Paul Kelly’s Merri Soul (Interview)

Over the course of the past 40 years or so, Paul Kelly has become, not just one of Australia’s finest songwriters, but one whose work stands up alongside the world’s finest. Kelly’s latest project is The Merri Soul Sessions, where Paul has chosen other Australian vocalists…mostly women…to record his songs. The album has, in turn, spawned a tour which wraps up at Auckland’s Powerstation this Sunday, April 12th. Along with his band, Paul Kelly will bring along all the artists who collaborated on The Merri Soul Sessions including Clairy Browne, Kira Puru, Dan Sultan and Vika & Linda Bull. The 13th Floor’s Marty Duda spoke to Paul Kelly about the recording of The Merri Soul Sessions and got some background on Paul’s chosen vocalists.

Click here to listen to the interview with Paul Kelly:

Or, read a transcription of the interview here: 

MD: So you’re bringing your Merri Soul Sessions tour over here, is that right?

PK: Yes, We’re flying to Auckland on the 12^th of April I believe, that would be our last show.

MD: Oh last show. So the thing’s been going on for a while I know. Maybe you can explain to people exactly what it is so that they have an idea of what they’re in for.

PK: Well, it’s a record that came out last year with me and a group of singers. So its my songs, some of them, a couple of co-writes and we shared the vocals around. So the thing is, I picked these voices I like and the songs chosen were songs that I thought other singers could do a better job than me. So it happens that  from time to time I write songs that I think suits other voices and I’ve done that a lot over the years where people have covered my songs, mainly women.

MD: Right.

PK: But it’s just a matter of getting those people to do it one of my records rather than on their own I guess.

MD: Yeah.

PK: So not anything that different to what I’ve done before but I guess just sort of putting it all into one place.

MD: Yeah. I was listening to the album the other day and you say it’s your record. It’s kind of interesting, you’re kind of a session player on your own record on this one. Is that a fair way of putting it?

PK: Yeah, that’s right, rhythm guitar and tambourine and a few backing vocals here and there. So and that’s how the shows work too.  We’re fortunate enough to be able to get all the singers on the road together as well, so we can do the record justice.

MD: Right.

PK: And we’ve got, obviously we got to do some more songs cause’ the record’s only about 40 minutes long I think. So we’ve put a show together, gets up to an hour and a half, we’ve added some duets.

MD: Oh great.

PK: Yeah, all of us get to do duets with each other and do covers. Few of my songs that fit the general…

MD: Right. So maybe we can just kind of run down who’s going to come with you. You’ve got Dan Sultan is one of the guys, is that right?

PK: Yeah.

MD: Tell people who he is.

PK: Dan Sultan is a young indigenous songwriter. I think he’s just now done his third record, or second record, but he’s been around for a while and I’ve worked with him on and off on a few projects for about 9 years. So we know each other pretty well. I just really love the way he sings, very talented guitar player too. So he’s singing and Dan co-wrote a couple of songs on the record which neither he or I sing, they were the 2 songs we wrote are taken care of by Vika in one  and Linda in the other.

MD: Right.

PK: So that’s Dan.

MD: Right. Then there Clairy Browne.

PK: Clairy Browne, she’s been around awhile too but she just did one record a couple of years ago I just really loved. I didn’t know of her, I didn’t know her until I approached her and said do you want to sing on this record. So it’s been good getting to know her on the recording and also on tour.

MD: So what was it about her that kind of made you want to reach out and work with her?

PK: A song particularly called Love Letter, which you can always just go on YouTube and see what I mean.

Watch Clairy Browne’s performance of Love Letter here:[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g94LD7i8wUc]

MD: Right, okay.

PK: Pretty great. She’s a great soul voice, direct. I like the way, I like her phasing, I like her rhythm. So I had a song that I thought needed someone to really kind of spit the words out, I thought she was the one to do it and she was. I also, just on a hunch, asked her to try a ballad that I had written one that I’d been struggling with myself, she took hold of that one too, showing another side to her.

MD: Which one was that?

PK: Where Were You When I Needed You.

MD: Oh right.

PK: Kind of an angry song but also a vulnerable, tender song. So again it needed someone that could balance that in the one vocal.

MD: Gotcha.

