Before too long Paul Kelly pairs with pianist Paul Grabowsky
The singer-songwriter has form on zigging when his audience expects him to zag, and his collaborative album with Paul Grabowsky is only the newest example of his creative restlessness.
The key to the most successful musical partnerships lies not just in the playing, but in the listening. If the ears are simpatico, there’s a good chance that the music itself will be, too. This holds true for large ensembles such as orchestras and choirs through to rock bands and all the way down to duos, where two performers share space together and the notes not played are as important as those that are.
In August last year, singer-songwriter Paul Kelly paired up with pianist and composer Paul Grabowsky for two concerts at a venue in the Adelaide Hills named Ukaria Cultural Centre. There, before a small audience, they used their respective voice and fingertips to reimagine a small selection of songs from Kelly’s significant catalogue, reconfigured to the most essential elements. It took plenty of trust and careful listening, but both performers felt that the shows went so well that they should be recorded for posterity.
The 12-track collection they captured together is nothing if not intimate, with Grabowsky’s beautiful playing – by turns warm and tender, or bright and strident depending on the song at hand – accompanied by Kelly’s distinctive voice in its full range, as well as the occasional flutter of a harmonica as they run through a surprising set that includes old favourites such as Winter Coat and You Can Put Your Shoes Under My Bed, as well as 2017 song Petrichor and the previously unreleased album opener, True To You.
“You’ve just got to trust that the other person is with you,” says Kelly of the bare dynamic at play. “I’m sure it’s the same for Paul: he’s playing something, and he’s got to trust that I’m going to be with him, wherever he lands.”
Grabowsky laughs and replies, “Yeah, it’s true: trust is the very heart of the matter, and when I think about these things, I’m very aware of the responsibility I have to Paul. The piano is able to create many colours; there’s different registers and different ways to support both the lyric and the melody, and in a great song, those things work in lock-step.”
It is mid July when the two musicians join The Australian for a Zoom call from their respective homes in Melbourne: Kelly wears a brown coat while flanked by an acoustic guitar hung from a shelf behind him in St Kilda, while Grabowsky sports a black jumper in a light-filled room near the rafters of his place in Bentleigh East. “Both south of the river,” notes Kelly with a proud grin.
In conversation, two things soon become clear: both men are hardcore music fans schooled in the deep knowledge that can only be earned from decades of skin in the game, and both men are fantastic listeners. This latter trait is immediately apparent when Grabowksy takes an opening question about an earlier collaboration and runs with it for more than 10 minutes. Kelly doesn’t attempt to interject, and instead settles back in his chair as his friend speaks expansively.
In 2011, Kelly took Grabowsky and his Australian Art Orchestra on the road for a national concert tour named Meet Me in the Middle of the Air. The show had its roots in a 2006 debut at the Adelaide Cabaret Festival, where the pianist and composer rearranged some of Kelly’s biblical-themed songs for a small orchestra and choir.
“It was a great project, and it really forced me to immerse myself in Paul’s songs,” says Grabowsky. “I became aware that there were so many different facets to the songs that he’d written over the years, and I looked forward to another opportunity to see if we could do something.”
The composer bided his time until he was asked by Ukaria founder and philanthropist Ulrike Klein to curate unique concerts with non-classical musicians, which led to him asking artists such as Megan Washington, Archie Roach, Kate Ceberano and Kelly to join him for duo shows.
“It’s a very different situation, I’m sure, for Paul, who is now used to many different situations because he’s created all kinds of fascinating challenges for himself as a performer, particularly in recent years,” says Grabowsky. “But most of them are with larger types of ensembles, from bands to chamber music units – but no project which is just with a pianist.”
It is a bold experiment that is directly influenced by a pair of albums that both men would listen to while driving to the studio on each of the three days they spent recording together at Monash University last year: Frank Sinatra’s collaborations with band leader Nelson Riddle, particularly on Sinatra’s 1954 collection Songs For Young Lovers and an album released the following year, In the Wee Small Hours.
“They’re completely different records in terms of their colouration,” says Kelly, who cites Sinatra as one of his favourite singers alongside Billie Holiday. “But it was the mood of those records [that appealed]. All the songs are slow; even when he’s doing well-known songs from the Great American Songbook, he and Nelson Riddle slow them down. There’s an intensity to them; there’s no lighthearted or up-tempo songs. They’re all heartbreak songs, and they’re very moody, ‘turn your lamp down low’ kind of records. That’s the kind of record we wanted to make.”
Riddle’s sparse arrangements on those Sinatra albums still featured strings and horns, though, as well as Bill Miller’s piano. In that sense, Kelly and Grabowsky have gone for an even more daringly bare bed for these songs. No drums, no blazing guitar solos; no guitars at all. Just piano and voice, with the two Pauls evenly distributed across the aural spectrum and performing in harmony.
It’s a lateral move that exemplifies the creative restlessness that has been the underlying story of Kelly’s career since his 1986 breakthrough hit Before Too Long, the lead single from Gossip, the double album he recorded with his band The Coloured Girls.
Kelly has form on zigging when his audience expects him to zag, and in those 34 years he has never really left the public eye, but he has also been unusually unwilling to conform to convention or expectations. Instead, he has been shapeshifting every few years, and that preference seems to be speeding up with age.
Please Leave Your Light On, then, contains echoes of his decision more than two decades ago to step away from his bread and butter – pop and rock songwriting par excellence, which led to the rare double of sustained commercial success and critical acclaim – to try his hand at fronting a bluegrass band on the 1999 album Smoke.
Both on record and on stage, his central desire is to challenge himself to try new things while also trying to avoid repeating himself.
“Sometimes I set up these situations where I’ve got to jump into them, and see if I can swim to the other side,” says Kelly. “Whether it’s doing Thirteen Ways to Look at Birds, with a classical piano trio and some extra people; or working with a bluegrass band; or working with my own band and setting up a situation where we jam and write the songs together, such Professor Ratbaggy and Stardust Five. I’m always finding another way to perform where you can reset the audience’s expectations.”
It helps, too, that his songwriting tends to lend itself to rearrangement. “A lot of my songs are fairly open to interpretation,” says Kelly. “Some of them are really set; a song like Before Too Long, for instance, it’s really hard to play that song any other way than the way I play it with a band. Even when I play it solo, the chords are locked down tight and move really fast, and I have to play that song a certain way. But a lot of my songs are much more plastic and versatile; they’re more stretchy.”
“And that was the way I chose songs for this record, which we both agreed should have the feeling of a dialogue, of two people speaking to each other,” he continues. “Piano and a voice; it’s a dialogue. So I chose songs that I thought had some space, that could be pushed around and done differently. I had enough of them to do that, and we both decided that we wanted to make the record have this sort of intimate, concentrated feeling that would reward concentrated listening. When you’ve only got two things to listen to, you can dive deep in there.”
Appearing midway through the album is a cover of a 1944 jazz standard by US musical theatre songwriter Cole Porter named Every Time We Say Goodbye. Grabowsky suggested this one to Kelly because it contains a particularly memorable lyric that he thought would appeal to the lyricist: “There’s no love song finer / But how strange the change from major to minor / Every time we say goodbye”.
It’s a deep love song written by a very private man who played his cards close to his chest, yet by alternately singing and speaking its two verses to put his own stamp on it, the pianist and composer notes with glee that the Porter tune has become a most cherished element of Australian popular culture: unmistakably, it is now a Paul Kelly song.
Please Leave Your Light On is released on Friday, July 31 via EMI Recorded Music Australia.