LA
LEGGENDA DELLA MUSICA AUSTRALIAN PAUL KELLY COLLABORA PER LA PRIMA VOLTA CON
CHARLIE OWEN ED IL RISULTATO E’ “DEATH’S
DATELESS NIGHT”, UN ALBUM ESTREMAMENTE PERSONALE CHE RIPRENDE IL
CANTAUTORATO IN STILE LENNON & McCARTNEY, HANK WILLIAMS, COLE PORTER E
LEONARD COHEN
Alcuni album nascono ispirati
dall’amore, altri da cuori spezzati, altri ancora – come nel caso di “Death’s Dateless Night”- nascono invece
da un funerale. Dopo anni in cui Paul Kelly, leggenda della musica
Australiana, e Charlie Owen,
musicista polistrumentista e produttore australiano, parlavano di una
collaborazione, ritrovatisi casualmente al funerale di un amico comune,
cominciano a mettere in pratica l’idea di un disco insieme. “Death’s Dateless
Night” è un album eclettico dalla forte risonanza emotiva, che ripercorre il
cantautorato in stile Leonard Cohen, Lennon & McCartney, Cole Porter, Hank
Williams. Scritto da Paul Kelly e Charlie Owen, mixato e prodotto da Greg
Walker, masterizzato da Adam Dempsey agli Scion Studios a Victoria/Melbourne,
“Death’s Dateless Night” è in uscita il 7 ottobre 2016 per Cooking Vinyl/Edel.
MELBOURNE,
Australia — Some albums are inspired by love. Others are created out of
heartbreak. Paul Kelly and Charlie Owen’s first-ever collaboration, Death’s
Dateless Night, came about because of a funeral. As Kelly relates, “Charlie
and I had talked over the years about making a record together but had never
got around to it. Driving to a friend’s funeral last year and discussing the
songs we’d played at other such occasions, separately and together, finally
gave us our frame.”
This
disc’s dozen tunes come mainly from others; however, unlike most covers
projects, Kelly and Owen didn’t really pick their selections — they were chosen
for them. “It’s interesting to look at the kinds of songs people request at
funerals,” Kelly reveals. “They’re not always sad, of course. They tend towards
the philosophical, wide and deep in scope.”
This
eclectic, and thoroughly compelling, set of songs mixes well-known tunes (the
Beatles’ “Let It Be,” Leonard Cohen’s “Bird on a Wire,” and Townes Van Zandt’s
“To Live Is to Fly”) with some standards (“Pallet on the Floor,” Stephen
Foster’s “Hard Times Come Again No More” and Cole Porter’s “Don’t Fence Me In”)
and songs from Kelly and Owen’s homeland (L.J. Hill’s “Pretty Bird Tree” and
Maurice Frawley’s “Good Things”). The one tune that the two did pick to include
is the closing number, “Angel of Death.” Kelly views this haunting song, which
Hank Williams recorded in his Luke the Drifter persona, “as a coda to the rest
of the record, a kind of commentary.”
The
music on Death’s Dateless Night certainly holds a strong emotional
resonance. Kelly and Owen keep the arrangements spare befitting the album’s
reflective mood. Owen’s deft handling of a variety of instruments (electric
guitar, dobro, lap steel, synthesizer and piano) provides a soothing setting
for Kelly’s warm, soulful vocals. The duo gives a suitable solemnity to “Bird
on a Wire” and “Hard Times,” while “Don’t Fence Me In” offers some lightness
and Kelly’s near a-cappella rendition of the traditional Irish song of farewell
“The Parting Glass” rivals the classic version by the Clancy Brothers and Tommy
Makem.
The
album happily doesn’t totally exclude songs penned by Kelly, who is regarded as
one of Australia’s finest songwriters. “Nukkanya,” which means “see ya” in the
Aboriginal language Narrandjeri, comes from his first solo album, 1994’s Wanted
Man; however, he originally composed it, somewhat coincidentally, for a
play entitled Funerals and Circuses. His other tune here, “Meet Me in
the Middle of the Air,” appeared on his 2005 bluegrass CD Foggy Highway,
although Kelly acknowledges that its words are inspired by Psalm 23, which is
frequently recited at funerals.
