Spring And Fall
Paul Kelly’s first album in five years shows an artist with little to prove but a lot to get out, writes MATT SHEA.
You suspect it takes a lot to surprise Kerry O’Brien, but it clearly registered in his voice when in November of 2010 Paul Kelly told the veteran television reporter and host of The 7:30 Report that he hadn’t written a song in over two years. ?Wow,? O’Brien exclaimed. ?Are you starting to feel hungry to get into it again?? Kelly responded: ?If you’d asked me two years ago – I would say, ?Oh, I’d be feeling pretty antsy about that.? Because I’ll feel useless if I’m not writing.? The implication was that he wasn’t all that bothered, and when O’Brien picked him up on it, Kelly concluded that he’d be happy to ?just sit for a while.?
Having Australian singer-songwriter royalty talk about sidelining his craft was enough to give local music fans conniptions. But there was context: Kelly had just come off the back of penning his autobiography, How to Make Gravy, for most of that process substituting one type of writing for another. And if there was a sense of exhaustion surrounding Paul Kelly, it was understandable: since 1998 he’d released no less than eight studio albums and been involved in numerous feature film scores. In that respect, perhaps a break was needed.
The release of Spring and Fall* adds another two years onto Kelly’s *7:30 Report* interview and makes it five since his last album, *Stolen Apples. It seems like an eternity, both for Paul Kelly and in the digital age. And it raises the question: how do you return from such an extended break?
The answer is: softly. Mature artists can sometimes compensate for age with a combination of bluster and glossed-up production, but there’s very little of either here. Spring and Fall is a lean, focussed project, written with a refined sense of purpose and performed largely on acoustic instruments. It’s a concept album, turning around the rise and fall of a relationship and told from multiple perspectives. Over 12 concise tracks, Kelly sings about fresh infatuation, deepening summer love, projected infidelity and the long painful break-ups that come when such connections are ground under the heel of time and disillusionment.
Paul Kelly New Found Year by 1888Media
Kelly has of course been through his own break-up. A long-term relationship with journalist and broadcaster Sian Prior ended just last year, and on occasion you sense it informs what he’s scribbled down for this record. But the Melbournian has always maintained that his songwriting is rooted in fiction, and these songs are universal in their nature. ?Oh my India, my new found land/My America, come take my hand,? Kelly sings on the record’s sprightly opening track and first single ?New Found Year?, in a couple of lines encapsulating what anyone has experienced with the open-plains-promise of fresh love.
Likewise, the coiled ?Someone New? – the album’s centrepiece – matches its simple strum to the most basic urge of wanting to let one’s loins stray. The treatment plays it straight until a clutch of strings drives the song to a dramatic conclusion, warning of the complicated damage that comes from what is such a straightforward desire.
This is the pro forma for the entire album. By establishing a central theme for his work, Kelly – along with nephew Dan Kelly and producer and multi-instrumentalist J. Walker – has locked in an unpretentious sonic approach, creating a record of unerring consistency that never reaches beyond its own grasp. Everything is restrained and ordered and of a piece – although this is a set of songs far stronger than anyone perhaps expected, each cut doing more than enough to be able to stand away from its company.
Paul Kelly Time And Tide by 1888Media
And it’s succinct too. By the time the six-minute ?Little Aches and Pains? has closed out the record – a classic slack-shouldered Paul Kelly ballad, and one of the few electrically-tinged songs here – barely 40 minutes have passed. It’s a far cry from the Kelly of 10 years ago, who regularly turned out records upwards of an hour in length.
Spring and Fall might tread softly, but it’s far from a tentative comeback. Nor is it the kind of album delivered to fulfil a record contract. This is the sound of an artist with little to prove, but a lot to get out. It’s the best Paul Kelly album in years.
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