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Price history (90 days)
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About this electronic
Deluxe CD + DVD Edition! I first started putting poems to music in 2012 for a classical music collaboration. Before then it hadn’t occurred to me to do that but since then I’ve continued playing around with poems 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. Five of the songs from NATURE are poems written by others – Dylan Thomas, Walt Whitman, Sylvia Plath, Gerard Manley Hopkins and Phillip Larkin. Four others – A Bastard Like Me, Little Wolf, Seagulls of Seattle and The River Song – are poems I wrote and later put to music. The other three came along the usual way as sounds sung to chords that then turned into words, sometimes slowly, sometimes in a rush. 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 realize 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 went into the studio in March and May this year with my usual boon companions - 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. They can morph from delicate scientists (Mushrooms) to big riff rockers (With The One I Love) and all states in-between. I think of NATURE as a companion piece to LIFE IS FINE, itself full of moons, rain, rocks, rivers, seas, smells and lovers. The songs are quite short. Except for Bound To Follow, not one is over three minutes and most are around two and a half. As I get older the shorter I can make a song the happier I am. My yard-stick for this is J. Cale’s great 1971 record NATURALLY. He didn’t believe in wasting the listener’s time. NATURE features many women singers. Vika and Linda, of course. My daughters, Madeleine and Memphis Kelly, sing and hum on two songs. Alice Keath, who sang on SEVEN SONNETS, returns to bring her unique harmony to The Trees. And Kate Miller-Heidke plays the siren luring a lover to death (or is it to new life?) in Bound To Follow. The first single from NATURE is With The One I Love. It comes with a film clip directed by Siân Darling and shot in Melbourne’s old magistrate court where Ned Kelly was tried and sentenced to death in 1880. I’m on trial in the witness box, Mojo Juju plays the judge and Vika and Linda are my defence lawyers. What happens? Can’t say. Disc 1 is the 12-song 'Nature' album and Disc 2 is a 27-song DVD, capturing last year's triumphant show from the forecourt of the Sydney Opera House, which was broadcast live around the country by the ABC as their major 'Australian Music Month' promotion. The DVD captures Paul and his long-time band in brilliant form as they feature songs from the just-released, ARIA award-winning Life Is Fine album as well as Paul Kelly classics like 'To Her Door', "From Little Things...', 'How To Make Gravy', 'Before Too Long', 'Deeper Water and many more.
