You've written a lot of songs of a personal nature. How easy would it be to get to know you through those songs?
People might get some clues. But I know from my own experience of writing songs that even when you're writing from your own life by the time you put them into songs you're changing them anyway. So I think it's a bit of a wild goose chase.

As a songwriter do you ever find yourself creating drama in your life - putting yourself in situations, maybe against your better judgement, just to see what happens?
Life is complicated enough without complicating it even more. But I've always been pretty curious about all kinds of experience, to see how people tick and that curiosity is also there in what you read - you can experience other people's view of the world through books. Our time is very limited and our circumstances are very particular. We're born into a particular culture, a particular time and a particular sex. So you have all these contingencies strapped upon you right away. If you're interested in life generally you're going to be always looking at things outside your life experience anyway.

How have you been influenced by, say, Aboriginal culture?
Some of the people I've worked with - Archie Roach, Kev Carmody and Mandawuy (Yunupingu of Yothu Yindi) - they've influenced me as a person just by the way they go about their lives. It would be hard for me to say what musical influence they've had. My interest in Aboriginal culture and history has obviously influenced the lyrics of some of my songs. It was through that interest that I wrote songs like 'Special Treatment' and 'Maralinga' or 'Bicentennial', 'From Little Things Big Things Grow'.

How do you approach writing from a woman's point of view?
It happens probably the way that other songs happen - by listening to people and what they say. There's no great mystery, it's just another form of play. It's to do with being interested in points of view besides your own. I've written songs from the point of view of people a lot older than me, in different jobs to me and people who are a different sex.

One of the hardest things to do in music is to keep re-selling yourself to the public with each record. What do you feel is the hook for Paul Kelly fans and heathens alike to check out 'Ways and Means'?
Well, the question for me is - 'how you keep writing in ways that interest you?' I've noticed since I've gone on that I write more collaboratively. I'm fairly limited as a musician which limits my writing. But I think I do have the ability to put people together and write with them which has happened more over the past few years. Specifically with this record if there's a hook it's in the guitar players (Dan Kelly and Dan Luscombe). I think they give the record a really unique sound and much different to previous records. Dan Kelly is a real idiosyncratic guitar player but he's got deep roots. For a young player he's got a lot of history in his playing and somehow filters it through himself in a strange way. And Dan Luscombe has got a great classicism about his playing and the ability to write memorable parts and riffs. Plus he plays fairly handy keyboard so it's a good combination.

Is 'Ways and Means' a return to a more rootsy outlook after the past few years where you've been using samples and wiggy sounds?
Not deliberately. As I said, Dan Kelly has got really strong roots in his playing but it's kind of a bit mutant with him which I really like. I'm always trying to be traditional and experimental at the same time.

Double albums - especially double albums on cd - are unwieldily beasts because there's so much music. How did you come at releasing 90 minutes of music?
To get rid of them, I guess (laughs). It was just that the tunes were piling up. We always had a plan for a record to come out in 2004 and that was more to do with record company schedule specifically in the UK. So we had to wait and as we did more tunes came along. All of a sudden there was a whole pile of songs. I didn't want to put out an overload on one cd. Pretty early on I thought we'll just split it into two cds. Having said that I do think that records can be too long because I know from being at home that I'll put on a cd and stuff happens and you never get to the end of it. You see a lot of cds that have got 14, 16, 18 tracks and they're 60 or 70 minutes. Part of splitting it was so that people could treat them as two separate records so they can be enjoyed like a normal record.

One of the highlights off the LP is a song called 'Beautiful Feeling' - complete with these fantastic falsetto vocals. How did that come about?
We worked on that for quite a while. That song started with Peter Luscombe bringing in a drum beat and a dweeby little keyboard line that turned into a guitar line. The guitar players harmonized that and we just started playing around with that riff and that beat and it turned into a soul ballad type tune with a 70s Rolling Stones feel which is where the falsetto and high harmonies came from.