PK: She did it. Kira Puru, she’s from Newcastle, a singer from Newcastle. Her dad’s Maori. Again I just saw, someone sent me a link to one of her songs called One Eye Open. Again there’s another song I’d written, like I said, this is sort of how this record came about,  I had these songs that I thought someone can do them better than me. This is a song called I Don’t Know What I’d Do and I was looking for a torch singer.  I just thought, yeah, a lot of these times I just work on a bit of a hunch, she could be good on this. It’s a love song and it’s  a song about deep love but there’s a dark side to it, I mean sort of love with fear, I guess.

MD: Yeah.

PK: When you love someone so much you fear that, you have this fear of losing them.

MD: Gotcha.

PK: Again I see a song with a balancing act between the darkness and light and I thought she did that really well. She can be quite brooding in the way she sings but she’s got a beautiful feathery touch as well. So she brought that, she brought that to the party. They were the newbies, so…

MD: Yeah. Well it’s interesting cause a lot of people when they do a project like this, it’s kind of wheeling out the regular kind of well-known names that show up on these kind of collaborative duets things almost and you didn’t do that. I mean they’re fairly unknown people but obviously they’re people who mean something to you and fit the song rather than somebody who’s just going to draw in some more people to…

PK: Yeah. It didn’t start with the people and then let’s find the songs to fit it. It started with the songs and thinking who could sing this. So yeah, it came from that way. Vika and Linda, I’ve been collaborating with them on and off for over 20 years. So I know them well and they sing in my live band and they usually sing a couple of songs during the course of the night or even more. So I mean actually the whole theme for the record was Vika singing Sweet Guy in the live set over the last few years and that the only old song on the record. That’s a song of mine from 25 years ago which is, when I first wrote it, all that time ago, I was trying to get a woman to sing it.

MD: Right.

PK: And no one sort of took it on. So my guitar player at the time Seth Connolly convinced me, said sing it yourself, Joan Baez sang The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down, you can sing songs from a woman’s point of view.

MD: Right.

PK: So I did and that was sort of, that was the first song I’d written from a woman’s point of view that I’d actually sung. So that sort of opened up a little door for me and I sort of, I’ve done that quite a lot ever since, I often sing different characters’ points of view and sometimes that includes the characters that are women.

MD: Right.

PK: So it would be great to, yeah, have a woman sing it. So Vika was doing it live and it was going down really well. So I thought, got to record that song, Vika’s version of that song and then thought we should put some other songs around it. So really it was Sweet Guy that started the whole thing off.

Listen to Sweet Guy from The Merri Soul Sessions here:

MD: Vika was here a little while ago doing her kind of Etta James tribute thing. She came over and talked to me, she was great, Fantastic. So yeah it makes sense that you would use her on this thing. So you’re adding some other songs, are they songs of yours or you’re doing covers or what else are you…

PK: Couple of duets. We got, there’s a couple of well-done soul songs, with When Something Is Wrong With My Baby, Dan and Clairy can do that as a duet , the Sam & Dave song.

MD: Yeah.

PK: A Dark End Of The Street, Kira and I do as a duet, it’s one of my favourite song writing teams, Dan Penn and Spooner Oldham, they wrote songs for many people, Aretha Franklin and Bobby Purify and people like that.

MD: Is that the music that you kind of go back to when you need to kind of source an inspiration, is it kind of that 60s Memphis, Muscle Shoals…

PK: Yeah I listen to a lot of old music but some of it’s really old time Country or Blues, yeah that music’s carried around with me for a long time. One of my favourite singers are, I guess singers like Etta…

MD: Did you listen to her when you were growing up or did you kind of come to it after you kind of matured and learned about them.

PK: I guess it must have been I would say in my 20s I guess. Just sort of following a path. But I don’t remember hearing so much on the radio while growing up, so it was more something I started exploring later.

MD: That would have been the same time that punk was happening and you were just getting your songs started off. It’s interesting. Is that something that you as an artist were consciously doing were just trying to find other things and other sources to draw from?

PK: Yeah. I guess I’ve always been pretty eclectic in my listening and curious. So yeah I never really listened to one kind of music and you start exploring. If you like The Clash then obviously you go back to, usually when you have artists that you really like and you sort of go back to what inspired them. The Rolling Stones were pointing back to Otis Redding an Solomon Burke and all that. So you just sort of, once you get curious about…yeah, probably The Rolling Stones when I think about it probably led me to people like Arthur Alexander, You Better Move On…

MD: Oh yeah it’s great, I love Arthur Alexander.

PK: You go back to the originals and you think, ah thanks Rolling Stones but I think might start listening to the originals, but good on them.

Click here for ticket information to see Paul Kelly & The Merri Soul Sessions at The Powerstation on Sunday, April 12th.