Seventy

Given Paul Kelly’s status as one of Australia’s greatest songwriters and storytellers, it’s fitting that his 30th studio album begins with Part A and ends with Part B of a song called “Tell Us a Story.” Drawing inspiration from source material such as *The Lord of the Rings*, The New Testament, *The Odyssey* by Homer, and Sophocles’ *Oedipus Rex*, the songs bookend the album and frame its tracks in a similar way to Chaucer’s *The Canterbury Tales* or Boccaccio’s *The Decameron*—people gathered together, passing time and keeping the darkness at bay by telling stories. If it all sounds a bit academic and highfalutin, fear not—Kelly’s rare ability to make songs and stories relatable to every listener, no matter the material that inspired them, remains unparalleled. Always an avid reader, inspiration comes from many places on *Seventy*–the lilting folk pop of “The Magpies” sets Denis Glover’s poem of the same name to music; the foreboding “Sailing to Byzantium” repeats the feat with W. B. Yeats’ poem. “Don’t Give Up on Me” (featuring Meg Washington) was inspired by a French Resistance song from 1943 called “The Partisan”; “The Body Keeps the Score” was informed by Bessel van der Kolk’s book. “I’m always borrowing images and stories for songs,” Kelly tells Apple Music. “It can come directly from books or poems. An example is *The Body Keeps the Score*, about intergenerational trauma and how the effects can be hidden for a long time. But unless they’re dealt with, they never properly go away. So I took the title and the basic idea of the book for the song. That sort of borrowing happens all the time.” A little closer to home, the gorgeous country folk of “Happy Birthday, Ada Mae” is a love letter to Kelly’s granddaughter, while “Rita Wrote a Letter” revisits Joe, Dan, and Rita from Kelly’s 1996 classic, “How to Make Gravy.” “I had a start for ‘Rita Wrote a Letter,’ which is exactly that line,” says Kelly. “And I’d written that down at least five years ago because I thought there’s a good idea for a sequel to ‘How to Make Gravy,’ because Rita gets mentioned just in passing in the first song. But it wasn’t until Dan Kelly my nephew came over one day, and he had a piece of piano music and a bit of a melody that he was singing, and it just kicked off. The very first lines that came up were, ‘I really don’t know how I’m talking six feet down and under the clay,’ and I thought, ‘Oh, this is where we’re going. This is going to be fun—he’s a ghost.’ Joe’s talking from underneath the ground. It’s a good example of the way a song turns out not the way expected.” Musically, Kelly and his band understand when to let rip and when to hold back—the haunting, solemn “My Body Felt No Pain” ably demonstrates the latter, the bluesy “I Keep on Coming Back for More” (inspired by Sonnets 147 and 129 by William Shakespeare) the former. Kelly may have called the album *Seventy* in reference to his age at the time of its release, but it’s clear the advancing years are only magnifying his artistic powers.