Death’s
Dateless Night continues Kelly’s recent interest in
making albums that are more than just a group of tunes. Earlier this year, he
released the seven-song mini-album Seven Sonnets & A Song, on which
he re-worked a septet of William Shakespeare’s love sonnets into songs. Prior
to that, he collaborated with several female vocalists for Paul Kelly
Presents the Merri Soul Sessions and teamed up with Crowded House’s Neil
Finn for a tour and its subsequent live two-CD set, Goin’ Your Way.
Kelly’s 2011 release Spring and Fall presents the arc of a relationship
from beginning to end, while 2007’s Stolen Apples is a religious-themed
song cycle. Kelly’s grandest musical venture (so far), however, has been his
“A-Z” project. It began back in 2004, when he did a series of shows in which he
performed his song catalog in alphabetical order. After doing several “A-Z”
tours, he released an eight-CD, 105-song box set, The A-Z Recordings,
that Darren Wang hailed in Paste as “a transparency into the craft of
songwriting that is unsurpassed in pop music today.”
A
living music legend in his native country, Kelly has garnered an impressive
number of honors there, including six Country Music Association of Australia
(CMAA) awards, ten Australian Recording Industry Association (ARIA) Music
Awards and the 1997 induction into ARIA’s Hall of Fame. His memoir How to
Make Gravy shared “Biography of the Year” honors at the 2011 Australian
Book Industry Awards and the audio version features such great Australian
actors as Cate Blanchett, Russell Crowe, Judy Davis and Hugh Jackman. Kelly has
been the subject of a documentary (Paul Kelly: Stories of Me) and two
tribute albums (Women at the Well and Before Too Long), and was
honored with an all-star concert saluting his 30 years as a recording artist.
It
was in the late 1980s that Paul Kelly first burst onto the American music scene
with a trio of terrific albums on A&M Records: Gossip, Under the Sun and
So Much Water So Close to Home. Critics piled up the accolades,
particularly noting the intelligence of his lyrics. Rolling Stone’s
David Fricke has called Kelly “one of the finest songwriters I have ever heard,
Australian or otherwise.” Starting with these records, Kelly quickly developed
a devoted U.S. following that continued with his ’90s solo outings — Comedy,
Wanted Man and Deeper Water — straight through to his recent
releases.
Charlie
Owen probably is best known in America as the subject of Kelly’s tune “Charlie
Owen’s Slide Guide,” which appeared on his 1998 Words & Music album.
Owen, however, is an established presence in the Australian music scene. The
versatile, sought-after guitarist has played in a number of groups, including a
stint with the Divinyls. His band Tendrils earned an ARIA Best Alternative
album nomination while his rootsier trio Tex, Don & Charlie was shortlisted
for the Australian Music Prize in 2005.
While
Death’s Dateless Night is the first album Owen and Kelly have made
together, their partnership started on an earlier project. The two organized a
tribute album honoring the popular Australian musician Maurice Frawley after he
passed away from cancer in 2009. Both Owen and Kelly had played in bands with
Frawley, although not at the same time. The three-disc Long Gone Whistle
served to raise funds for the music program established by Frawley at Rochester
Secondary College.
It
is quite fitting then that Kelly and Owen included the Frawley tune “Good
Thing” on Death’s Dateless Night. Given the duo’s deeply personal
reasons behind making this album, it also makes sense that the CD’s only guests
are Kelly’s sister Mary Jo and his daughters Memphis and Maddy. While funerals
served as the origins for Death’s Dateless Night, the music is far more
life-affirming than maudlin. In fact, Kelly admits that the album was such a
pleasure to make that he is already thinking about a sequel.
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