Saying Paul Kelly has gone back to first principles with his 29th album may be perplexing. There is a generation who don’t know and another who may not remember that restlessness was not always his state of being. That wondering what direction the Melbourne-based songwriter has taken was not a thought that occurred on the eve of each album release.
Until the late 90s Kelly had, for two decades, worked steadily (and to increasing sales) with songs built for live performance. There were traditionally shaped bands behind him – the Dots, the Coloured Girls or the Messengers – and there were melodic hooks and foursquare beats, guitars to the front and storytelling and locale at the centre of the lyrics. He was good at it too. Maybe too comfortably good for his own sake.
But a bluegrass album and a dub project in 1999, accompanied by a cross-fertilising combination with his young nephew, Dan, found Kelly rejuvenated and suddenly restless. This century has now produced soul records, a collaborative album inspired by bird-themed poems, another bluegrass set, a bluesy duo and an album of Shakespeare sonnets set to music.
His last three albums were songs (mostly covers) he had been playing during lockdown; a reinterpretation, with local jazzhead Paul Grabowsky, of nine of his older songs; and a Christmas-themed collection that drew on myriad cultures, rhythms and writers (and of course his own How to Make Gravy, now a seasonal standard).
So probably the last thing anyone expected in 2024 was a band-focused, pop rock record that jangles and bustles as much is it sighs and cries – structured in the style of a two-sided vinylthat might have come out in the early 90s. But that’s where we are, and Kelly comes with a bunch of familiars.
There’s Bill McDonald on bass and Peter Luscombe on drums, Dan Kelly and Ash Naylor on guitar, Cameron Bruce on keyboards, and occasionally, Vika and Linda Bull on backing vocals – some of whom go back more than 30 years with Kelly, and all of whom know how to make a room of musicians feel like a band. A band that can turn its hand to anything and quickly too – something Kelly helpfully signposts by leaving in a recording of his voice giving key and tempo guidance at the beginning of Houndstooth Dress, a track recorded on its first take.
The band close in behind the piano in Double Business Bound, wearied just enough to evoke country dust blowing through. They sneak up to night-bar soul in Love Has Made a Fool of Me; they ride the clip-clop rhythm of Harpoon to the Heart from the back paddock to the riverbank, and tumble through the pub’s back door into a brassy soul show in Hello Melancholy, Hello Joy. And Taught by Experts sets chiming guitars to a Messengers-style momentum that playfully contradicts its lyrics of revenge with its sound of joy.
An old-school band doing old-school variety with old-school energy. It worked then; it works now.
First principles doesn’t just apply to the music though, as Kelly builds these songs around the classic four Ds: desire, devotion, disappointment, death. You know, the way God, Elvis, Townes Van Zandt and Shakespeare intended.
The most prominent of these is desire. Opener Houndstooth Dress is positively horny: “Slip it on, I’ll zip it up before we go … That dress sticks to you like a judge sticks to the law.” And Let’s Work it Out in Bed, which opens “side two” with a similar hip-grind rhythm and the vocals of Reb Fountain, looks to sex to make up for the harm being done with words. Even the incipient melancholy that hovers around the cross-border romance in Northern Rivers runs on a faint seam of physical wonder and appreciation.
But desire doesn’t last, or eventually maybe it doesn’t matter. Not like the family photos and memories in the shuffling blues track All Those Smiling Faces, the warmth in the languid flow of Going to the River with Dad, or the wistful questioning of Back to the Future – three songs which in one way or another argue the value of moments in a life of impermanence. “Ooh, get on the floor and dance!” Kelly sings “You don’t have forever.”
After all, as he himself shows, nothing stays the same. Though it may come around again.
Fever Longing Still by Paul Kelly is out now through EMI