What do you feel is the closest you've come to crafting the perfect pop song?
I thought 'Beautiful Feeling' came close but it does get too long and it's a long verse to get to the chorus. I guess you wouldn't call it the perfect pop song - it became something else. I thought 'Before Too Long' was the most classical sounding pop song - short and succinct. 'How to Make Gravy' is one that had all these gear changes in it but, then, it doesn't have any singalong chorus. I mean pop music is the music I love so that's the area I try to work in the most. But I don't think I'm that good at pop music. It ends up becoming something else.

When was the last time you consciously tried to boil down a song to its essential elements to make it as catchy a pop song as possible?
I think that's always part of the process. I think editing is part of writing, a part of pop music and poetry. Poetry is about being concise and saying as much as possible in as few words as possible. It's also a driving force behind good short stories as well. The thing that operates against it sometimes is when the music has got a good groove and you want to sit with it and extend it. For some reason over the past couple of records songs are becoming four or five minutes which tends to take it outside of radio. It's a good question because one part of me is always trying to make things shorter but just lately they've been coming out longer.

You mentioned that on Ways & Means you were trying to write 'happy' love songs. What's the happiest love song you've written?
There are probably more happy love songs on this record than other records. 'Beautiful Feeling' would have to be up there. There weren't that many off the last record. They've always been more 'love-gone-wrong songs' than 'love-gone-right songs' and I think that's because they're easier to write. It's been an ambition of mine for a long time to write more happy love songs but they're really hard to write without being banal or smug or boasting or having the worse elements of modern R&B music.

Despite dealing in universal subjects you have a distinctly Australian slant - how have, say, Americans respond to your records?
Although my language might be an Australian turn of phrase or there might be a word or a term they're a little unfamiliar with, it doesn't make a huge amount of difference. Sometimes that makes the song more interesting. I listen to a lot of music where I don't understand the words. Whether it's someone in another language doesn't really matter. It's music after all, it's not prose. Certainly there's words attached to music but it's the music that gives you a feeling first. A lot of hip hop is language that I'm unfamiliar with, it's really specific local argot. Patois. Slang. Whatever you want to call it. That music gets through to me even if I don't know all the time what's going on. One of the songs that had a huge influence on me as kid was Chuck Berry's 'Memphis, Tennessee'. I've never been to Memphis, Tennessee but I knew what that song was about. It was about a father missing his daughter. So where the song is set shouldn't be any kind of barrier or filter to getting a song. If anyone ever says 'what does that mean in your song?' It's only because they like the song and they're curious. So they're already there.

Are you surprised with how many colloqualisms and local argo you do actually use?
It's funny, yeah, because you're not even aware of them. An Irish friend of mine, who's been living in Australia for about five years, was listening to 'How to Make Gravy' and he said, 'hold your own…I thought that was an Irish expression. I've never heard anyone say that in Australia.' And I thought it was an Australian phrase. You're in your own language so you're often not aware at how it might mean something different in another culture.

Do many songwriters come to you and say they've written a song for you?
I get a few. Not so much face to face but I get a few things in the mail. Haven't heard one for me yet.

What did you make of Stories of Me: A Songwriters Tribute to Paul Kelly?
Um, yeah I thought it was good in places (laughs). I liked the woman (Catherine Britt) who sang 'If I Could Start Today Again' - I thought that was beautiful. I liked the Fourplay String Quartet doing 'You Can Put Your Shoes Under My Bed'. I liked Dave Steel's 'Looks So Fine, Feel So Low'.

Do you find sometimes when people are doing songs of yours that they come across as more dour? The lightness and sense of humour is missing.
Yeah, I think that can happen. Singing someone else's song is a form of translation and I think things often get lost in translation. And humour is one of those things that can often get lost. The humour is in the way you lean on a word and it's so tied into a voice or a tone and that's really hard to take and make your own. I think it's got something to do with translation is my guess.

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©2003 Christopher Hollow