Wild Sovereign Development Site

Tag: songwriter

  • for the ages

    I went to see Paul Kelly play Berlin. I was going with my girlfriend and the evening of, she rang to say: I don’t feel well. I feel so tired and I just need to stay at home and curl on my couch. Can you go on your own?

    I went. Since I left my boyfriend I have been going to a lot of events on my own. I sat with a German couple and the man said to me, “Do you know him?” “Oh,” I said, awkwardly. “I once sat in the same cafe with him in Richmond, in Melbourne. Australia’s not quite that small.”

    This was in the Richmond Hill Cellar and Larder and Paul Kelly was sitting quietly with his friends and I was nutting out the playlist for my album, listening over and over through what we had made with cat-callers and buskers and students of jazz in New York and I looked round the room with my own music in my ears and saw the love: how everyone tried so hard to be courteous and pretend we had not noticed him there.

    “But you know his songs,” this man elucidated now. “I am the same year as him: 1955.”

    He patted himself on the chest, approvingly.

    The audience was filled with Australians. You can tell by the facial expression. A certain kind of friendly lazy openness that lends itself to generalisation. I looked around. You looking at me? asked an older, Australian man behind me when I glanced round. Oh no, I said, I was just… gazing in your direction. He had hopped up. Held his beer up in his hand. Can I come sit with you? Ok, I said, and so he bought me some beers and talked in my ear between the songs. But I hardly heard. I was transported. Someone brought on a bottle of water and stood it next to the central mic. The musicians came onstage and among them were Vika and Linda, the glorious Islander Bulls, it had not occurred to me they’d travel with him. I know they sing backing vocals on his albums. They were radiant and they owned the stage, from its wing. Paul Kelly introduced the new album he had written and they launched it like a ball of flame. These people, and their music.

    Linda sang one song and Vika sang another. In their salty, knowing womanhood they swayed side by side like palms. The beautiful affinity between them bespeaks sisterhood. The rest of the stage was occupied by men. They know each other. They can communicate with a bare glance. I was almost crying. There came a moment when the crowd threw back their heads and yawped, bawling along with the lyrics in our Australian accents: he took it pretty badly: she took both the kids.

    Then they sang How To Make Gravy and I was crying. Surrounded by beautiful, healthy, young Australian men in their t shirts I flung my arms open and one of them snatched me up and hugged me harder than I have ever been held. I emerged from his embrace and his face was wet with my tears. Every time I smiled he smiled back at me. The music finished and they all walked offstage and we weren’t having it, we hammered our feet on the ground and yelled and hollered. Paul Kelly broke the glittering curtains open by himself. The closing song had been a quiet one, “Darling, you’re one for the ages,” and he had spoken the lyrics, shyly, in bad German: mein Liebling, du bist zeitlos. It seemed like he had half the crew of Rockwiz on stage with him and half of those were my Facebook friends. Australia really is that small. Now he took up his guitar in silence and the crowd began to sing to him, irresistible, a capella, “Darling – you’re one for the ages. Darling… you’re one for the ages.”

    A grin tugged at Paul Kelly’s face. He is not a good actor, he is too authentic and sincere, as I had ascertained this evening by watching the film clip for Love is the Law, in which he looks uncomfortable and the film maker’s directions are almost visible on the screen. “Well this is probably my second favourite moment of tonight,” he said. “My favourite was when someone yelled out, ‘En-fucking-core!’” We laughed, proud of ourselves. He started to encore. We all stood still and listened. To awaken stillness in a big crowd is a consecrated kind of gift. Sweat was rolling down my spine and darling, I was one for the angels. When I got home I would hand wash every one of my garments in a trance of caretaking meditation and the beautiful young man had given me his number and so had the older Sydney guy, who sells Blundstones. But for now the rest of the band came back on and played like emperors. Much later, as I stood collecting my warm wrappings for the long bike ride home, a roadie opened the curtain and out the back I could see their white tour bus, Vika Bull standing beside it waiting for the gear to be boxed up and wheeled out, she was smoking a cigarette and our eyes met, and I felt a bolt of womanhood arc out of me and into the vast cold sweet dark Berlin sky which chuckled with the autumn wind, all the way home.

