“The more I know her, the less I do.” It’s one of those tightly worded aphorisms worthy of Oscar Wilde, but it comes from Paul Kelly, one of Australia’s most beloved singer-songwriters. It’s about the mystery at the centre of love, but it also captures something about the man himself: we think we know Paul Kelly, have in some way always known him, and yet he constantly surprises us.
As we amble from his St Kilda home down to the Port Phillip Bay foreshore on a day that threatens to turn blistery at any moment, Kelly talks about mystery and surprise. His short-haired border collie, Queenie, joins us, scurrying ahead and then turning back to look at us like an impatient schoolkid. Kelly, wrapped in a well-worn corduroy jacket, bends down and clicks his fingers in a vain attempt to summon her.
“It is a mystery,” Kelly says of his songwriting skill. “I never quite know what I’m doing. Most of the time when I’m writing songs, I’m boring myself,” he admits.
“Every now and then, there’s a surprise. And then you have to try and follow it down.”
Following it down, like mining a seam, can take Kelly to some unusual places. In a career spanning decades – his first public performance was in a folk club in Hobart, circa 1974 – his output has drifted through musical sub-genres like an itinerant hitchhiker. He may be most recognised for his folk and rock-inflected material, songs like From St Kilda to Kings Cross and Before Too Long, but so much of his songwriting strays in grand looping discursions through bluegrass, jazz, country, alt-rock and even pure pop.
“I’m not a natural musician,” Kelly explains as we cross Beach Road on to the sand and Queenie leaps off the lead in anticipation. “Like most writers, I tend to fall into my own habits or grooves. So I’ve always been interested in collaboration with other people.”
This hunger in Kelly to expand the limits of his own talent has seen him work with some of the world’s greatest musicians in a bewildering range of contexts – from touring with Bob Dylan and Leonard Cohen to recording a live album with Neil Finn at the Sydney Opera House. But really, this experimentation is happening continuously with his core band, which includes sisters Vika and Linda Bull and his nephew Dan Kelly.
“It always starts with the band,” Kelly says, as the southerly wind whips around us. “They bring things to the songs I can’t imagine. I like to be surprised, I want to be surprised. And working with other people is a way of writing something you couldn’t have come up with yourself.
“There’s a lot of hit and miss with other people, but then there’s a lot of hit and miss by yourself as well.”
His new album, Fever Longing Still, is in many ways a quintessential Paul Kelly album, full of songs that wouldn’t seem out of place slotted into records like Life is Fine or even Under the Sun (Kelly’s 1987 pub-rock classic that included hits like Dumb Things and To Her Door). And yet for all its familiarity, it doesn’t feel remotely like pastiche; there’s an immediacy and emotional honesty typical of Kelly and impossible to fake.
It opens with Houndstooth Dress, a vivid, driving track that pulses with a kind of dirty swagger. It’s capable of lushness, as in Hello Melancholy, Hello Joy, and the expansiveness of All Those Smiling Faces, which Kelly calls “the love song about clan.” It ends in what seems a deliberate echo of How to Make Gravy, the quotidian but deeply poignant Going to the River with Dad.
We wind around the shoreline and back into the bustling streets of St Kilda as Kelly opens up about his process. He has a shuffling, slightly apologetic walk and his dark, hooded expression is occasionally broken by his tight, enigmatic smile.
“You never really understand a record till you’re halfway through it or towards the end of it. We just record songs when I’ve got them, and sort of stockpile them, I guess.” He files them in his MacBook under “odd socks drawer”. For Fever Longing Still, Kelly knew he wanted an album of love songs, one that incorporated not just romantic love but parental love, community love, friendship.
“Raymond Carver is an influence on my songwriting. His stories are very minimal, but there’s always something happening at the edges. They’re often unresolved,” he says.
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. It’s reflective, perhaps, of his own relationship history: twice married and divorced, with three adult kids, Kelly is now in a long-term partnership with documentary director Siân Darling.
The challenge was finding a pathway from the overt sexuality of Houndstooth Dress to the plaintive and elegiac final track. “They’re completely different to one another, it’s quite paradoxical,” Kelly says. Trying to plot the transitions “becomes like a puzzle or a game. And in between, we can fill the album with all these different colours.”
One aspect of Kelly’s songwriting that is often overlooked is its literary sophistication. In his paean to rest, Eight Hours Sleep, Kelly quotes Macbeth’s “sleep that knits up the ravelled sleeve of care”. References to notable poets like Emily Dickinson, Tennyson and Homer pepper his work, as well as more obscure figures like Kenneth Slessor and Wislawa Szymborska. It comes out in his speech, too, the shrugging modesty flecked occasionally with poeticism and grace.
“I grew up with folk music,” says Kelly. In that tradition “it’s quite normal for lines and titles and melodies to float around and get picked up on”. Literary allusions “kind of slip past, I think”, overlooked perhaps because they’ve always been there. “Shakespeare’s been floating in and out of my songs for a long time.”
We wander up Blessington St and into the St Kilda Botanical Gardens, shielded from the wind now and noticeably warmer. We talk a bit more about poetry and the role it’s had on Kelly’s career. Approached in 2012 by the Australian National Academy of Music to write a song cycle for its students, Kelly decided to set some poetry to music.
“I’d never thought that was possible; I always thought if you had the words first it would somehow restrict the music, make it run on too rigid a rail,” he says. Kelly usually composes the music first, “with gibberish and a few words attached, maybe a title.” Now, with words that had richness and resonance already set down, he found new ways to access his own musicianship.
“It was a revelation.”
Now Kelly prepares for his most audacious career move yet: a series of arena-sized shows around the country. While not completely alien to those massive venues – “I have played those big stages at various multi-lineups” – these concerts have a celebratory, retrospective feel to them.
Asked if he’s nervous about the increase in scale, he replies simply: “Not really.”
We’ve got the songs that I know will work, songs that have big ringing chords and are more cinematic in scope,” he says. But then, touring with Cohen and Dylan has taught him that, even in cavernous venues full of thousands of screaming fans, intimacy and introspection can still have a powerful effect.
“A quiet song in a really big space can be incredible. The sound of 90,000 people being silent is different to 100 people being silent. It’s got this great presence and energy.”
As we reach the rose garden we come across a troupe of actors rehearsing a scene from Twelfth Night. Kelly seems keen to give them space, as if aware of something alchemical in the air. “Let’s go around the long way,” he says.
Fever Longing Still by Paul Kelly is out now
