Forty-five years into his career and now celebrating his 70th birthday, Paul Kelly shows no signs of slowing down. Today, the Australian music icon announced his new album, Seventy, due November 7, and unveiled a long-awaited sequel to his beloved 1996 song “How To Make Gravy”. The new single, “Rita Wrote A Letter”, is equal parts quietly devastating and darkly comic — a continuation of a story that has lived in the hearts of fans for nearly three decades.
First introduced in How To Make Gravy, the characters Dan, Joe, and Rita have become part of Australian musical folklore. This time, Kelly tells the tale from Rita’s perspective. “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 explains. “About five years ago, I wrote down the words, ‘Rita wrote a letter,’ and thought, ‘There’s my title.’”
The idea, however, stalled for years. “I scratched away intermittently and fruitlessly for several years, but never got very far until Dan Kelly sent me a recording of something he’d written on piano with a rough melody over the top. The words started rolling after that. 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!”
Seventy promises to be a pure storytelling record, crafted with the tight-knit group of musicians who have shared Kelly’s journey for decades. “Looking back on what we’ve done with these songs, it’s really a band record,” Kelly says. “Peter Luscombe has been with me for more than 30 years, Bill McDonald and Dan Kelly for 20. Even the newbies, Cameron Bruce and Ash Naylor, have been with me since 2007.”
Kelly describes the album’s structure like a night of yarn-spinning around a fire. “Telling stories is deeply human and has been since we started to become humans,” he says. “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.”
Before the album’s release, Kelly will embark on the biggest tour of his career, playing ten arena shows across Australia and New Zealand in August and September. Lucinda Williams and Fanny Lumsden will join him on the Australian dates, with Reb Fountain supporting in New Zealand.
Tickets for Paul Kelly 2025 Australia/New Zealand tour are available from Frontier Touring
You can pre-order Seventy in a number of bundles from Paul Kelly’s official store.