  • apple a day

    Saturday night, home with the one I love. We cycled over to the Korean grocers’ in the freezing cold mist to get ingredients and I made soto ayam, my favourite Javanese chicken soup from childhood. He is nutting something out for himself on the guitar. I read him something I had written earlier, while he was shredding the chicken. Then we lay down for a while in silence and after a long time I said, want to hear the song I wrote on my phone the other day? I can’t remember how it goes. And he listened to it and then said, Cathoel just drop the ‘& the New Government’ and publish your songs as Cathoel. I said, but why? It’s my favourite band name of all time! And so then he told me why, mentioning some features of what he hears in my voice that made me curl my toes with delight.

    The song, I tell him, reading off the tiny screen, is called In the Human Senses of the Word. He closes his eyes. Outside the window it is silent and completely dark. I can see a few lights on in a few other houses. What’s your day like right now? Catch me up.

  • the pickling palace

    The people across the road are drunk and two of them are planning to have sex together tonight for the first time. That’s at this stage, it’s not even dark yet, we’ve still got the Fight that Blows Up Out of Nowhere and Falling Asleep in the Pizza up our sleeves. Their voices carry and then the Friday afternoon traffic will surge up the hill again to carry them away. He says something and she says, “You are fucking kidding me.” “No,” he says, something something. “You’re just making that up!” Her incredulity is a dare. Climb this tree for me and bring that fruit. He says, “No, I’m deadset serious. Anything you like.” One of the other blokes says something and then the girl begins to sing, or chant, like she was at a football game: “Je-sus, Je-sus, Je-sus, Je-sus.” The positive guy sings something over the top of her, harmonizing. He’s making it up. He’s fucking-kidding her. Their verandah falls apart in a seething heap of laughs just as a truck roars down the road. When the noise clears he is saying, aggrieved, “…been doing it all my life.” I know that feeling, I have too. I have just got home from a delicate day of negotiations in my unconscious and as we swept over the bridge with its hanging-lantern streetlights and banners I felt a song unbrew in me. I sang it out the window in handfuls of confetti and as we pulled away from under the biggest fig tree, that the road goes around (the greatest kind of road), I said, to my long-legged companion who was driving, “Did you see that girl on the corner, the beautiful girl, with the guy who’s just so in love with her?” “Yes,” he said, his voice warm as if fond of them. “How she was just standing there in her little purple dress,” I said, “holding the orange flowers he brought her. He’s looking at her so carefully, he’s in love with her every little gesture. She’s not even noticing, telling him something, he’s in love with the way that she says it.” “So is she in love?” he wanted to know. I said, “Could be. But she’s not thinking about it, she is remembering something that happened and telling him. So it was hard to tell.”

    We drove round a sweeping corner prickly with pedestrians. We had watched a giant ibis as it took off from a street sign and flew the length of Charlotte Street, its white wings insignia. The prosperous tropical colonialism and sandstone and big bunches of trees made me feel at home. I wound my seat back and propped my foot out the side window. I said, sentimentally, “Both of them standing there with their bicycles.”

  • this song’s about

    Someone was asking for songwriting ideas and I came up with these. Ideas are easy, it’s the completion that stings.

    Pushing your bicycle past a house where a particular song is playing.

    Seeing a cloud in the shape of something you love, or fear.

    A leaf falls in front of your feet and it makes a sound that reminds you of…

    Waiting at the traffic lights I thought I saw you but….

    The shadow of a church falls into the street, is godliness tipping into traffic?

    Our Prime Minister tours the world like a beauty queen clutching his inadequate speech. Insulting people is his superpower.

