AUSSIE ANONYMITY

ROCK: Paul who? More than a decade on, the U.S. has yet to embrace the considerable talents of one of Down Under's greatest songwriters.

• Where: The Troubadour, 9081 Santa Monica Blvd., West Hollywood
• When: 8 p.m. Tuesday
• Tickets: $10
• Info: (310) 276-1158, (714) 740-2000

Every country has one: the unsung hero of the modern songwriter whom nationals revere but the rest of the world can't fathom.

We'll stick to men for the sake of argument. Ireland has Luka Bloom, for instance. Scotland has Paul Buchanan and the Blue Nile (and to a lesser degree, Richard Thompson, who more people "get" nowadays). England has Paddy McAloon and now Neil Hannon. France has, um, Johnny Halliday.

We have several, of course: Peter Case, John Hiatt, Joe Ely, Joe Henry, Ron Sexsmith and now Richard Buckner and Pete Droge (and those are just the most recent). All indications are positive, too, that after the buzz over Elliott Smith and Dan Bern wanes, they'll fall in line as well.

Australia, on the other hand, has the unlucky trend's reluctant role model, Paul Kelly. Not that the sad ignorance of great loner talent began in the '80s (see Tim Buckley and Phil Ochs, to name a few earlier scribes who battled anonymity), but Kelly's consistently engaging musical trajectory has nevertheless always found him at the wrong place at the wrong time.

"It's all a matter of cycles," an optimistic Kelly said by phone recently from his home in Adelaide. "You can't possibly have any control over it, so you just make the best records you can and hope that people come to them."

A limited number of people have slowly come to Kelly's music over the course of the past decade. Some will recall his rightly acclaimed A&M debut, "Gossip" (1987), recorded with his crack band, the Messengers. Since busting up that group in 1991, the artist's work has only deepened. "Deeper Water" (1995), in fact, was perhaps his most accomplished record to date, while his latest, the ironically titled "Words and Music," also sparkles.

The 40ish Kelly pens exquisitely moving and intimately crafted odes to birth and life and sex and death (if not plants and birds and rocks and things) that are as catchy and accessible (and occasionally funky) as they are profound - and every bit as enjoyable as the work of, say, Crowded House, though that seems to have fallen out of favor as well.

Why his stateside career hasn't risen above cult status, then, is mystifying. In his native Australia he could be the center of a rejiggered drinking game - Six Degrees of Paul Kelly. Seemingly everyone who is anyone in the Oz scene has worked, toured or come into contact with him, be they major (the Finn brothers, the Go-Betweens) or minor (the Regurgitators, the Triffids, Archie Roach, Rebecca Barnard, Monique Brumby).

Naturally, the name Paul Kelly brings shrugs here. Now on the tiny but still prestigious Vanguard label, he's making his umpteenth entree into America (he plays the Troubadour on Tuesday) at a time when male singer-songwriters have gone out of fashion in the wake of Lilith Fair and Girl Power and any number of aggressive and/or abused Miss Thangs.

Sort of makes a guy want to give up trying. Kelly says he's not ready to surrender his American Dream, however.

"It still matters to me to make a living outside of Australia," he says. "Unless you have records in the Top 40 here - and sometimes I do, sometimes I don't - it's hard to make a living out of our music scene. If I can sell some here and some there, that makes everything that much easier."

Still, Kelly admits that, more than anything else, the distance of the two lands, let alone the different cultures, makes it increasingly difficult.

"Despite the brave new world of communication supposedly bringing everyone closer, it's just physically hard to hit big in America. Only those with a novelty in their favor have really ever done it. And I would play more in America, except that it's so expensive to do. And I don't really want to be away from my family for too long.

"Maybe if I was 20 years younger," he jokes.

A NEW PERSPECTIVE

With age comes wisdom. So it is that Kelly finds himself becoming more reflective and critical of his work while once again craving the unity, companionship and creativity of a band.

He views his current support - drummer Peter Luscombe, bassist Steven Hadley, keyboardist Bruce Haymes and guitarists Shane O'Mara and Spencer P. Jones - as "a solidified lineup, as much a band as I've had before." (He doesn't have a name for them, so to speak, though he notes "we're looking if you've got any ideas.")

Within these new parameters, Kelly says he's feeling both prolific and experimental, allowing outside ideas to greatly affect his songwriting, while he's also become more enamored of basic, two-to three-chord trance-like patterns. "Simple African-derived melodies and rhythms, though it's also in basic folk patterns as well," he says.

"Nothing on My Mind," a jaunty cut from the new album, is probably the most exemplary. Building on an uninterrupted groove (nicked from Prince's "Sexy MF"), Kelly launches into some jaded, near-spoken-word storytelling that references Hemingway but sounds more like your everyman-at-the-end-of-the-bar. (It also offers a title-track chant that sticks to the brain like a plate of ribs stick to the stomach.)

There are more straightforward moments, sure; "How to Make Gravy" and "I'd Rather Go Blind" are prime Kelly portraits, while "Glory Be to God" hints at the spirituality prevalent on the record (originally it was to be titled "Praise"). But whatever the style, his new work is, like all Kelly albums, a dozen variations on a small set of themes.

"I don't think you ever get anything new in the subject matter with me," he says. "Like most writers, I'm always (going) on about the same things. I agree with William Butler Yeats that the only things a man should be concerned with are sex and death. Nothing changes much. It's just the style or my attitude toward those subjects that changes."

Whatever the mode, however, Kelly refuses to slow his pace. "I only feel that I'm slowing down in that it seems harder for me to write songs sometimes," he says. "I'm a bit more critical of it. When you're a songwriter, you try not to repeat yourself, which is what I'm trying not to do with this record.

"But it's not time to slow down yet. This album does feel like a new beginning. I mean, every record does feel like that, I suppose. But I still find songwriting fascinating. It's my job, of course, but it's still mysterious and exciting ... it's the one thing that thrills me."

PAUL KELLY: To hear samples from "Words and Music" call Register InfoLine at (714) 550-4636, category 5730.