Nature Paul Kelly

• 1 And Death Shall Have No Dominion 02:26
• 2 With the One I Love 02:29
• 3 A Bastard Like Me 02:34
• 4 Little Wolf 02:54
• 5 With Animals 02:23
• 6 Bound to Follow (Aisling Song) 04:06
• 7 Seagulls of Seattle 03:00
• 8 Morning Storm 03:00
• 9 Mushrooms 02:56
• 10 The River Song 02:12
• 11 God's Grandeur 02:17
• 12 The Trees 02:23
• Total Runtime 32:40

Info for Nature

Following the triumphant success of his 2017 album Life Is Fine, Australia’s greatest and most enduring songwriter Paul Kelly returns in 2018 with his new studio album Nature, set for release on October 12.

Nature is launched by the first single ‘With The One I Love’ and a video directed by Siân Darling, shot in Melbourne’s Old Magistrates’ Court, where Ned Kelly was famously tried and sentenced to death in 1880. Kelly explains, “I’m on trial in the witness box, Mojo Juju plays the judge and Vika and Linda are my defence lawyers.”

‘With The One I Love’ continues in a similar rocking spirit to last year’s ‘Firewood and Candles’ (which won Paul the coveted APRA Award for Song Of The Year) and again echoes the melodic guitar rock of Paul’s 80s work with The Messengers.

Kelly entered the studio in Melbourne in March and May this year to record Nature with his esteemed band – Peter Luscombe on drums, Bill McDonald on bass, Ash Naylor and Dan Kelly on guitars and Cameron Bruce on keyboards. “I love playing with them,” he says. “They can morph from delicate scientists to big riff rockers and all states in-between.” It also features the vocals of Vika and Linda Bull, his daughters Madeleine & Memphis Kelly, Alice Keath and Kate Miller-Heidke.

Nature brings together poems from five literary greats – Dylan Thomas, Walt Whitman, Sylvia Plath, Gerard Manley Hopkins and Phillip Larkin – alongside poems that Kelly wrote himself and later put to music, and his own original songs that came along in the usual way, as sounds sung to chords that then turned into words.

Explaining the creative process behind Nature, Kelly says, “I’ve been playing around with poems since 2012 and it’s now become another way for me to write songs. I think most writers get sick of themselves and their own habits so it’s a happy surprise, after 40 years of writing songs, to find a new way.

“What links them all is the natural world – trees, birds, animals, plants, dust, desert, water – and human nature’s small place in that world. Most of the pieces were written over the last four years in and around the recording sessions for ‘The Merri Soul Sessions’, ‘Seven Sonnets And A Song’ and ‘Life Is Fine’. I didn’t realise I had the makings of another album until I put the songs in a folder and saw the titles staring me in the face. Sometimes you don’t know what you’re doing until you look back.

“I think of ‘Nature’ as a companion piece to ‘Life Is Fine’, itself full of moons, rain, rocks, rivers, seas, smells and lovers.” (Paul Kelly)

Paul Kelly, lead and backing vocals, acoustic and electric guitars
Bill McDonald, bass
Cameron Bruce, piano, keyboards, organ, backing vocals
Ashley Naylor, lead guitar, backing vocals
Dan Kelly, rhythm guitar, backing vocals
Peter Luscombe, drums, percussion, backing vocals
Kate Miller-Heidke, backing vocals on "Bound to Follow (Aisling Song)"
Vika Bull, backing vocals
Linda Bull, backing vocals
Madeleine Kelly, backing vocals
Memphis Kelly, backing vocals
Alice Keath, backing vocals

Paul Kelly
After growing up in Adelaide, Kelly travelled around Australia before settling in Melbourne in 1976. He became involved in the local music scene and recorded two albums with Paul Kelly and the Dots.

Kelly moved to Sydney by 1985, where he formed Paul Kelly and the Coloured Girls, later changing the name of the band to Paul Kelly and The Messengers. At the end of the 1980s, Kelly returned to Melbourne, and in 1991 he disbanded the Messengers.Since 1992 Paul Kelly has had a solo career, fronting the Paul Kelly Band, and since then has worked in occasional collaborations with other songwriters and performers

Kelly has written numerous Top 40 singles include “Billy Baxter”, “Before Too Long”, “Darling It Hurts”, “To Her Door” (his highest-charting local hit in 1987), “Dumb Things” (appeared on United States charts in 1988), and “Roll on Summer”. Top-20 albums include Gossip, Under the Sun, Comedy, Songs from the South (1997compilation, his best-charting album), …Nothing but a Dream, and Stolen Apples.

Kelly has won eight Australian Recording Industry Association (ARIA) Music Awards, including his induction into their Hall of Fame in 1997. In 2001 the Australasian Performing Rights Association (APRA) listed the Top 30 Australian songs of all time, including Kelly’s “To Her Door”, and “Treaty”, written by Kelly and members of Yothu Yindi. Aside from “Treaty”, Kelly has written or co-written several songs on Indigenous Australian social issues and historical events. He has provided songs for many other artists, tailoring them to their particular vocal range. The album Women at the Well from 2002 had 14 female artists record his songs in tribute.

He continues to cross musical boundaries. Recent albums include the bluegrass-inspired Foggy Highway, the wide ranging double set, Ways & Means and Stolen Apples. The Triple J tribute album Before Too Long, released earlier this year, featuring John Butler, Missy Higgins, Megan Washington, Paul Dempsey, Ozi Batla and many others is evidence of his influence on generations of musicians.

Paul Kelly has recorded seventeen studio albums as well as several film soundtracks (Lantana and the Cannes 2006 highlight, Jindabyne) and live albums, in an influential career spanning more than thirty years. He was inducted into the ARIA Hall of Fame in 1997.

This album contains no booklet.