Kelly's songs give meaning to life's mundane details

By Sean Glennon, Globe Correspondent, 8/22/2003

It's the little moments, not the grand events, that fill up a life. Existence is built of the tiny joys and subtle regrets one moves through the world barely noticing -- except in those odd instances when everything seems to stop inside your head, when a single thought emerges clear, immediate, and inescapable, offering a glimpse of who you really are.

Australian singer-songwriter Paul Kelly has made a career of exploring those overlooked events and microscopic details that give substance to life. From his stint as frontman for the rock band the Messengers in the '80s to his current incarnation as a slightly folky rock troubadour, Kelly has displayed a knack for identifying and illustrating the significantly insignificant. His ability to cast the plain parts of life in the context of poetic lyricism has won him critical comparisons to the likes of Ray Davies and Paul Simon and the admiration of fans in Australia, Europe, and, to a lesser extent, the United States.

The 48-year-old Kelly has been performing in front of audiences for nearly 30 years. Trained on trumpet while attending school in Adelaide, he taught himself to play guitar after graduation and began performing almost immediately.

It wasn't until the release of his second album with the Messengers, "Gossip," in 1984, that Kelly began to gain national attention. "Gossip" was widely lauded as one of the best Australian rock records of that year. Three years later, he broke through in the States with the radio hit "Dumb Things" (from the LP "Under the Sun"). By the time the landmark "So Much Water So Close To Home" was released in 1989, Kelly was being heralded by some of the biggest names in rock criticism. And while mainstream recognition continues to elude him, Kelly's talent has kept his cult following intact and growing.

Kelly can seize a fleeting feeling of comfort and turn it into an expression of enveloping warmth ("Most Wanted Man in the World"). He can employ a sweet narrative ("When I First Met Your Ma"), a gentle recollection ("I Had Forgotten You"), or a vague snippet of unreliable memory ("I Wasted Time") to uncover the beauty of everyday life. It's the fact that he's done all of that consistently -- over the course of 13 albums -- that leads fans and critics to call Kelly one of the world's most under-appreciated songwriters.

"I Wasted Time," from the most recent of Kelly's CDs, "Nothing But a Dream" (SpinArt), illustrates Kelly's talent for finding beauty in the mundane. In it, Kelly adopts the voice of an elderly man reflecting on an ordinary life, wondering if it might have been more but recognizing that it was plenty. He jumps without explanation into a random half-memory. "Molly took my hand and led the way/Now Molly's yellow hair has turned to gray/She wore a red dress she let me undo/Though Molly swears that day her dress was blue."

It amounts to nothing, but Kelly makes it clear that it's everything. Listening to him sing it with a weary, dreamy tone in his nasal tenor, one can't help but understand. But Kelly's writing process isn't driven by lyrics. It's the simple melodies that come first. Then the folk-rock arrangements. Then the words.

"Getting a tune usually happens pretty quick," Kelly says. "The lyrics take a bit longer."

However Kelly's creative process may play out, the writer says he wants listeners to pay attention to his lyrics. That's one of the reasons songs such as "Careless" (1987) and "How to Make Gravy" (1996) have become staples of Kelly's live sets.

" `Gravy' is a song that, since I wrote it and recorded it, it's been in the live set every night," Kelly says. "It's one of those songs that's just a great live song to sing."

Kelly says he enjoys the experience of telling a tale through music ("Gravy" is presented as a letter home from a prisoner at Christmastime). He's careful, though, to balance those kinds of songs with more straightforward expressions of love, loss, and longing.

"You can't play too many narrative songs to an audience," Kelly says. "You just wear them out. So you have to play songs that don't have story, that are just a feeling."

For those paying attention, the songs that are "just a feeling" are just as compelling as the narratives. It's that focus on the little things, again, that really matters.

Paul Kelly plays the House of Blues in Cambridge tonight at 9 with Charlotte Martin. Tickets are $12. Call 617-491-2100.