    Why we all love the Dalai Lama and conflate him with David Attenborough.

    Imagine being Brad Pitt’s brother, “the homely one.”

  • a singer I’d never heard of

    Our nearest cafe has made such a bold and tender innovation. Simple, really. How shall I describe it? Ok, imagine it’s Monday morning. It’s earlier than you’d like. For reasons unusual you have had to stagger out of bed and you feel grumpy. There’s no milk, argh. You grab your mug and stumble almost literally down the hill. Over your head trees are waving to each other across the asphalt, they would join hands if they could. The crows cark, the traffic spurls, the world is bright and full of love and if I could just get my eyes to open properly I’d see it all. At the bottom of a steep slope there’s a little coffee shop. If you had a billycart you’d be there within seconds. The usual clot of people in suits standing not looking at each other parts on a sweet and familiar sound: a strummed guitar. Monday morning gig! First thing, in the grumpy hour. It’s genius.

    A guy sits curved over a mic whose stand, set at an enquiring angle, seems to be interviewing him. Guitar is plugged into a tiny amp, one of those kerbside amps you carry under one arm. You reach the head of the queue and buy coffee. He is singing. He sings with a tentative grace. The customers, embarrassed, so strenuously ignore him it almost must break his heart. The songs are familiar, radio fodder, he is doing them an injustice. You love him for that. With his voice he breaks open the idea that all songs come fully formed from a studio, there is no struggle, only gloss; that everyone’s life is far better than yours.

    You have had to kind of climb out of your sleep and sleep’s warm privacy to emerge in public city life, to use your vocal chords. Your hair is all over your face and you’re wearing the tshirt you slept in. You lean over and say, You have got the sweetest voice, it’s such a lovely surprise of a Monday morning. Oh! he says: thanks. He takes hold of his guitar differently. Over the back of his machine the barista asks, Did you just request the Beastie Boys? I told him he has the sweetest voice, you say: same thing.

    You are slouched against the besser block wall in the sun. Your hips swing and one clog is knocking on the other, you emit an appreciative murmur when the song is done. This emboldens a man in his suit standing nearby to say, That was better than the original! The singer laughs, thanks him. All of a sudden the music is not invisible and we don’t have to pretend it hasn’t happened. A girl in knee-length boots comes striding in and sits at a spindly table opposite. A guy in a striped tie looks up and smiles. At the end of the next song your coffee is ready, in its own curling-handled brown mug. You can’t leave because you’ve asked the guitarist, Do you write stuff, as well? And very diffidently he has offered: I could pull one of those out… if you like. And he pulls out like a long swathe of coloured scarves knotted one end to the other a lilting song about a little bird; sitting on my shoulder; telling me you’re not the man you use to be. It is a song about self-belief: that thing we’re all in need of. The things this little bird says to him seem cruel and they remind you of the kinds of things your own little bird sometimes whispers, the reasons why you are not also sitting out in the sun in a coffee shop, playing. You think about your dusty guitar and how he said, I haven’t played my own songs for a long time. You notice how he is curled in on himself but from the outside there is nothing not to like: his gentle presence, his tortured and reedy voice, plaintive and frayed but strong inside, like a rope. When the song is done it is a gift that he has given you. You want to give it back, to show it to him. You say, That was really lovely. Have more confidence in your own stuff. Thanks! he says, already sitting up straighter. You look at him and keep seeing yourself. I was so happy when I came down the hill just now! you say: Monday morning gig! it’s brilliant! You’ve made a big difference to my day.

    You pick up your mug off the railing. He ducks his head, says, You’ve made a big difference to my day, too. Thank you, you say again, and leaving the music behind, carrying the music, start walking up the hill for home. Carrying milk and honey and beans. A small swirling land of milk and honey. Pot of steam. A bright morning. A singer you’ve never heard of, but heard, and who heard you. What more can be grace? Come, Monday: come.