Never at a loss for words, Dan Kelly talks to DOUG WALLEN about his protracted new album 'Dan Kelly’s Dream', his move to Melbourne’s west and how he spent months trying to write Bindi Irwin out of a song.

By now we know what to expect from Dan Kelly: reference-stuffed songs issued with coy falsetto sitting nicely between indie-rock and folk-pop. His long-gestating new album Dan Kelly’s Dream is certainly all of that, with an environmental conscience and a fantastical streak to boot.

It’s also, according to Kelly, the end of a trilogy that includes 2004’s Sing The Tabloid Blues and 2006’s Drowning In The Fountain Of Youth. Having disbanded his backing unit The Alpha Males and done touring stints with everyone from Augie March and New Zealand singer Bic Runga to his famous uncle Paul, Kelly convened a new band for Dream. He plucked Dallas Packard and Indra Adams from Ground Components and David Williams from Augie March, but completing the record was easier said than done.

He did finally finish Dan Kelly’s Dream – and it’s a doozy. Nodding to “wordy Dylan” and Ray Davies alike, it’s an immensely colourful songwriter album that’s also quite light on its feet. ‘Bindi Irwin Apocalypse Jam’ is charismatic cheek as only Kelly can pull off, while ‘West Coast Fishing Incident’ riffs on Twitter and ‘Stretching Out’ chimes in with Beach Boys harmonies. ‘Poisoned Estuary Jam’ stretches to nearly 10 minutes before the standout ‘Grown Up Solution’ brings the album home.

So you live in Footscray now?
Yeah, I’ve been there about a year.

I used to live in West Footscray. I saw you in the local paper once.
Oh yeah, that was a classic. I think they were just desperate to have anyone who’s actually lived around there. I’ve found a couple of dudes [I know] living around there, but I still feel like a bit of a pioneer at the moment, moving from Northcote to Footscray. Everyone’s like, “What are you doing?”

Well, it’s not so different from how Northcote used to be.
Exactly. All they really need is Footscray is one good venue and one good bar, and you’re off to the races. Or maybe it’ll spoil it. But I like Footscray a lot. I feel like it’s where the rest of the world lives.

“I’m really aware if I go too far in one direction, then it’s going to just be novelty. The last thing I want to do is be some emotional dude who’s writing about his feelings.”

Obviously your new album has a globe-trotting theme. Did living in Footscray have any influence on that, being bombarded by all these different cultures?
Well, it sort of dovetailed. I moved there when I was writing the lyrics, but I really wanted to write a geographical record. I’ve been listening to a lot of African music for a few years. I mean, like everyone; it’s like the zeitgeist. There was a lot of that going on as well. Even stuff like the Latin Playboys, y’know, kind of cyclical guitar music that wasn’t so straight-ahead. It did feel like a really good time to move there. My aunt said she had a house in Footscray I could live in cheap because she wasn’t going to be there. I caught the train over; it was the end of summer last year. Everyone got off the train at Footscray and I was like, “My god, this is so not Northcote. This is like the rest of the world.” It felt really good to do that, just to mix it up a bit. Not that I’ve seen really any African music since I’ve been to Footscray. It’s kind of hard to find out where it is. I’m not very connected to the community.

I guess you’d have to go to an African cafe and ask someone.
Yeah. I’ve tried that a couple times. It’s funny, I go into the one Ethiopian restaurant and they’re playing quite modern stuff [on the stereo]. I’m like, “Have you got the old stuff?” And they’re like, “Ah yeah, we just didn’t think you’d like it.” So if you ask them, they’ll play some of that great old Ethiopian jazz and stuff. They’ve all got it but they don’t think anyone’s into it.

Some tropical music filters into the new record, and you did work with The Ukeladies that’s more Hawaiian. Do you think that kind of native music supports the environmental concerns you address in the songs?
Well, I got on this tropical trip with the record [early on]. On the one hand I got into that whole Santo & Johnny, ’50s reverb, and instrumental music. But I was also getting into really clean-tone guitars like later-period Sonic Youth and Pavement, where it’s really clanging, detuned guitars as opposed to distorted guitars. It’s such an evocative sound. It just to me sounds like undersea, a lot of it. Then I was lucky enough to have friends in The Ukelaides, and I thought I’d do some of my songs with them. They have this kind of Ray Davies adventure/holiday feeling to some of them, so it suited doing it in a Hawaiian way. I suppose I’m still grappling around for ways not to just sound like a boring singer-songwriter. Like to colour it in a bit. So I don’t know if it’s tied into an environmental theme but if I’m writing a song about pollution, it’s good to try and make pollution noises or something. [Laughs] To me it’s a fun part of it.

Listening to the record, there are so many references in the lyrics. But talking to you now, that seems to be the way you talk.
Yeah, I often think maybe I’m too … referential or something. But it does seem to be the way I am. I don’t know if it’s just a post-modernist mishmash.

