Dan Kelly is essentially a storyteller. He’s a guy who grew up peering out of school class windows with his active imagination pondering the creative possibilities outside rather than digesting the practical information being presented in front of him. As an adult living in rural Victoria he still gazes out the window, looking at and thinking about the world around him. In fact, as he tells us in our interview about the creation of his new album Goldfeels, an early morning contemplative coffee and cigarette outside the backdoor set the scene for his daily impending songwriting sessions.
Listening to a Dan Kelly song immediately conjures visions of places and characters. His music can be so expressive that it negates the need for explanatory video clips … although he creates those too (See the clip to the track ‘Golden Shoes = Country Blues’ below). From the evocative banjo intro to his new album album, Dan draws you into the world as he sees it. On Goldfeels, he illustrates both a harsh and beautiful perspective of his country. The album was created after a devastating period in Australia’s history of flood, fire, and covid lockdowns. Adding to Dan’s heaviness of heart was the deep personal grief he was suffering due to the passing of his father. It took the encouragement of his mate, musician and producer of this album Dan Luscombe (The Drones) to press Kelly to write his way out of his funk and return to creating music.
The resultant recording, Goldfeels is a triumphant emergence from the dark. As Kelly tells us, he didn’t know if he was even capable of creating music anymore. Most of the record was written on a seventies-era wooden Yamaha piano, an instrument he was learning to play as much as he was attempting to summon songs from it. Rather than attempting to play intricate notes, Dan was more concerned with chord shapes and as you’ll hear from the album, those chord structures contain a tremendous amount of feeling.
Prior to the release of ‘Goldfeels’ (out September 6), Australian Musician editor Greg Phillips spoke to Dan Kelly via zoom about the creation of his fabulous new album.
MORE ABOUT DAN KELLY
Dan Kelly isn’t just a songwriter; he’s a world-builder. The multiple ARIA and AMP Award nominee’s albums arrive after years of refinement, craftwork and tinkering. The music goes far beyond anything obvious or straight ahead to encompass the nexus of Dan’s idiosyncratic perspective, unerring gift for character portraiture and impressionistic storytelling. Each record acts like an epic Australian novel, but the arresting effervescent imagination of his beautiful melodies, masterful guitarwork and the saturated texture of the production.
Dan’s breakthrough albums with his band The Alpha Males, Sing The Tabloid Blues (2004), and the J Award-nominated Drowning In The Fountain Of Youth (2006) painted a frenetic portrait of Melbourne’s share house life. Dan Kelly’s Dream (2010) presented a series of vignette travelogues of eccentrics and outsiders. Leisure Panic! (2015) made his focus geographical, a panorama of Northern New South Wales, introducing more folk and pastoral elements into his signature anime-inflected adventure rock.
A rumination on cycles of time, GOLDFEELS, takes us on a journey through the goldfields of Dja Dja Wurrung land in Central Victoria.
Birthed from a maelstrom of family grief and pandemic isolation, the album sounds as wide open as the landscapes that inspired it. Written by Dan alone at the piano, the album is sonically sparser than the infinite layer cake sound of previous records, with propulsive percussive energy locked into a heavy, steady groove. GOLDFEELS holds you in dawn and dusk, moments of reflection and speculation. Biblical imagery and apocalyptic raveups sit alongside lost love, the insidious pull of online radicalisation, environmental degradation and classic DK character odysseys like the epic Sea Shepherd Cook.
Produced and engineered by multi-instrumentalist Dan Luscombe (Courtney Barnett, The Drones, Amyl And The Sniffers), the album also features a crème de la crème, de la crème, crème de la crème of Australia’s most respected musicians: Tropical Fuck Storm’s Erica Dunn and Lauren Hammel, Jess Ribeiro, Amanda Roff (Harmony, Time For Dreams, Don Walker), Ben Woolley (Marlon Williams), award-winning saxophonist Julien Wilson, Gus Agars (Marlon Williams, Robyn Hitchcock), Peter Luscombe (Paul Kelly, The Black Sorrows) and Tom Lyncolgn (Harmony, Nation Blue).
While the album deals with darker and heavier themes than he has explored previously, it still brims with unexpected and invigorating moments of music on every track, pulling from influences from the most idiosyncratic sides of Sly Stone, Neil Young and John Lennon, flavours of yacht rock and classic indie rock.
Mostly, it still sounds like Dan Kelly music, just the next evolution forward for an artist who has always been driven to find new frontiers of imagination and exploration.
GOLDFEELS Track listing:
1. Intro
2. Goldfields Doctor
3. At The Bushfire Benefit
4. Golden Shoes
5. Back To The Garden
6. Lakes Of Menindee
7. Burn Up With The Trees
8. Sea Shepherd Cook
9. The Hero Is You
10. Regional Crisis
11. Escape From The Internet
‘GOLDFEELS’ out via Golden Point Records via Metropolitan Groove Merchants on September 6th, 2024