Te Pō (O Holy Night)” from 2021’s Paul Kelly’s Christmas Train, concurs. “What I love about [Kelly’s] storytelling is how glancing it is. He’ll describe the room and what’s happening in it and never need to mention the elephant. ‘I Don’t Remember a Thing’ is a great example—something awful has happened that the protagonist can’t or won’t look at properly. I think the best storytellers build worlds that can survive and sustain them and their listeners throughout the years,” he says. “The Paul Kelly universe is always expanding.”