Paul Kelly: Proof That Changing The Creative Process Is Good For The Soul

When a few years ago Paul Kelly was invited to venture outside his comfort zone and collaborate on a project with classical composer James Ledger, few could have predicted how the experience would soon filter into his own music, nor how routinely powerful the results of this unconventional union would prove.

The collaboration in question – 2013’s Conversation With Ghosts – found Kelly and the team creating an atmospheric song cycle using the words of long-departed poets such as Alfred Tennyson, WB Yeats and Emily Dickinson. This left-of-centre approach would eventually open a songwriting portal for Kelly which the singer-songwriter had long assumed to be bolted shut, but which he’s now mining to his heart’s content and consistently hitting pay dirt.

“The strong argument for doing it is that you’re presenting the poems to people who might not have heard them, so it’s a way of shining a light on some of the things I love and giving the poem a new life.”

Kelly’s beautiful new album Nature finds the legendary songsmith following the Conversations With Ghosts path and putting the words of pre-existing poems to music – five penned by far-flung poets, four stemming from the singer’s own repertoire and the remaining three songs of more conventional construction – with results as strong as anything delivered during Kelly’s long and storied career.

“Conversations With Ghosts was the first time I’d ever put poems to music, and up to then I thought that I couldn’t do that – I always had this idea that having the words first would restrict the music and make it run too rigidly – but I was just completely wrong,” Kelly chuckles softly. “With Conversations With Ghosts it was a project for a young classical orchestra – I was working with a classical composer – and I kind of just jumped into it, and by the end of that I realised, ‘Oh, I can put poems to music!’ and that led onto the Shakespeare record [2016’s Seven Sonnets & A Song] and it’s sort of become part of the way I write songs now – or another way for me to write songs.

“It cropped up in the final title song on [2017 album] Life Is Fine which is a poem that I put to music, and Nature is really just continuing that and taking it a little bit further.”

Kelly explains that there’s an intangible essence that drew him to the work of the five poets he unilaterally conspires with on Nature – namely Dylan Thomas, Walt Whitman, Sylvia Plath, Gerard Manley Hopkins and Phillip Larkin – but that even he’s not sure what he’s looking for when on the search for a potential new adaptation.

“I love all those poets, but I never know what particular poem is going to jump out at me and become a song,” he ponders. “I sort of know now that there’s a good chance of me trying to write music to a poem, so sometimes it’s just a matter of flicking through the pages of a particular poet or looking up the poems you remember and love and trying straight away to write a song – I find that usually happens either really quickly or it doesn’t happen at all.

“I mean there’s lots of Sylvia Plath poems I love but I can’t remember why I thought Mushrooms would be good to make into a song: I know it happened really, really quickly, so it’s probably why I don’t remember!

“With And Death Shall Have No Dominion [by Thomas], I’ve known that poem for a long time, and I don’t even know why I tackled that one because it’s a real mouthful to sing. Sometimes it’s like a bit of a challenge, like, ‘I wonder if I can actually make these words fit?’

“And other poems like the Phillip Larkin one, The Trees, it rhymes and it’s quite lyrical as a poem: the words are singable, ‘The trees are falling into leaf’. So yeah it’s just those kinds of things.

“Some other poems just mightn’t fit a tune, or not that I could find. But still I don’t really know why some poems work for me and others don’t, but I’m very glad to have found a new way to write songs.”

Even though some of these poets have long shuffled from this mortal coil Kelly still feels a strong connection to their work, if not the artist themselves.

“It’s more to the poem than the person, I guess,” he tells. “It’s something I think about, and there is an argument for not doing it – some people might say, ‘Well why put the poem to music?’ To some listeners they might hear a poem a certain way and to hear this other version might be jarring to them or might ruin it for them. So I do think about that, but then on the other hand as well they might not like your version of the poem so then they can just not listen to you anymore and go back to the poem.

“The strong argument for doing it is that you’re presenting the poems to people who might not have heard them, so it’s a way of shining a light on some of the things I love and giving the poem a new life. A lot of poetry is performed anyway, and I’m always interested in hearing poets recite their own poems – some are better than others – but I think a really good poem is an oral thing as well and it should be heard as well as read, so why not put some music to it if you can?”

Even the four songs on Nature that Kelly adapted from his own poetry have their foundations in the realisation that a song’s music doesn’t have to come before the words.

“They’re from the last three or four years,” he explains of the poems in question. “Again I think that was the influence tracing back to Conversations With Ghosts and realising that I can put poems to music, so I thought, ‘Oh well, I don’t have to worry about coming up with a tune first, if I’ve got an idea I’ll just write it as a poem.’ Again that opened me up to writing a different way.