That goes hand-in-hand with the humour in your songs. How tricky is working that in?
I find that I’m really aware if I go too far in one direction, then it’s going to just be novelty. The last thing I want to do is be some emotional dude who’s writing about his feelings. That just doesn’t suit me. But by the same token, I am trying to figure out my place in the world through these sort of stories. So I feel like, to balance out the humour I have to have some real feeling in there or a theme. Or, if I’ve got a real feeling or a theme in there, I have to balance it out with the humour. It just seems to be the way I’ve worked out how to write songs. It was always a real struggle. I was like, “Well, I’m not that great, so how the fuck do I do this?” I think I just developed this way of doing it that seems to suit me. Obviously it’s not the most original thing. You can go back and pick some of the key things that probably influence me but it still seems to be my way into figuring out how to tell these stories. And yeah, they’re pretty punchline-orientated. There’s always a punchline somewhere. Maybe that’s just the way I am. Again, I’m really wary because I don’t know if you’ve met comedians in real life, but fuck they’re the most boring people in the world. So I’m trying desperately hard to not be that guy or a novelty kind of muso.

The lyrics are quite observational but sort of fantasy at the same time.
It must be the guys I got into … I’m probably more influenced by writers. Certainly someone like Nicholson Baker, who’s this weird mix of sex and science. And Salman Rushdie I really love. Peter Carey as well, who I suppose you’d call a magical realist. They’re really rooted in real human emotion and often quite intense stories but then something quite fantastical will happen. And again probably going back to The Kinks. Somehow he [Ray Davies] would be writing about the suburbs but you’d feel like it was this whole world. I really got into that whole adventure/escape style. Maybe it’s just because I’m sitting in my room in Footscray and desperate to make myself sound more interesting than I am. [Laughs]

Well, Ray Davies was so domesticated when he was writing all those songs and taking those flights of fancy.
Yeah, I remember reading in his autobiography that he was at home with a kid and a wife. Again, I’m not trying to compare myself to Ray Davies, but certainly maybe his style. And Jonathan Richman as well, lyrically. And Robert Forster too: he can be very poised but also quite sort of queenly. It’s not too straight. He’s an eccentric. It’s not like I specifically listen to those artists more than anyone else but they seem to be the ones who point the way for me.

To change the subject slightly, I was wondering how the band came together for this record. I know the Alpha Males dissolved and you were solo for a bit.
I really changed my approach playing solo. I think I gained a lot of confidence in myself in terms of these songs. I would tell a big preamble and then the song would almost become the punchline. And the people who came to see me would all of the sudden get what all the old songs were about, that it wasn’t just a massive wall of falsetto guitar. There’s a story. I really wanted to write songs I could then go out and do in the same way, that I wouldn’t lose that connection even if I got a band. So I did the thing with The Ukeladies and did a few songs for that. Then I demoed the rest myself at home, writing a lot of it in Northcote and then Footscray. I had a pretty clear idea of what I wanted to do. I wanted it to sound almost like a mid-’60s Bob Dylan record. Hence a lot of the really obvious Dylan references, like the title for example. [Laughs]

I recorded a lot of the demos with that real wiry ’60s sound, quite thin with lots of slap delay. Once that was done, I was like, “Who can I get to play on this?” I basically just asked around. And Indra and Dallas … the last big Alpha Males tour, Ground Components were the support. I just really like [The Groundies]. They’ve got a lot of spirit and they have a real ’60s feeling – even though they were a modern-sounding band to my ear. And Dave I just had made friends with because I’d played guitar for Augie March as sort of a sixth wheel for a little bit. I was about to do the record and needed someone really quick. Dave came and did a jam and it just worked. We worked on it for about two months in little rehearsal studios and started to get a bit of a sound. It was quite a funky sound because Dale was mostly just playing Rhodes and Indra is the first bass player I’ve played with who actually played the bass, as opposed to a guitar player. Gareth [Liddiard] from The Drones and Lewis [Boyes] from St Helens were my two bass players before that. They were both brilliant but it was the first time it had ever felt like it had a real groove. So that did shape the record. Some of the songs ended up a bit swingin’ and I threw my stuff on top of that.

I don’t want to get too bogged down in this but I know there was a prolonged birthing process for the album. You recorded all over, including in London. What clicked where you knew everything was finally the way you wanted it?
All I knew, to cut a long story short, was that after the initial month’s tracking with Burke [Reid in Daylesford, Victoria] – and we even went into mixing for a bit – I’d talked myself into making this [type of] record, thinking that would be the best thing I could do. And after a month, I was like, “Well, I’ve sort of got it but it’s boring.” From my end, y’know. I couldn’t work with Burke anymore because we’d run out of time and I’d run out of money, so I went back and did it in London with Aaron [Cupples] from The Alpha Males. We did the last record together. We basically just coloured it in. It clicked when all the music told the story of the lyrics. I stopped imposing this dogma on it where it’s got to be minimalist and funky. It felt finished about two days before I finished it, I think, unfortunately. [Laughs]

