Spring In His Step

It's a cold, miserable August day in Woolamai but the mood is jovial inside the Mill, the spacious studio in which Paul Kelly is putting the finishing touches on his 19th studio album, Spring And Fall. Kelly is in his sixth day of mixing with the studio's owner, Andy Stewart, and Machine Translations' Greg J Walker when this writer makes the 120 kilometre trek south-east of Melbourne for a progress report. On our arrival we find a chirpy Kelly sweeping up shards of broken glass after an unconventional (and over-enthusiastic) attempt to add percussion to a track using drinking glasses has gone awry. South Gippsland looms large over Spring And Fall's creation: the bulk of the album was recorded in a country hall near Leongatha and a few days were spent doing overdubs at Walker's “shed studio” in Jumbunna, before Kelly and co headed to Stewart's studio to mix it (some overdubs were also done in Melbourne at Head Gap Studio, Preston).

“[The hall] was Greg's suggestion,” Kelly explains during a break. “He's done a couple of things down there. Greg lives in Jumbunna, near Korumburra, which is not far from Leongatha, east of Poowong and Lang Lang. It's been fun. I haven't been down this way that much, but I always found the geography quite confusing. It's a big area – coast beaches to coal mines and farmland.”

Spring And Fall comes five years after Kelly's last record, Stolen Apples. In that time – his longest break between albums – Kelly wrote a memoir, the acclaimed How To Make Gravy. To promote the book, he revived his A-Z tour concept, in which the singer, joined by his nephew Dan, played an alphabetically ordered setlist. (Kelly originally hit on the A-Z idea as a way to avoid playing 'greatest hits' gigs every night.)

“Dan and I started from the premise that [Spring And Fall] was going to be an intimate, sparse record,” Kelly explains. “We've sort of developed this sound; [Dan's] great at blending the intimate and the spacious I guess, he can go sort of ambient and kind of orchestral and lots of echoes and delays and stuff, or he can just sit up nice and close and play George Harrison-style. I thought it'd be good to do a record starting from this sound, with this aesthetic.”

Walker's name was thrown into the mix as a possible producer; he was keen and available, and suggested the hall “twenty minutes up in the hills from Leongatha” as a potential recording location. Despite Kelly's initial reluctance – he thought the building may be too big to effectively capture the “intimate, singer-songwritery” vibe he was after – Walker talked him round. Wearing thermals and beanies (“there were mittens sometimes,” Kelly admits), and with a “huge kero sort of rocket heater” blasting the room each day before recording commenced, the trio would usually work from around 10am to 9pm. “The great thing about Greg,” Kelly says, is “he can engineer and produce, arrange, and he plays – he's a beautiful musician as well; he plays guitar, dobro, double bass, piano, strings, he can play violin – so we ended up becoming… I was saying all along, it's not gonna be a band record, but you end up becoming this little band, a little trio. We cut a lot of the songs on double bass… Most of it was just often a couple of acoustic guitars, but maybe they would be different in some way, one would be a nylon or a 12-string or a dobro, and acoustic and a double bass. That was sort of our basic sound and we built from there.”

The Kellys would use the hour-and-a-half drive down to Gippsland to get in the musical zone: Nico's Chelsea Girl, John Cale's Paris 1919 and Van Morrison's Veedon Fleece were all on high rotation.

“I think [Veedon Fleece is] a record that's been a bit overlooked because of [Morrison's more acclaimed album] Astral Weeks. It has similarities to Astral Weeks in that it's lots of double bass… it's a fantastic record. And of course our record doesn't sound anything like that because I don't sound anything like Van, but we've got lots of double bass on the record.”

Kelly says there is always at least one or two albums he's channelling whenever he's in the studio. “It's good to have a couple of touchstones, I think. Sometimes it's just a psychological thing – it's not like you end up making a record that sounds like that record, it just gives you a lift or inspiration or there's something about it that you try and absorb.”

Spring And Fall is a song cycle, a love story from “start to finish”. Vika and Linda Bull sing harmonies on one track; Peter and Dan Luscombe provide drums and piano, respectively; Atilla and Karoline Kuti add some violin and cello; Laura Jean sings on two songs (“I just loved that last record of hers,” Kelly says. “That song So Happy It Hurts I think is just a ripper”); and Genevieve Lacey contributes recorder. Both Lacey's involvement on Spring And Fall and the idea for the song cycle were inspired by Kelly's work with composer James Ledger and the Australian National Academy Of Music (ANAM) on Conversations With Ghosts, an original song cycle based on the poems of Les Murray, WB Yeats, Judith Wright, Lord Alfred Tennyson and more. Kelly says the Conversations With Ghosts project helped him get the songwriting wheels turning after emerging from his book-writing period “quite rusty”... “I was feeling kind of, 'I don't know if I can sit down and write a song, let alone a song cycle', so I actually started looking at poems and started picking out poems I liked, trying to put them to music and sing them. But I guess that just got me going with words and music, even though they weren't my words, and also sort of coming at things from a more sideways fashion than I normally do. I normally don't write the words first, I get music or melodies and sound, generally sort of get mumbled sounds to a tune and then try to get the words to fit those sounds. [To] actually start with finished words – like a Yeats poem, a Les Murray poem, things like that – then just sing them it sort of shifted something a little and once I got started doing that then I started writing some songs of my own as well.”

Paul Kelly's Stories Of Me documentary will be screening at the following dates and venues:

Thursday 18 October - QPAC, Brisbane QLD
Saturday 20 October - State Theatre, Sydney NSW
Saturday 27 October (3.30pm and 7.30pm) - Astor Theatre, Perth WA
Friday 2 November - Canberra Theatre, Canberra ACT
Saturday 3 November - Hamer Hall, Melbourne VIC