“I’ve written occasional poetry over the years but not much – I sort of write poems for fun, or maybe poems for friends or in letters. As far as sort of writing songs that was always starting with the music first, but that has shifted over the years.”

And while poetry is often pictured as a long and rambling art form – and Kelly hasn’t been shy about dropping in long, meandering narratives in his past work – nearly all of the songs on Nature clock in under the three-minute mark, which the singer explains was a conscious ambition.

“I noticed that was happening and then every time I’d write a short song I’d have this great feeling of satisfaction, so it’s sort of become a little bit of a goal,” Kelly smiles. “I was actually trying to make this record all short songs. I said to the band, ‘I want to have every song under three minutes,’ and if you look at the track listing there’s two songs that ended up being three minutes exactly, and I almost thought about speeding them up and giving them a little old-fashioned speed up to bring them under the three minutes mark, but that’s getting a little too nerdy.

“Of course Bound To Follow is the long one so that was always going to be roughly four minutes, but it’s become a bit of a joke now with the band – we get our hands on a song and just look for ways to make it really succinct. There’s no real reason for all that but let me ask you this: how often has someone said, ‘That song was too short,’ and how often has someone said, ‘That song’s a bit too long’? I think the latter happens much more often.”

A lot of fuss was rightly made last year when Life Is Fine – his 23rd studio release – became Kelly’s first-ever #1 album, but typically the singer deflects praise for the feat to the people around him who helped make it happen.

“It feels good of course,” he reflects. “But I felt really good for EMI and the whole team because that sort of success is really a team success. It’s not really on my mind when I write songs and make records, because that’s kinda out of my control anyway. Songs sort of come at me and then I write them: I know some are going to be more popular than others, but I can’t even pick which ones they are.

“But EMI got really excited about Life Is Fine, I could feel it, and that’s their job: ‘We’re going to get this to number one!’ they’d say to me – that’s what they do – so that’s their job and what they try to do for all their records. So my main feeling was that of course I’m happy for myself, but I’m mainly happy for that whole team. And the management team as well, everyone. It’s like winning a grand final.”

Last year Kelly was also appointed as an Officer of the Order Of Australia, entirely appropriately for “distinguished service to the performing arts and to the promotion of the national identity through contributions as a singer, songwriter and musician”.

“That’s an honour too,” he quietly demurs. “They’re not really things you can strive after, but when they come your way I’m honoured to accept them.”

Are there any other songwriters Kelly looks up to in terms of that lens of national identity?

“I love Don Walker, he’s still getting better and I love his solo records as well as what he wrote with Cold Chisel,” he enthuses. “I’m on record as saying that The Go-Betweens and The Triffids have been a big influence on me and the Hoodoo Gurus and The Saints.

“And of course there’s lots and lots of great songwriters coming through now, and a lot of great women songwriters which is amazing: Ainslie Wills and Angie McMahon and Alex Lahey and Mojo Juju and Julia Jacklin, Sampa The Great… it goes on and on.”

This year Kelly’s entire catalogue has been receiving the vinyl reissue treatment, rolling out chronologically and giving a great extended overview of his marvellous career in the process. Not that the man himself has any personal reason to celebrate the occasion.

“I don’t have a record player at my place because I started travelling as soon as I left school and moving around so I was a cassette man, and I never really bought vinyl or collected it,” he laughs. “But I have a group of friends who are all vinyl nuts, and every now and then we’ll have a vinyl night – one of the guys has this little basement under his house which is all set up with great speakers and beautiful amps – and about half a dozen of us get together and pick a couple of songs each to play and we rotate and tell a little story about why we chose it. And they let me in with my cassettes!

“The rule is no CDs – no digital – but cassette was analogue so I’m allowed in with my cassettes, and I have heaps and heaps of old cassettes so I can always find a good tune.

“But I have been getting all the vinyl reissues and I just keep them nicely at home, but they are great to hold and look at and feel.”

It’s interesting though that despite being a thorough reissue series it started with 1985’s Post, effectively assigning Kelly’s first two records with his initial backing band The Dots – 1981’s Talk and 1982’s Manila – to the discography scrap heap. What’s his relationship with those early forays these days?

“Well, they’re there,” Kelly states dryly. “For me, Post is sort of my first record, that’s where it felt like I found my voice. Those first two records are sort of me trying to work out what’s going on. If people want to find them somehow they can, but I don’t really want to put them out myself, sorry.”