Paul Kelly is marking his 70th year with SEVENTY, a new album landing November 7th, and a single nearly 30 years in the making.
“Rita Wrote a Letter” picks up the story from his 1996 classic “How to Make Gravy”, only this time with Rita “loud and clear,” and Joe still talking from beyond the grave.
“I’ve been mulling over the idea of a sequel to ‘How to Make Gravy’ from Rita’s point of view for quite some time,” Kelly says. “About five years ago I wrote down the words, ‘Rita wrote a letter,’ and thought, ‘There’s my title.’”
After “scratching around fruitlessly” for several years, his nephew Dan sent Kelly a recording of something he’d written on the piano with a rough melody over the top.
“The words started rolling after that,” Kelly says. “As often happens, they took me by surprise. You could say the song took a dark turn but to my mind it’s a black comedy. A ghost story. You hear Rita’s voice loud and clear, but Joe talks even more. I couldn’t shut him up!”
The song’s lyrics cut with the kind of wit and weight Kelly’s famous for: “Rita wrote a letter / One you don’t want to get from your wife / When Rita writes a letter / The pen is sharper than the knife.”
Its video — directed by Imogen McCluskey, starring Justine Clarke, and produced by Jessica Carrera — leans into the haunted humour. “”I was inspired to tap into my own family’s ghost stories when approaching the creative for Paul Kelly’s ‘Rita Wrote a Letter’,” McClusky says. “Often funny and tender, they speak to the thin membrane between this world and the next, and the messages that reach us from beyond the grave. I hope the iconic lore of Rita and Joe continues to touch PK fans new and old.”
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The release follows an eyebrow-raising stunt from Kelly earlier this week, when he published a death notice for Joe in The Age. The obituary claimed the character died of “sudden misadventure” and listed his family — Dan, Rita, Stella, Roger, Mary, Angus, Frank, and Dolly — alongside a nod to his love of reggae and Junior Murvin, before announcing an August 14th funeral “followed by a wake to end all wakes.”
SEVENTY sees Kelly mixing ghost stories with literary adaptations (“Sailing to Byzantium”), heartfelt notes to family (“Happy Birthday, Ada Mae”), and tales of old friends, unbridled desire, and “breathing in apples on the morning breeze.”
At its heart, SEVENTY is Paul Kelly storytelling at its finest, and it has been specially curated to flow in a particular way. “Telling stories is deeply human and has been since we started to become humans,” says Kelly. “A bit like what happens in my family at Christmas time with people doing an item, singing a song, telling a joke, telling a story. The third song on the record is a ghost story! That’s what you do when you’re sitting around the fire.”
Kelly will take the album on his biggest-ever Australia and New Zealand tour this August and September, playing ten arena shows with Lucinda Williams, Fanny Lumsden, and Reb Fountain. It’ll be his only live run of 2025 — and if Joe’s “wake” is anything to go by, fans can expect a celebration worthy of the stories it tells.
Paul Kelly’s “Rita Wrote a Letter” is streaming now.
