Paul Kelly

One Liner:  One of Australia's best songwriters, blasting folk and rock from the desert

Wikipedia Genre:  Australian rock, folk

Home: Adelaide, Australia

Poster Position: Late Addition.
Weekend Two Only.
Friday at 1:15.

AmEx Stage.

Thoughts:  My first impression after a few tracks is that this guy is bound to have been the lead singer for a Brit Pop band that I don't recall.  "Darling It Hurts" sounds like an Oasis B-Side with some doowop swagger.

Huh.  He is actually an Australian singer, who has worked with lots of groups (but none of them are familiar at all).  The Dots, The Coloured Girls, The Messengers, Professor Ratbaggy, and Stardust Five - he's 69, so he has been around the block for a long ass time.  First album was 1985.   David Fricke from Rolling Stone calls Kelly "one of the finest songwriters I have ever heard, Australian or otherwise".  He originally started in Melbourne, recording with the Dots, but then moved to Sydney and started up Paul Kelly and the Coloured Girls, which he changed to Messengers later because of the racist issues with that first name.  He claims to have written his first song after listening to Van Morrison's Astral Weeks.  Classic disc.  Too many albums, but he has 14 ARIA awards and is in their hall of fame as well.  He even has a biopic that was in theaters in 2012!  His Wikipedia is literally too long to read.

Honestly, I am really enjoying this.  Makes me think of a movie, like this guy should be the character in a movie about a travelling troubadour who sings these rad, crusty songs.  To track is "To Her Door," with a surprising 74.7 million streams.

Sounds like a classic country song at first, with those piano riffs and the snare rim click keeping time.  But after the first chorus, it kicks in to a more standard rock rave-up.  A little Springsteen-esque, just needs some sax in there instead of the guitar solo.  That song was voted into the APRA Top 30 Australian Songs of All Time in 2001.  This was on 1987's Under the Sun album.  His second-biggest track apparently features the same protagonist as in that earlier song, this is "How to Make Gravy."  44.4 million streams.

That one starts out like a Counting Crows jam.  This was from the 1998 album of the same name, which he also used as the name for his memoir book.  I don't expect that I will be there for Friday of Weekend 2 at 1pm, but I honestly really have enjoyed letting this guy roll for a while.  Good stuff.