Paul Kelly

With each song Paul Kelly writes, he feels like he’s starting anew. Every one a puzzle to be solved, a mystery that can be never quite explained. That adventurous spirit makes his 29th studio album, Fever Burning Still, as rich and rewarding a listening experience as any record he has made since releasing his first in 1981.
Few songwriters find ways to keep that creative fever burning for as long and as brightly as Kelly.
The country of his birth, its emotional interior and geographical landscape, its heroes and villains, our hopes and failings, have been a constant in Kelly’s long list of Australian-set songs. From St Kilda to King’s Cross, Adelaide, Leaps and Bounds, Incident on South Dowling, Maralinga (Rainy Land), Randwick Bells, Sydney from a 747. From the bus ride through the cane in To Her Door to the childhood memory of Deeper Water.
He has written about the country’s greatest cricketer, Bradman, and its most infamous bushranger, Ned Kelly, in Our Sunshine.
Some songs take their time to make their mark. How to Make Gravy, a message from a prisoner who can’t be home for Christmas, wasn’t a hit at the time of release in 1996 but now is recognised as an Australian classic. From Little Things Big Things Grow, about the 1966 strike by Aboriginal stockmen on Wave Hill Station in the Northern Territory, co-written with Kev Carmody, has taught more Australians about the history of the battle for land rights than newspaper headlines ever could.
And when Kelly finds a theme, he goes all in. His 2021 album, Paul Kelly’s Christmas Train, is far broader in scope than the usual Christmas standards collections, ranging from new original rock songs to an Irish folk ballad set on Christmas morning. It also reflects the experience of Christmas in the southern hemisphere in songs such as Swing Around the Sun and an Australian carol from the ’40s, Three Drovers.
In 2022 and 2023 he released new compilation albums on themes from Time to Rivers and Rain, Drinking and Poetry, including new tunes among some of his best-loved material.
On Fever Longing Still – the title is from a line in a Shakespearean sonnet – Kelly returns to the subject of many of his greatest songs, from Love Never Runs on Time and Careless to Wintercoat, When I First Met Your Ma, If I Could Start Today Again and Firewood and Candles.
Love in all its shades is the theme for an album which introduces new Kelly treasures like Houndstooth Dress and All Those Smiling Faces to that bulging songbook of songs about love. The songs arrive in various ways. Houndstooth Dress is so fresh you hear Kelly teaching the band the song. Taught By Experts is a brilliant new version of a song he has been trying to perfect for 30 years.
Variety has long been a key to Kelly’s recording career, which includes albums ranging from bluegrass and country (Smoke and Foggy Highway) to funk and soul (Professor Ratbaggy, The Merri Soul Sessions).
He set Shakespeare sonnets to music in 2014’s Seven Sonnets & a Song. This was followed by an album with guitarist Charlie Owen of songs they had performed at funerals (Death’s Dateless Night), and an album with musicians from broad-ranging backgrounds interpreting bird-inspired poems (Thirteen Ways to Look at Birds).
In 2020 Kelly released an album in collaboration with jazz pianist Paul Grabowsky, Please Leave Your Light On, and a stand-alone single, Sleep, Australia, Sleep, about Australia’s shameful response to environmental realities. In 2021 he released Every Step of the Way, a song inspired by footballer Eddie Betts and his battle with racism. In 2023 he released Khawaja, a song about Australian cricketer Usman Khawaja.
Kelly’s willingness to experiment and work with collaborators including his long-time band has played an important role in keeping that creative fire flaming.
His 2017 set Life is Fine became his first No 1 album and that year Kelly won two ARIA Awards, for best male artist and best adult contemporary album. He returned to the awards in 2018, dedicating a poem to Kasey Chambers as he inducted her into the ARIA Hall of Fame, an honour Kelly received in 1997. He has received 17 ARIA awards for recording and five APRA awards for songwriting.
The natural world flowed through Kelly’s 2018 album Nature, which featured new Kelly songs as well as his musical settings for poems by Sylvia Plath, Walt Whitman, Gerard Manley Hopkins and Dylan Thomas.
His body of work includes live albums (see the CD/DVD recording of an Australian tour with Neil Finn, Goin’ Your Way, and the 8-CD box set A-Z Recordings, revisiting his songs with acoustic guitar, harmonica and voice). To this add the film soundtracks, co-writes (he co-wrote the land rights anthem Treaty with Yothu Yindi), production work and decades of touring, playing the kind of shows fans never forget. And he found time to write perhaps the finest and most unflinching autobiography ever written by an Australian musician, also titled How to Make Gravy.
Kelly’s Order of Australia in 2017 acknowledged distinguished service to the performing arts and the promotion of the national identity through his contributions as singer, songwriter and musician.
In 1997, he released best-of compilation Songs from the South. In 2019, Songs from the South 1985-2019 brought the story up to date. But Kelly’s mission is to keep creating, keep exploring, keep finding new ways to move the fingers, the music, the heart, the mind.
“Feeling dry is the normal state for a songwriter,” Kelly says of the creative process. “Most days I don’t have a song or anywhere near a song. You do anything you can to break old habits, jamming with the band to find a different riff, playing a different instrument, putting the guitar in a different tuning.
“Often I will say, ‘I have no ideas today’ so I learn a song instead. In lockdown I spent three weeks learning how to play Stardust by Hoagy Carmichael. I don’t know if it leads anywhere but at least now I can play and sing Stardust.
“You have to keep turning up and keep trying, stay open. And write things down when they come into your head or otherwise they go out of your head.”