NEW YORK – During his first visit to New York in seven years, Paul Kelly made sure to stop at Katz's deli, check out a friend's restaurant recommendation in Little Italy, and take some long walks. Then there was business to attend to, when he stepped onstage at a Bleecker Street club to sing his songs.
To followers back home in Australia, where a Kelly show at the Sydney Opera House sells out, that's something like a New Jersey tourist finding Bruce Springsteen strumming his guitar in the corner of a Melbourne bar.
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While the world is more connected today than ever, it is still a big place, and regional differences abound in cuisine, culture and other traditions. The 69-year-old Kelly illustrates the phenomenon. He's iconic and growing in popularity in Australia, while a cult figure — at best — elsewhere.
“He's like our Bruce Springsteen,” said Vicki Zubovic, an expatriate who came to Kelly's mid-October show at New York's Le Poisson Rouge nightclub. “He tells our stories, about love, loss and all of life.”
Other Australians in the audience sing along to references from home in his music — like the MCG, or Melbourne Cricket Grounds.
Kelly also paid debts, and showed his admiration for, the United States. He started the show with “Careless,” one of his best-known songs, with the opening line of “how many cabs in New York City?” He included “Everything's Turning to White,” his composition based on the Raymond Carver short story “So Much Water So Close to Home.” The story of a new love, “Gonna Be Good,” references Johnny Cash's “I Walk the Line.” “The line is narrow,” Kelly sang. “The line is long.”
He's a plain-spoken songwriter whose best work is rich in emotional resonance. That's what struck one of America's best songwriters, Lucinda Williams, when her husband Tom Overby took her to see Kelly in a Los Angeles club several years ago. Williams had heard his name while touring in Australia, but never his music.
“I was completely blown away,” she recalled in an interview with The Associated Press. “I remember turning to Tom with a look of awe mixed with admiration and saying, ‘God, this guy is really good.’”
So why the relative anonymity on this side of the world? Kelly's best chance may have come in the early 1990s when signed to a major label, A&M Records, after he emerged playing with rock ‘n’ roll bands like the Dots and Messengers in the 1980s, but without a quick stateside success he was dropped. “Part of it might be the record industry,” said Williams, who has her own horror stories. “Let's just blame it on them.”
His restless eclecticism probably harms him. He’s recorded bluegrass music, an album of Shakespearian sonnets, a blues collaboration of songs performed at funerals and a musical interpretation of poems inspired by birds. Tough sells for a music marketer, in other words.
Then mix in some bad luck and simple geography. For his first time in the U.S. this fall since the pandemic, Kelly was to open a tour headlined by Shawn Colvin and Keb' Mo', but it was canceled due to the bluesman's heart surgery. Over the years, he's lost money on U.S. tours. The temptation to stay home and play in arenas is obvious.
He comes over to the United States as much as he can, but how people respond is out of his hands, Kelly said over lunch the day after his New York show.
“That's life,” he said. “That's show business.”
“When I started writing songs and performing music, I never thought of it as a career,” he said. “In fact, I hate the word ‘career.’ For me, I’m hoping to have a job where my work is my play. I manage to make a living out of it, so everything else is a bonus.”
A new album this fall shows Kelly's storytelling ability. Images of the “thermos of sweet tea steaming,” cockatoos calling and fishing lines in the back of the car on “Going to the River with Dad” make a listener accompany Kelly on a trip with his real-life father, who died when his son was 13. In “All Those Smiling Faces,” he brings photo albums to life as he sings, “get on the floor and dance! You don't have forever.”
Kelly cites the work of songwriters like Ray Davies, Lou Reed and Chuck Berry as inspirations. “You can see their songs,” he said. “They’re cinematic. That’s why I sort of lean that way.”
Family is a big part of his work. On “When I First Met Your Ma,” Kelly is a man who tells his children about their parent's courtship. “Love like a bird flies away,” he sings. “You’ll find out the only way.”
The narrator in “To Her Door” — listed by the Australasian Performing Rights Association as one of the 30 best Australian songs of all time — tells of a man thrown out of his house for drinking as he travels back in a cab months later seeking reconciliation. You feel his nerves. Will it work? The listener never learns.
“I write mostly love songs, like most songwriters do,” he said. “But I realized early on that most of my songs were not just about two people. When you start writing about people in a relationship, there are a lot of other people involved. There are exes, their parents, maybe children and siblings and friends.”
His catalogue is so vast and varied that in the late 2000s he hit upon the idea of performing 100 of his songs in alphabetical order over the course of four nights. The resulting tour produced a box set and eventually a book.
Kelly's “How to Make Gravy” is his tour de force. Asked in 1996 to record a song for a holiday compilation, his first choice of the Band's “Christmas Must Be Tonight” was already taken. So he tried writing his own.
The result is a song with no chorus and set in prison — no jingle bells here — where the narrator phones his brother to pass along a recipe for the family feast. The call is about a lot more, of course, as he expresses regret, longing, fear of his surroundings, paranoia, even some humor. An early hint that he'd made a connection came when Kelly's brother called to say he had to pull to the side of the road when he first heard it. He was weeping.
Now December 21 — the date of the phone call mentioned in the song's lyric — is known as “Gravy Day” in Australia. Bella O'Grady, a 27-year-old woman who moved to New York earlier this year and attended Kelly's Le Poisson Rouge show, said “Gravy” always evokes warm feelings of holiday celebrations.
Kelly “has become part of the Australian psyche, part of the Australian way of looking at the world — a bit cheeky, a bit cocky,” said Glenn A. Baker, a music historian and former editor of Billboard in Australia.
“His songs are so much a part of us," Baker said. "We can't work out why they're not part of you. For many Australians, we don't mind that at all. It means he's all ours and we don't have to share him with the world.”