Paul Kelly on wings of song with a new album

The song cycle Thirteen Ways To Look At Birds, a collaborative project by Paul Kelly and WA composer James Ledger, was a hit at the Vivid Festival and is out now on CD.

Paul Kelly and James Ledger performing Thirteen Ways To Look At Birds at the Adelaide Festival.

• Freak on a mission
• Two minds playing as one
• Luminous still shines on
• Where the good songs have gone

The idea came from Anna Goldsworthy, pianist of the Seraphim Trio which performed alongside Kelly and Ledger with multi-instrumentalist Alice Keath.

The composing duo, who had worked together on Conversations With Ghosts, settings of poems by a variety of writers including Les Murray, decided they would repeat the winning formula.

This time they settled on birds “actual, mythical and metaphysical” that had inspired poets including Judith Wright, John Keats, W.B. Yeats, Thomas Hardy and Gwen Harwood.

“Hope is the thing with feathers — that perches in the soul”, wrote American poet Emily Dickinson in one of her 1800 poems, only 12 of which were published in her lifetime. This verse is featured in a highlight moment in Thirteen Ways To Look At Birds on the Decca label which has just been announced as the ARIA Award winner for best classical album of 2019.

Thirteen Ways To Look At Birds is now out on the Decca label.

Kelly sings or recites, accompanying himself on acoustic guitar some of the time, while Ledger shapes sounds using his Fender Telecaster with an array of pedals and a synthesiser. Goldsworthy and the other Seraphim members, violinist Helen Ayres and cellist Tim Nankervis, bring to the arrangements the more “classical” elements and it is all topped off by Keath providing vocal harmonies, banjo, glockenspiel, autoharp, synthesiser and bass drum.

VARIED

For the most part the mood and music is on the dark side and range over a broad spectrum of emotions and ideas: A barn owl that is killed by a boy or the carolling magpie, the god Zeus of Greek legend who, disguised as a swan, rapes Leda or the science of migration and how birds fly in mass formations.

At its heart is Keats’s Ode To A Nightingale, which Kelly learned off by heart as a schoolboy and has loved ever since.

Ledger is given free rein on the instrumental Murmuration, while the mood lightens for Mudlarking and Richard Wilbur’s poem A Barred Owl in which a parent tells their child the owl is asking “Who cooks for you?”, not mentioning how it swoops on its prey, carries it to a tree and eats it raw.

This album makes for a varied hour — as varied as the poems that inspire it and the feathered friends they describe. No wonder it won the ARIA.

You can pick up Thirteen Ways To Look At Birds at JB Hi-Fi for $22.99.