‘Sometimes I get sick of music’: For Paul Kelly, storytelling is a way of being in the world
He might be one of Australia’s most beloved songwriters, but for his latest album Seventy even Paul Kelly was conscious of making something that stood out from the ‘wash of noise’.
A few tracks into Paul Kelly’s thirtieth studio album, Seventy, the singer songwriter invokes Dutch psychiatrist Bessel van der Kolk’s hugely influential book The Body Keeps the Score – a title Kelly borrowed after listening to the audiobook on an epic road trip.
Like the rest of the album, it’s lush, poetic, and timeless – another Paul Kelly song that bypasses the head and enters the heart. This would be no surprise for the legions of fans well familiar with the prolific singer-songwriter’s deep back catalogue. But as someone who’s dipped in and out of Kelly’s five-decade-career, I’d forgotten how much his music is part of me.
My body didn’t though. I listen in a state of ecstasy.
“Well, that’s great to hear. That’s why we make it. We want it to go deep,” Kelly says over the phone shortly before the album’s release.
Opening with ‘Tell Us A Story: Part One’, Kelly centres the primacy of storytelling, urging various characters to share their assorted tales. Its bookend, ‘Tell Us A Story: Part Two’, closes the album, as Kelly’s insistent, cyclical invitation slowly fades out into an endless future of many more:
Tell us a story, Billie,
I’ll get another big log for the fire
Tell us a story, Billie
With tricks and spells and mad desire
I know you got a story to make our laughter roar
Doesn’t matter that we’ve heard that tale a hundred times before!
His voice is strong and message clear: ‘story’ is a natural place for us to dwell, especially when the going gets tough. Kelly says it brings perspective.
“Stories are a way of just feeling better in the world,” he explains. “You hear people say that phrase all the time, ‘Oh, we’ll laugh about this in five years’ time’. They’ve just had some complete disaster and then they’ll say, ‘Oh, we’ll be laughing about this’ – and it’s true!
“But you get that distance from what actually happened, and it becomes a story. This is just how it works for us.
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“So I think storytelling’s just a way of being in the world.’
Seven decades and over five hundred songs in, Kelly still wrestles with the process of songwriting.
“Most of the time [when] you’re trying to write songs, nothing much happens,” he says, “But you’ve just got to keep at it.”
“I write songs by going to my guitar or the piano and playing around till I get a chord sequence or a melody that sounds good… But most of time you sort of hit roadblocks or cul-de-sacs and a song doesn’t take off.
Kelly likens the process to going fishing, where patience and perseverance is the only way.
“You might go four days in a row and nothing happens,” he reflects. “You go on the fifth day and then you get a bite.”
“And often the best songs just come at you sideways anyway, when you don’t expect them. You might be trying to write one kind of song and then suddenly this other one comes along.”
Some greats turned up. In the liner notes Kelly says Seventy could be considered “a taking stock record”, where all his “different kinds of songwriting” are represented.
‘I’m Not Afraid of The Dark’ is a deeply moving song about a man staring down mortality; ‘Made For Me’ is an intimate call-response between inveterate lovers featuring velvet-voiced collaborator Rebecca Barnard; and ‘Happy Birthday, Ada Mae’ is a lilting paean to Kelly’s granddaughter, embedded with hopes, dreams and caution.
Ada Mae I hope you find
A tree, a bird, a star, a flower
And a love to keep you strong and kind
When haters try to seize the day
‘Rita Wrote A Letter’ is sure to fire up crowd vocals when Kelly and his band tour. Co-written with nephew Dan – and recalling ‘Come Up And See Me’ with its Cockney Rebel vibes – the song is a sequel to Kelly’s 1996 hit, ‘How To Make Gravy’.
This time around, the beloved, but perennially down-on-his-luck ex-con Joe is no more – ‘six feet down and under the clay’. With Christmas looming, I ask Kelly who’s going to make the gravy now?
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“I didn’t know I was going to kill him off,” Kelly laughs. “I wrote the song at first because I wanted to tell more of Rita’s point of view, because she only gets a passing mention in the original song.”
“But ironically I haven’t really [killed him off],’ he says of Joe’s lingering presence. “Because if you listen to the song he doesn’t shut up – he’s talking the whole way through! He won’t stay [dead]! As the song’s fading out he’s still talking!’
‘So he’s a ghost that’s talking’.
In a world that demands otherwise, Seventy is also a clarion call to music’s ability to pull us back from everyday distractions and push us into deeper experiences.
“That’s what I’m always aiming for,’ Kelly says, confessing, “Sometimes I get sick of music, it’s just everywhere.”
“I know that’s how most people listen to music these days,’ he adds. ‘They’ll just pick up on a couple of songs from a record. Which is fine, I know I do the same.
“But I just wanted to make this thing, that, for those who want to dive into it, it’s going to stand out from just a general wash of noise in our lives.”
For Seventy Kelly also worked to create an overarching narrative that invites and rewards listening with intention.
“That’s why I try to make albums that work from start to finish,” he says. “And that if you listen to it as a piece, in the order that it was made, that it’s going to be more rewarding than just listening to a song here and a song there.
“So that’s why I still think it’s important – at least for me and the band – that we make this thing that sort of stands outside of that.”
Seventy is just that, a stand out: a transformative soundtrack to real life composed of short, sweet and sometimes sharp earworms.
“It’s just my natural sort of bent, I guess,” Kelly says about the manifest singablity of his songs. “I like to write melodies that you can sing and that feel catchy.”
It’s also part of why he loves to play live.
“Singing, yeah, that’s a big part of our shows,” he continues. “It’s not just us on stage singing some songs and people in an audience passively listening. They participate. They engage, they sing.”
“That’s what I really like about doing shows. You’re becoming part of something that’s bigger than us – bigger than the band, bigger than all of us individually. That you’re part of this big connection.
“It gives us energy,’ he finishes, ‘And sort of floats us up, lifts us up and helps us ride right along.”
Seventy is out now. Paul Kelly and band will perform in Victor Harbor on March 21 2026 as part of the Red Hot Summer Tour