IN A PLOT PROMISE to rival any being offered by the streaming services, by the end of this conversation, Paul Kelly and I will be trading quotations from a play where a (fake) lawyer, a moneylender and a shopkeeper trade in debts, honour and attempts to suborn logic or love. Action! Drama!
It’s an old-fashioned set of notions, bound by traditions and habits, supposedly fixed in our laws and behaviours. And yet – sometimes subtly, sometimes in a rush – they are always changing, mutating, adapting, and renewing. Something like songwriting. Something like the way across the dozen songs on his new album, the oft-sensual and regularly pop-filled Fever Longing Still, Paul Kelly dips into his (many) pasts and comes up feeling familiar, and yet not exactly.
Such thoughts are prompted as Kelly peers over my shoulder to the record and CD shelves and cracks a smile of tolerance as much as amusement at my inability or unwillingness to quit this habit. So is he still a purchaser of music?
“Occasionally,” he concedes. “Probably more vinyl now. Box sets with liner notes and things like that.”
One of the things people like me love about box sets is often you can trace the development of a song through the years, through various iterations of arrangement and lyrics, sometimes new melodies and tempos, occasionally production choices that speak of their time or stand apart from it. In one way it supports the idea, that songs never die, that songs never finish, because there is always a different time, a different line, the new way to resurrect it.
Given there are some songs that go back years, and some songs that sound like they might have existed decades ago, on Fever Longing Still, is that how he feels about songs: that they a living thing?
“Very much so. I feel that about my songs: they change in how I sing them over the years; there are different ways you can record them. Some songs, the recordings I feel are fixed and I wouldn’t go back and re-record them, but I know they end up changing through performance. But there are other songs that are more, what would you say, malleable: you can do different versions of them.
“I’m often in the habit of revisiting songs of mine and doing them in different ways, and there are songs that we have tried over the years [in the studio] that I feel we haven’t quite got them, so we’ll go back and revisit. There are a couple of songs on this record where that happened.”
What was it about these songs, which probably were 90 or 95 per cent right, but couldn’t build a bridge to completion? How did he identify what wasn’t right, or is it only obvious years later when a new approach is taken?
“The hardest song on this record for us was All Those Smiling Faces: we did a version and thought it’s not quite right. The lyrical structure in the verses, I knew that was all right, but there was something musical that wasn’t working,” says Kelly. “We realised later that was because there were these long gaps between the lines: it’s a line, and then there’d be a gap, you’d say another line, and there was a gap. That works for a while, but when there are five verses, by the third or fourth verse I felt like I can’t just keep going with this structure.
"But we kept on trying to make it more interesting by putting different things in the gaps between lines and then we realised, it only started working when we started chopping it up.”
Sounds brutal.
“I never feel like I’m making a record until you start cutting pieces up,” he grins. “In the old days it was like, cutting tape, and then it feels like, ah, we’re making a record, we are chopping pieces out. Once we started chopping things out of Smiling Faces we sped up the narrative and it all worked but it’s funny, it took us a long time to realise that and it was pretty much staring us in the face.”
How does someone who has been writing songs for nigh on 50 years, and recording for more than 40, not see that? How does a songwriter of his abilities and musicians of such ability as those in his band – the likes of Bill McDonald, Dan Kelly, Ash Naylor, Peter Luscombe and Ash Naylor on this track – especially given their years working together, not see something so obvious?
“You know, I’ve got no idea. It’s like every record I make and I proof read the cover and the cover art, and other people proof read it and look at it, and inevitably there is a mistake when it comes out,” says Kelly. “When you are looking at something for so long, sometimes you just don’t see it properly. So we were staring at that song too long that we couldn’t get the right distance on it. Again, it came from John O’Donnell [ex head of EMI] who I might send a song to because I value his thoughts. He really liked the song, he said I think it’s the single, but I think you need to play it faster.
“He was sort of right. He obviously sensed it wasn’t quite right: it was a song that started out sounding great for the first couple of minutes and then it just got old. That’s obviously what he was picking up on, and thought a tempo change would be right. I knew the tempo was right but that gave us a little spark to think, okay let’s get the razor out.”
Is it proof that no one ever really knows anything? That there is never going to be a point where he could say, yep, I’ve nailed this songwriting thing, I can come in tomorrow and this is all under control?
“No, it never feels like that,” Kelly says adamantly. “There are a couple of things to say about. In terms of writing songs, I don’t really know what I’m doing until I’m in the middle of it. Going into the studio is always experimental: take the songs to the band and none of us know how they are going to turn out. We would have rehearsed them beforehand and got a bit of a roadmap, but sometimes it changes in the studio. So, yeah, I think if you knew what you were doing right from the start there would be not much life in either the writing or the recording.”
Discovery is an ongoing thing?
“There is always a part of a song that takes you by surprise, it’s the part that comes at you sideways that makes a song or gives a song life. And that also happens with the recording,” he says. “The wider point is why I like collaboration, because you get ideas coming from more than one person. From outside the band as well as inside the band.
"That’s important to have, for me anyway. I need collaboration, I need other people.”
… Not just other people, but other sources. Other wells to draw from. As we’ll see in part two of this interview tomorrow where Paul Kelly also reveals how this late in his career he encountered a revolution in his work. “Finding a new way to write songs felt like a gift.”
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Paul Kelly (with Jason Isbell And The 400 Unit and Fanny Lumsden; Reb Fountain) play:
RAC Arena, Perth – August 26
Brisbane Entertainment Centre – August 29
Qudos Bank Arena, Sydney – August 30
MyState Bank Arena, Hobart – September 2
Adelaide Entertainment Centre – September 4
Rod Laver Arena, Melbourne – September 6
Christchurch Town Hall – September 9
Michael Fowler Centre, Wellington – September 10
Auckland Town Hall – September 12
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