Paul Kelly walked into the WFPK studio sounding like a man who’s made peace with not having to explain himself anymore. Not because he couldn’t — clearly, he could talk songcraft, poetry, and structure all day — but because after a few decades and a few hundred songs, explanation starts to feel optional. He was in Louisville for a show at Zanzibar, backed by a full band and harmony singers, touring behind Life Is Fine, a record whose title sounds deceptively casual until you sit with it for a second too long.
“Life is fine,” Kelly said, testing the phrase out loud. “It can be a fine thread. Life is fragile. I like the ambiguity of that phrase.” He laughed a little. “It’s one of those dangerous words, you know. Someone says, ‘I’m fine,’ and you don’t really know what that means.”
The album itself was a gear shift. After a run of concept-heavy projects — Shakespeare sonnets set to music, songs traditionally sung at funerals — Kelly felt the need for contrast. “I always knew I wanted to follow those records with something completely different,” he said. “High contrast.” The label nudged him gently toward a “normal record,” but Kelly admitted the instinct was mutual. “It was my idea as much as theirs.”
That doesn’t mean he sat down and decided to write pop songs again. Kelly doesn’t work that way. “Songs come pretty randomly,” he said. “I just collect them as I write them.” Over time, patterns emerge, conversations form between songs, and suddenly there’s a record taking shape. “When you’ve got six or seven that are talking to each other,” he said, “it helps you write the extra few you need.”
For someone this far into his career — Life Is Fine lands somewhere around album number 23, depending on how you count — the obvious question is whether verse-chorus-bridge ever starts to feel like a trap. Kelly didn’t dodge it. “There are so many ways to make verse-chorus-bridge work,” he said, “but yeah, it’s good to refresh yourself by trying out different things.”
Lately, that refresh has come through poetry. Not just reading it, but inhabiting its structure. “A lot of poems aren’t written in that style,” he said. “You just write the music straight through.” With Shakespeare, Kelly found something unexpected: the sonnet already behaves like a pop song. “Eight lines, then the turn — that’s like a bridge — and then the couplet,” he said. “Sometimes you can use that couplet as a chorus.”
The record’s final track goes even further back, borrowing its bones from a poem by Langston Hughes. “The last song is based on a Langston Hughes poem called ‘Life Is Fun,’” Kelly said. “That one actually reads like song lyrics.” When adapting poetry, Kelly’s rule is simple: respect the words. “If you’re taking a poem by someone else and putting it to music,” he said, “you don’t mess around with it too much. They did a pretty good job the first time.”
Live, Kelly doesn’t try to compress his entire catalog into a greatest-hits sprint. Instead, the show mirrors his thinking. “We play the new record as a piece first,” he said. “Straight through. That’s the first 40 minutes.” After that, the past opens up. Old songs. Newer ones. Some he remembers instantly, others he has to re-learn if a request sticks in his head long enough. “I usually remember the song,” he said, smiling, “but not always how to do it.”
In the studio, those ideas weren’t theoretical. Kelly and his band played “Josefina,” a song he pointed out “doesn’t really have a verse-chorus structure — it’s got a one-word chorus.” Later came “Letter in the Rain,” quiet, patient, and devastating in the way only restraint can be.
Listening to Kelly talk about structure, it’s clear he doesn’t see form as limitation. It’s just another tool. “All kinds of other songs come along,” he said. “You do them as they arrive.” That openness — to ambiguity, to borrowed forms, to not knowing exactly what “fine” means — is what keeps the work alive.
After all these years, Kelly isn’t chasing reinvention for its own sake. He’s following the songs where they lead, whether that’s Shakespeare, Langston Hughes, or a three-minute band record that shrugs and smiles while quietly breaking your heart. Life isn’t great. Life isn’t terrible. Life, as he keeps reminding us, is fine — and that’s a lot bigger than it sounds.
Listen to the interview and performances above and then check out "Firewood and Candles" below!
