Paul Kelly Struggles for Words
Music Comes First for Aussie Songwriter-Musician

Listen to Lynn Neary's interview with songwriter Paul Kelly.

April 28, 2002 -- "Love is the Law," a song from Australian musician Paul Kelly's latest album Nothing But a Dream, is an anomaly. A local festival in Adelaide commissioned him to write a song as a sort of theme for the event.

Paul Kelly • From Nothing But a Dream Love is the Law The Pretty Place I Wasted Time • From Greatest Hits From St. Kilda to Kings Cross Darling it Hurts How to Make Gravy

"Anthemic songs are not really the kind of songs that I generally write," Kelly tells Lynn Neary for Weekend Edition Sunday. "So as desperate men do, I turned to the Bible, and found St. Paul's letter to the Corinthians -- Chapter 13 -- the famous letter about love that you hear at weddings."

Anthemic intentions aside, the song nevertheless fits in with that part of Kelly's repertoire that makes use of fuzzy guitars, Beatlesque delivery and vaguely retro arrangements -- with a bit of U2 or Midnight Oil thrown in.

Another part of his repertoire consists of largely acoustical numbers that come from the same camp as Elliot Smith and the lighter side of Richard Thompson. In either case, Kelly follows the same pattern when he's writing. "The words are the hard part. For me, it's the music first. No one's going to listen to the words unless the music is interesting in some way."

Nothing But a Dream is Kelly's first "singer-songwriter" album -- he wrote everything on guitar and he plays nearly all the instruments. He says writing songs is a process of "managing accidents."

"Songs are flukes," he says. "If I knew how to write a song, I'd write one every day.

With 14 albums and more than 20 years behind him, Kelly still isn't well-known in the states. Thanks to his deft evocation of his homeland, he's often called "the Bruce Springsteen of Australia," but that may simply be an outsider's perspective.

"I don't write about Australia," he says. "I write about men and women who just happen to live there." On the other hand, he adds, "all my favorite music… stinks of where it comes from."


Additional Resources

• Kelly's Web site, 'Dumbthings'

• 1 Corinthians 13

• About Elliot Smith

• About Richard Thompson

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