Across six episodes, icons in music and screen join Double J host Zan Rowe to delve deep into intimate moments in their lives as they share five songs they love.<\/p>\n
Now 70, the singer-songwriter has built one of the country’s most enduring careers.<\/p>\n
He’s never had a single hit rocket him to stratospheric fame. Instead, it’s been a decades-long obsession with songwriting that’s delivered a steady stream of high-quality work.<\/p>\n
Consistency has always been the goal \u2014 a thread that runs from his earliest days to the present.\u00a0<\/p>\n
As a young songwriter, Kelly was only ever chasing one thing.<\/p>\n
“I mean, the main ambition was always [to] write the next song. That was always it for me,” he says.<\/p>\n
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Paul Kelly’s longstanding love of making mixtapes made him a perfect guest for Take 5 with Zan Rowe. (ABC TV)<\/p>\n
The songs still come. Kelly will release his 30th studio album Seventy in November. But they arrive with less urgency than they once did.<\/p>\n
“They’re coming less often now,” he says.<\/p>\n
“Maybe I’m sick of myself. I mean, I’ve always been sick of myself, but does the world really need another song? And there’s plenty of people coming up.”<\/p>\n
The son of a pianist and grandson of travelling opera singers, Kelly’s path to becoming a musician started with classical piano lessons in his Adelaide childhood home, before his sister’s boyfriend set him on a different path.<\/p>\n
“I remember hearing Louis Armstrong for the first time and just my head exploding,” Kelly says.<\/p>\n
“I asked my parents if I could switch to trumpet and I got the big sit-down talk. ‘If you’re going to switch to trumpet, you can’t sort of just give it up after a year.'”<\/p>\n
Though his parents were cautious, Kelly’s imagination was already running wild.<\/p>\n
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“I love to listen to music lying down in the dark. I would do that and imagine I was playing the trumpet in front of a crowd.\u00a0<\/p>\n
“That was probably when those first thoughts of performing came into my head.”<\/p>\n
Eventually, trumpet gave way to guitar, and the smoky jazz clubs he’d imagined became folk nights and local pubs.<\/p>\n
That love of folk music \u2014 and its storytelling tradition \u2014 would later draw him to another genre entirely.<\/p>\n
“I liked hip hop right from the start,” he says.<\/p>\n
“I mean, I came up in folk music and I just immediately saw a lot of similarities.<\/p>\n
“It’s got storytelling in it. It’s got incredible language and poetry. I also like that it’s music that can be made without a lot of stuff. You could make up hip hop lyrics just by tapping on the table.”<\/p>\n
5 things you might not have known about Paul Kelly<\/a><\/p>\n He loves hip hop and footy, but took a while to come round to Radiohead<\/p>\n In his episode of Take 5 with Zan Rowe, Kelly chose Queen Latifah’s confronting 1993 track Just Another Day\u2026 to illustrate his passion for the style.<\/p>\n The song charts a regular day in Latifah’s neighbourhood \u2014 a carjacking, an arrest, the funeral of a young girl \u2014 all set against a mood of quiet resilience.<\/p>\n “I guess what I really like is the contrast,” Kelly says of the song.<\/p>\n “It’s this beautiful sort of easy lulling kind of chorus. This deep affection for the place she’s in. I get the feeling of, ‘I got through today. This is a good day’.<\/p>\n “The push and pull, I love that in all kinds of music. Melody that sounds cheerful, lyrics as bitter as you can ever get.”<\/p>\n Mapping place (and life) through song<\/p>\n In his Take 5, Kelly explores the theme of place \u2014 choosing songs that transport listeners across time and geography.<\/p>\n Paul Kelly’s Take 5 songs:The Kinks \u2013 Waterloo Sunset, 1967The Go-Betweens \u2013 Cattle and Cane, 1983Archie Roach \u2013 Charcoal Lane, 1990Queen Latifah \u2013 Just Another Day…, 1993Joni Mitchell \u2013 River, 1971<\/p>\n From Latifah’s streets of Los Angeles, we’re taken to the cane fields of Far North Queensland with The Go-Betweens’ Cattle and Cane.<\/p>\n “You can smell that song, the rain and the cinders,” he says. “It takes you back, you’re not in the present anymore. You’re back as a child.”<\/p>\n The Kinks take us to a lonely room overlooking a Waterloo Sunset, while Joni Mitchell’s River evokes a sad and wintry Canadian Christmas.<\/p>\n Then there’s Kelly’s old friend Archie Roach, whose Charcoal Lane is as vivid as it is heartbreaking.<\/p>\n “There’s great affection in the song, great sadness of course, and great resilience,” Kelly considers.<\/p>\n Archie Roach delivered devastating stories with grace on Charcoal Lane<\/a><\/p>\n At the heart of Charcoal Lane is a humble man, who knew the path to change and healing must be paved with speaking your truth.<\/p>\n “The camaraderie in the song: ‘Side by side, we walk along to the end of Gertrude Street\u2026'”<\/p>\n As Kelly reflects on place through music, it becomes clear that songwriting itself is a kind of map \u2014 a way of tracing one’s life and experiences.<\/p>\n “Definitely a kind of map,” he says.\u00a0<\/p>\n “I mean, you couldn’t say exactly what that map is, but I’m very aware that anything you write, your own self comes through it.”<\/p>\n “Do you reckon you’re discovering your own map still?” Zan asks.<\/p>\n “Yeah,” Kelly says. “I don’t know where I’m going next. Who does?”<\/p>\n Stream all episodes of Take 5 with Zan Rowe free on ABC iview<\/a>. Hear extended Take 5 podcast episodes on the ABC listen app<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"“I like songs that you can see and smell,” Paul Kelly says. “I like songs that seem like…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":211858,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[64,63,23322,134,66282,130239,130236,130237,115589,90569,130238,130240],"class_list":["post-211857","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-entertainment","tag-au","tag-australia","tag-djfrontpage","tag-entertainment","tag-paul-kelly","tag-paul-kelly-adelaide","tag-paul-kelly-songs","tag-paul-kelly-take-5","tag-take-5","tag-take-5-with-zan-rowe","tag-where-is-paul-kelly-from","tag-zan-rowe-take-5"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/211857","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=211857"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/211857\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/211858"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=211857"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=211857"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=211857"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}