It is 11 p.m. when Paul Kelly calls from Melbourne, Australia, and 7:01 a.m. when I pick up in New York City. It’s Sunday, Jan. 13, in both cities, and we are both exhausted. Kelly has just arrived home from a big dinner celebrating his 58th birthday, and I have just awakened from a few hours sleep after spending Saturday night at the Winter Jazzfest in Greenwich Village. Within a few minutes, however, we have both cleared the cobwebs and picked up the same conversation we’ve been carrying on for years.
Kelly is a rootsy singer/songwriter whose reputation in his homeland—a handful of hits but much greater critical esteem—is comparable to that of Neil Young and Leonard Cohen in Canada. That Kelly’s reputation hasn’t spread as internationally as Young’s and Cohen’s is due more to Australia’s geographic isolation than to the quality of the work. The latest evidence of that high standard is Spring and Fall, Kelly’s first album of new material in five years.
The main reasons for that dry period, he says, were two massive projects, The A-Z Recordings and How To Make Gravy. In 2004, Kelly began performing 100 of his own compositions in alphabetical order in stripped-down acoustic versions—either as solo shows, as duo shows with his nephew Dan Kelly or as trio shows with Dan and Paul’s then-girlfriend Sian Prior. As Paul told stories about each of the songs, he got the idea for a book of memoirs, which became How To Make Gravy, named after his most beloved song.
In 2010, the live recordings and the memoir were published as a box set containing eight CDs, 106 tracks and a 568-page book, well worth the several days it takes to consume it all. But when those projects were finished, Kelly was faced with the question: What next?
“I hadn’t written any songs in about three years,” he recalls, “because I’d been writing the book. I was feeling rusty. One part of me was thinking, ‘I need to write songs for myself;’ the other part was thinking, ‘I don’t know if I can write songs.’”
It was then that he got a call from the Australian National Academy of Music, based in Melbourne but a classical-music conservatory for the entire nation. The institution was making an effort to connect its students with other genres of music, and they invited Kelly to create a song cycle for the student musicians to play.
“I said, ‘How the fuck can I write a song cycle when I can’t even write a single song for myself?’” Kelly reveals. “I read poetry pretty regularly, so in desperation, I opened up a book of poems to see if I could sing them or not. It was Australian poets like Kenneth Slessor and Judith Wright as well as poets like Dickinson, Tennyson and Yeats. Some of them I could sing; some of them I couldn’t. The breakthrough was Slessor’s ‘Five Bells,’ a long meditation on death, a fantastic poem I had read first as a teenager. I tried to chant it, and five minutes into the poem, I said to myself, ‘Hey, there’s something here.’”
Kelly continued putting poems to music; he would sing them with simple guitar accompaniment and record the demos on his computer with Garage Band. He would then email the results to James Ledger, a modern composer at ANAM to flesh out for an ensemble of a string quintet, recorder, harp, clarinet, piano and two French horns. As he worked on more poems, a song cycle emerged that he called Conversations with Ghosts. His live recording with the students should be released later this year.
“That got me thinking about song cycles,” Kelly explains. “If I were going to release my first studio record in five years, I didn’t want to just put out a bunch of songs. If you’re going to put out an album these days, you should really put out an album. Otherwise why not release the songs one by one, if that’s how we get music anyway? Why not create an island in the sea of all these songs? Why not put that out there right from the start: maybe you should listen to this all at once? I suddenly had this longing to hear an album that was all of one piece.”
Kelly freely admits that he’s part of the new approach to consuming music. Because he moved around a lot when he was young, he never became a record collector but relied on cassette tapes made from his friends’ discs. So it was easy for him to switch from CDs to downloads and then from downloads to streaming on Spotify. When someone recommends a new band to him, he enjoys the ability to listen to it immediately.
“When I was growing up,” Kelly remembers, “if you wanted one song, you had to buy the whole album, even if there were only a couple of good songs. So I think it’s a good thing to force artists to make albums that are all killer, no filler. As an artist myself, I don’t feel I’ve been crippled or ripped off. My whole catalog’s out there for streaming; people can pick a song here and pick a song there, and I’m OK with that. It’s a changing model, and I’m just rolling with it.”
On the other hand, he acknowledges, there are albums that he wants to listen to as a whole. Kelly never thinks of listening to Bob Marley’s “Crazy Baldhead” by itself; he wants to hear it in the context of the whole Rastaman Vibration album. It’s one of his favorite all-time records, because Marley is trying out all kinds of singing, and the approach on one song informs how you hear the next song. And it’s that inner conversation between songs written and recorded at the same time that makes listening to an album a different experience than listening to an isolated song. He cites other albums—Van Morrison’s Veedon Fleece, John Cale’s Paris 1919—that have a similar internal coherence. He wanted to create a similar effect on his new album, but where to start?
