Paul Kelly “Seventy”

Australia’s master storyteller celebrates a significant landmark with an album that cements his artistic legacy.

Having taken over six years between the self-penned albums of “Nature” (2018) and “Fever Longing Still” (2024), Kelly’s creative juices have clearly been running overtime, with a brand new album just twelve months after its predecessor. However, this latest offering is a significant release, as it celebrates Kelly’s thirtieth album, his fiftieth year in the music business, and released in his seventieth birth-year. Hence, the album’s title: “Seventy”.

Over a fifty-year career, Kelly’s music has soundtracked Australian life and culture, earning him a multitude of awards, including no less than seventeen ARIA awards for recording and five APRA awards for songwriting. Most recently, he received the ‘2025 AACTA Award for Outstanding Contribution’, presented to him by legendary film star Russell Crowe, a confessed lifelong Kelly fan.

If last year’s release “Fever Longing Still” proved that Kelly’s creative fire was still burning as bright as ever, then “Seventy” is the perfect summation of his long and celebrated career. Not that this album is in any sense a compilation, nor a collection of long forgotten outtakes, far from it, but rather in the way it musically encompasses the gamut of Kelly’s sound through the ages. From rock and new wave to folk and shades of americana, sometimes laidback, sometimes upbeat, but always one-hundred per cent Kelly and his distinctive songwriting style. A style which has proved so influential on generations of artists who have followed in his wake, including Courtney Barnett, Amyl & The Sniffers, and The Beths, while his songs have been recorded by everyone from Nick Cave to Kasey Chambers.

The album opens with ‘Tell Us A Story (Part A)’, which immediately finds Kelly taking up his favourite role as storyteller, telling tales and swapping yarns, a tradition that can be traced back to Chaucer’s “The Canterbury Tales” and Boccaccio’s “Decameron”, and a craft of which he has undoubtedly proved himself one of the finest purveyors of his generation. Here, as with the rest of the album, the narrative is supported by the perfect musical conduit, with longtime band members Peter Luscombe, Bill McDonald, and Dan Kelly, contributing a collective seventy years to Kelly’s songs, while relative newbies, Cameron Bruce and Ash Naylor, have been part of the band since 2007.

‘Rita Wrote A Letter’ is possibly the most anticipated sequel in Australian music history, as nearly thirty years after Kelly first introduced Dan, Joe, and Rita in one of his most beloved songs, and unconventional Christmas anthems ‘How To Make Gravy’, he returns to their story through an affectionately dark comedic ghost chronicle. The following number, ‘The Body Keeps The Score’, occupies a melancholic soundscape, with a narrative that investigates the complex effects of trauma, while ‘I Keep On Coming Back For More’ finds Kelly and the band mining an impulsive and hypnotic groove that helps to continuously shift the musical landscape.

That constant conveyance is not exclusive to the musical ambience, as Kelly’s narratives and storytelling also draw from a myriad of sources, whether it be crows pecking at the bones of the Roman Statesman Cicero on the song ‘Take It Handy’ or taking W.B. Yeats’ beloved poem ‘Sailing To Byzantium’ and by giving it a full band arrangement create a whole new level of tension to the musings about the convergence of immortality art, and the human spirit. In contrast, the extremely personal ‘Happy Birthday Ada Mae’, written directly to his granddaughter, addresses the fears for future generations and the growing threat to the planet, which is immediately followed by the whimsical love song ‘Made For Me’ sung as a duet with Rebecca Barnard.

The final triptych of songs finds Kelly taking stock, reflective, but at the same time, resilient, resolutely aware of what he’s achieved and at what price, as with ‘My Body Felt No Pain’ and ‘I’m Not Afraid Of The Dark’, he shines a perceptive light on his life’s work and the journey so far, before returning the album to where it began, and ‘Tell Us A Story (Part B)’, inviting us to start all over again with tall tales and short stories of life, love, loss, wit, laced with poetry of myths and legends.

“Seventy” is both an accurate summation of Kelly’s musical journey so far and a perfect indicator that this master songsmith is still very much at the top of his game.