Kelly the singing wizard of Aus
Thursday will be a good night in Boston for icons of Australian music. On the same night the reunited Midnight Oil hits town, singer-songwriter Paul Kelly will make a quieter visit, hitting Passim for a rare acoustic show.
Though he never made as big a splash in America, Adelaide native Kelly is beloved at home, where he’s had numerous chart hits and was honored earlier this year as an Officer of the Order of Australia. His greatest American success came in the late ’80s, when he toured with his now-defunct band the Messengers and got some radio play for “Darling It Hurts” and “Dumb Things,” both punchy garage-rockers.
But his upcoming sold-out show, with guitarist Charlie Owen, will feature a more conceptual strain of music, with material from his last two albums: “Seven Sonnets and a Song” takes most of its lyrics from William Shakespeare, and “Death’s Dateless Night,” which he and Owen conceived after attending a friend’s funeral, collects mortality-themed songs from Kelly, Leonard Cohen and others.
“I see the two albums as companion pieces,” he said this week. “They both came out in the same year and have similar themes. Most of the songs I’ve sung at funerals were songs requested by family, oftentimes favorite tunes of the deceased, which are not necessarily about death. But I noticed, looking at the set of songs as a whole, they tend to have a wider, more philosophical focus.
“Like many writers, I have my own habits, which I am always trying to break,” he said. “Over the last five years, I started putting poems to music just for fun. I realized it’s a new way of writing songs for me. Words are the hardest part, so having a set of words to start with is a relief. The Shakespeare record is part of that.”
Five years ago, Kelly was the subject of a documentary film, “Paul Kelly: Stories of Me.” While the movie paid tribute to his music, it was honest about his rather active love life and his spell of heroin addiction.
“I trusted the people making it, and I gave them complete autonomy. I think that a documentary where the subject gets too involved isn’t a real documentary. I didn’t much like watching it, but it wasn’t made for me.”
Remembering his trips to America in the ’80s, he said, “Everywhere we went reminded me of a movie, a song or a TV show. Everywhere seemed deeply familiar and utterly strange at the same time. As Wim Wenders said, America has colonized our subconscious.”
As for the notion that he may just be too Australian to catch on worldwide, he said, “I heard ‘Memphis’ by Chuck Berry when I was in my teens. I had never been to Memphis, but I knew what that song was about. It was about a father missing his daughter. Memphis was secondary. My favorite music usually has a strong smell of the place it came from. Mine’s no different.”