Does that mean you listen back and regret some of the final touches?
No, I’m pretty happy now. It’s actually still more minimal than the last record, surprisingly enough. I feel like I did what I had to do. It’s not boring. I think I’ll do my minimalist funky record when I’ve actually written the songs with that in mind, rather than trying to impose that on these songs that were written in my head as big epic stories. I hope that I get to that point because I just think it would be a lot easier. [Laughs]

There’s a mention in the press kit that this record is third in a trilogy. Do you have a feeling of closure now?
A little bit. Again, I’m not really writing about myself, but it was about figuring out my place. All three records seem like these adventure songs to me and I don’t know if that’s something I’ll keep doing. I think it developed really well between the three but it would be a bit tired if I came back with another “Dan Kelly Goes To South America” record.

I remember seeing these updates on M+N where it was like, “OK, the album’s now called this and now called this”.
Oh god. [Laughs]

At one point it was “The Decommissioner”, which is a song title on the album. And Dan Kelly’s Dream is also a song title. How did you arrive at the final title?
Well, I got onto the idea of writing this eco-terrorist musical, which is an idea I’d had in my head for a while. I don’t really like musicals, but it was a way of almost geeing myself into action. I had a lot of music and not a lot of lyrics but I had a lot of ideas. Because I’d had two-and-a-half years of just pottering along and playing with other people. And not wanting to repeat myself after the last record, I got on this trip and wrote that song ‘The Decommissioner’ and started writing other songs to fit into that. So at that point I was telling people it was going to be called “The Decommissioner”.

But then in the end a lot of the songs have this underlying theme, which is a slight bit of eco-paranoia. Even though it’s not the message, it’s in the background, which just reflects what I was thinking about. Then I got to the point where I was writing songs and they all separated out a bit. ‘The Decommissioner’ is a semi-violent song, I suppose, where the guy actually blows up a power station. And y’know, it’s not me but I was probably tempted to stir up a bit of shit … I was pretty bummed out about Copenhagen. But I didn’t want it to be the overall theme of the record. There were a lot of themes and it just didn’t fit to all be about this one guy. So I don’t know if it’s a Bob Dylan tribute, but Dan Kelly’s Dream just seemed to make more sense. Because it’s the song that goes all the places the rest of the record goes, I suppose it ties it up a bit.

And it’s a way to accommodate the fantasy element of the songs.
Yeah, it’s a classic: it was just a dream. A lot of people say it’s a weak way to do it. And I generally will skip past any section with italics in a book. I’m like, “Oh no, dream sequence.” But I sort of played with that. And yeah, it did just give me a way in. You probably pinpointed that before. I was using all these things – whether it was a press release or a song or an idea for a musical – just trying to gee myself into getting it done and getting the concept there in the end. I had to have some false starts … well, not false starts but I had to lead myself up a few different paths before I felt like it all started to work as a collection of songs.

And you managed to fit Bindi Irwin in there.
[Laughs] Look, I spent months trying to write her out.

I was wondering if you had any reservations.
Oh, totally. Like we talked about this novelty thing. It’s the last thing I want to do, even though I enjoy making people laugh and getting involved in the songs. My general ethos is: if you don’t laugh, you might as well jump off a cliff. I just wrote the Bindi song and couldn’t write her out. It was really catchy and I don’t have that many mega-catchy choruses. Then I thought my best option was to write in all this stuff that makes sense with that, so I wrote in Terri. That song did pretty well on radio but probably not enough that it will plague me the rest of my life. I mean, imagine this aged rocker with McCartney jowls in 20 years having to sing that.

Have you written any songs since this record?
Not really. I mean, I only really finished when I finished. I was literally dotting the i’s and crossing the t’s up to the last moment. As soon as I came back [from London] I did the Paul Dempsey support tour and then my own tour. Before I know it, it’s now. [After] the last record, I let all that [solo work] drop for a while because [Fountain Of Youth] was kind of an epic. I went, “Whew, don’t want to think about that anymore.” Because I don’t find it super easy. It’s a lot of editing and soul-searching and searching for themes. But the problem was, I let it go too long and it was really hard to get back into it. That’s why I had to play a lot of games with myself.

I wasn’t sure if you’re one of those songwriters who’s always writing in some form.
Lyrically, no. I mean, I store stuff away. But I don’t ever really write a lyric until I’ve got some music. Or I might have a little phrase to go with the music. I’ve got a million ideas on my computer or my iPhone or my old phone that I’ll put down if I’m just strumming away. And generally I’ll mould them into songs over a period of time. I’m chipping away at these ideas in my head all the time but I’m not sitting around just going, “Ah, busted out another song.” God, my life would be heaps easier if I did, I reckon. It also might be shit. Hopefully the next one won’t take three years.

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Dan Kelly and his Dream Band will perform a free show at 1000 £ Bend in Melbourne’s CBD tomorrow (July 16) as part of the M+N Lunchbox series. More details here. Dan Kelly’s Dream is out July 16 through Shock.