“I don’t think you can reduce poetry to meaning,” Paul Kelly tells Robert Forster in this special conversation between two music icons. In this video Kelly talks about how he came into songwriting including the albums he’d rather you didn’t hear, how Raymond Carver made him a better songwriter and and why his new ‘mongrel memoir’ is a lot like gravy.
Before singing ‘Sweet Guy’ he reads a chapter from How To Make Gravy about finding his feminine voice which opened up a new form of character writing for him. By playing his A to Z shows he discovered a new way to perform his songs, but it led to a “really nice booklet” which evolved from liner notes into How To Make Gravy.
You can also read Paul Kelly’s Music into Words by co-editor of his book, Michael Nolan.