Cooking Vinyl

Given that he's one of the finest singer/songwriters at work in his native Australia, it seems a bit curious that Paul Kelly seems eager to let other folks write lyrics for him in recent years. That said, he's been working with some very impressive "collaborators" -- for his 2013 album Conversations with Ghosts, he created musical adaptations of poems by W.B. Yeats, Alfred Lord Tennyson, Judith Wright, and Les Murray, while 2016's Seven Sonnets and a Song found him setting William Shakespeare's sonnets to music. The title track to 2017's Life Is Fine took its words from the work of Langston Hughes. Kelly continues to explore the nexus between great poetry and contemporary music on 2018's Nature, which features seven fresh originals from Kelly alongside five numbers where he turns to the writings of Dylan Thomas, Sylvia Plath, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Philip Larkin, and Walt Whitman. (It's worth noting that one of Kelly's originals, "A Bastard Like Me," was inspired by Charlie Perkins' memoir of the same name about his life as an activist for Aboriginal rights.) While one might expect that Kelly's lyrics would stand out in relief from the verses of these literary giants, that isn't really the case on Nature. A great deal with that has to do with Kelly's gifts as a tunesmith and vocalist; he approaches the poems with respect but treats them as living works and not fragile museum pieces, and the music is graceful but muscular, intelligently evocative in the spare, low-key sound of Whitman's "With Animals," quiet but richly detailed on Plath's "Mushrooms," and confident but comfortably rugged on Larkin's "The Trees." If Kelly's compositions are often a bit more upbeat and forceful, his songs are literate enough in their observations of the human condition that they can rest easily alongside the poetic adaptations; 37 years on from his debut album, Paul Kelly remains gifted and fully inspired as an artist, and his enthusiasm and respect for his fellow authors shines bright on Nature. © Mark Deming /TiVo