Key Change in Kelly Country

Sunday Mail (Brisbane) - IE Inside Entertainment Liftout
Sunday, June 12 2005
By Graeme Hammond

Australia's foremost storyteller has travelled a highway through the Appalachians towards a different form.

Paul Kelly can still recall the hairs rising on the back of his neck when he first bumped into bluegrass in the early 1970s. The song that did it was Rank Stranger by the Stanley Brothers, one of the genres seminal acts of the late 1940s, and just to read Kelly's telling of the tale within the song is enough to drive you to hunt a copy of your own.

"A man returns to his home town after a long time away" Kelly writes in notes accompanying his new album Foggy Highway" and wanders the street like a ghost.

"Nobody knows him and no face is familiar. A stranger proclaims that his family and friends have all gone away to a beautiful shore by a bright crystal sea. Its sung in high keening voices full of sorrow wonder and hope.

I hadn't known music could be so weird and beautiful"

Bluegrass, Kelly elaborates when we meet to discuss the album is a mass of
contradictions: it's simple in structure but not easy to play. It needs years of practice and discipline, but works properly only when it is raw.

The playing of it is joyous but the subject matter is often bleak.

And on Foggy Highway essentially a sequel to 1999 bluegrass album Smoke, he produces some goose bump inducing songs himself that stay true to the genre's dark Appalachian form.

Passed Over is a quiet thanksgiving for a child who pulls back from the brink of death. Stumbling block a coded tale of an inward battle against moral temptation, and Song of the Old Rake a regretful sigh from a man who traded love for lust.

And then there is the most powerful of his tales They Thought I Was Asleep, a deeply moving account told in the voice of a child who wakes in the middle of a road journey to discover his parents weeping. Grief hangs heavy and silent in the cold air and the kid brother mentioned at the songs outset vanishes from the narrative. Kelly closes the song with only the crushing line "How I wish I was asleep" to explain the terrible occurrence.

Of all the talents Kelly has demonstrated over the 24 years of his recording career, none surpasses his ability as a story teller. On Foggy Highway the marriage of this skill with the music most of us would only associate with Duelling Banjos, O Brother where Art Thou? and Earl Shrugg's theme from the Beverly Hillbillies takes him to a new level.

"A lot of my songs are stories, short stories" he says. "Writers like Raymond Carver, who wrote so many short stories, were a big influence on me when writing songs. I like the way Carver can convey so much without saying much". "These are all very useful things for a song writer, because generally the formula means you got three or four minutes, so to be able to sell a story on that short time you have to be economical. You have got to work so hard".

"Carver was really good like that. He left a lot of spaces where you could imagine the rest of the story".

It was a Carver story that inspired the Kelly classic Everything's Turning To White. So compelling is its theme - three men who retreat to a remote wooded spot for a weekend of fishing and discover a girls body in the water, only to remain fishing for the rest of the weekend- that it is about to be turned into a film. Kelly is soon to begin working on the soundtrack.

Before that, however for Kelly comes a tour for the Foggy Highway album.

And if Kelly is looking forward to taking the Bluegrass sound on the road, then ore so are his supporting musicians grateful for the greater exposure of their favourite music style. "There is a small Bluegrass scene in Australia but I don't think anyone makes a living playing fulltime Its just not commercially viable" says Kelly.

He was struck by the ease with which the Bluegrass musicians mostly a core of Ian Simpson from WA. Trevor Warner from Adelaide and Mick Albeck, James Gillard and Rod MC Cormack from NSW- created the arrangements for the songs.

"One of the joys of making this record (was that) the band could play so freely, so well together. Its kind of loose but its alright".