About six years earlier he had written a song called “Someone New” that begins with the couplet, “I just want to sleep with someone new, someone I’ve never met.” When he played it for his all-male band, the musicians were all looking sheepishly at their shoes by the end. Kelly himself, in a long-term relationship at the time, was reluctant to put it out. But he knew that any song that makes people uncomfortable has an undeniable power. The challenge was making the words and music go together, for the opening lines, which were meant to be an internal soliloquy, had arrived in his head at the same time as an anthemic, U2-ish melody. It could only work in the context of a group of songs that emphasized quieter, more personal reflections on love.
He had another, even older song, “When a Woman Loves a Man,” that he had written for the great Australian singer Renee Geyer. He had always wanted to record it himself, and he realized that if he could describe how a relationship goes from that infatuation song to the restlessness of “Someone New” and beyond, he’d have the song cycle he was looking for.
“Willie Nelson’s Phases and Stages, the story of a divorce, was a good model for me,” Kelly says. “I really love that record. I wanted my album to have the feeling of a confessional record, but for me it wasn’t a confession. I’d been involved in writing a book that was non-fictional, and I was very nervous when it came out, because it involved people I knew and I had said some very frank things about them. I was glad to get back to songwriting that was fictional. Some people think the songs are my story, and other people think it’s their story. You know the song’s working if people feel they must be true.”
Kelly’s Spring and Fall begins with “New Found Year,” a song imbued with the rosy optimism of every brand-new relationship. The narrator counts out the months to come when he believes the relationship will still be thriving, a prediction he expands in another song, “For the Ages.” But we the listeners know that the song cycle is called Spring and Fall and that the narrator’s love will wither like summer flowers in the autumn frost. On “Gonna Be Good,” the narrator promises that he’s “gonna be good from now on,” implying that he hasn’t been good in the past, and it’s dicey about the future. Kelly even alludes to Johnny Cash’s song “I Walk the Line,” which makes a similar, uncertain claim.
“I find ‘I Walk the Line’ a very interesting song,” Kelly says. “On the one hand, it’s a straightforward declaration of commitment, but the music keeps undermining it; it keeps switching registers, like it’s a speech he’s trying out. I don’t quite believe him. There are a number of songs on this album where you doubt what the narrator’s claiming. I find that dramatic. Why do we go to films or the theater? We like to think we know a bit more than the characters do.”
Sure enough, “Someone New” reveals the narrator’s wandering lust, and “Time and Tide” underscores how romantic feelings shift in predictable cycles. Most of the songs on the album are narrated from the male perspective, but the two harshest songs are sung from a female point-of-view. One reveals that the woman in the relationship feels as “Cold as Canada” as she leaves without even saying goodbye to her partner still sleeping in bed. After the man declares on “I’m on Your Side” that he still wants to be friends after the break-up, the woman (still speaking through Kelly’s voice) replies that what she does is “None of Your Business Now.” “So go and find another,” she declares, “or write a stupid song.”
“Yeah, that’s blunter, bolder,” Kelly admits, “not much ambiguity there. Most of the record is sweet, jejune; it needed a song like that to have balance. A record without that would have been too much of one mood. And it needed a melancholic song to close.”
That song is “Little Aches and Pains,” where the ex-lovers make plans to visit each other again after a long period apart. But it’s not really the final song, for there is a hidden bonus track, “Mistress Mine.” The lyrics are taken from the clown’s speech in Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night, and Kelly has provided wistful country-folk music to reinforce the live-and-let-live attitude of lines like, “What’s to come is still unsure; in delay there lies no plenty. Then come kiss me, sweet and twenty; youth’s a stuff will not endure.”
“This isn’t from the poetry project, but poetry was on my mind,” Kelly says. “I often work on things parallel, and like little fleas, ideas jump from one to the other. I thought the Shakespeare song made a nice bookend to John Donne quote on the first song. I like writing with dead people; they don’t argue—though sometimes their devotees do. In my whole retro mission for this project, I decided if I’m going to bring back the album, I’m going to bring back the hidden track too.”
From the famous erotic poem, “To His Mistress Going To Bed,” the first song quotes Donne’s analogy of exploring his lover’s body like a 16th-century European mapping “America, my new found land.” The allusion sets up the later reference to chilly Canada in a way that listeners will never appreciate if they hear the tracks separately.
“When a record first comes out,” Kelly points out, “and you listen to it all at once, it creates grooves and patterns in your brain and you always want to hear it that way. I’ve always tried to make records that way, but on Spring and Fall I was much more conscious about it, carrying phrases over from song to song. When you write a song cycle, it influences even the length of the songs. Like a Schubert cycle, the songs should be short enough that it eventually it seems like all one song.”