I reckon I could well be the first to cut through the myth and legend around the unusual circumstances surrounding the birth of 63-year-old Australian singer-songwriter Paul Kelly.
Wherever you look to check out his back story, reference is made to his arrival on this Earth in 1955 in the back seat of a taxi. Of course I had to ask.
"No, they've all got it wrong, sort of," Kelly says. "Supposedly, I popped out on to the floor of the car, which happened to be a Morris Minor, rather than a taxi. The story seems to have been embellished every time it is referred to. Morris Minors, of course, were pretty snazzy cars back then in suburban Adelaide."
That's old history, of course, for a musician very much focused on the present. And the present for the prolific Kelly involves a new album, naturally enough; called Naturally.
In the record company blurb for the new record, Kelly name-checks JJ Cale's debut LP, Naturally, as an important influence on how he approaches music. As it happens, I had finally got around to replacing my vinyl copy of Naturally the day before we hooked up for a chat.
With Nature, Kelly has taken an entirely different approach to writing songs, which has renewed his passion for creating new music.
"My older brothers, as they do, had introduced me to the JJ Cale record and I began thinking about it again when I was putting Nature together. JJ Cale wrote a lot of short songs, but they never sounded too short, even if they were only two minutes twenty. So yes, JJ Cale gave me the confidence, I guess, to feel OK if I performed a short song," Kelly says.
Confidence should not have been an issue for Kelly. He can fairly be described as the godfather of Australian rock music. He's recorded more than 25 albums, won 14 Aria awards, and has two songs in Australia's list of the top 30. He's received the Order of Australia, and his life in music is honoured in Stories of Me, a 2012 rockumentary.
But at the same time, it is clear Kelly was looking for a new way in to the music for this new album.
"As well as the JJ Cale connection, the big difference came about when I first started putting poems to music for a classical music collaboration in 2012," Kelly says.
"I'd just never thought of that way to write songs before, so it really opened my eyes to the possibilities. I think most writers get sick of themselves and their own habits, so it's been a happy surprise, after 40 years of writing songs, to find a new way.
"Five of the songs from Nature are actually poems written by others; Dylan Thomas, Sylvia Plath, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Walt Whitman and Phillip Larkin. Four others, A Bastard like me, Little Wolf, Seagulls of Seattle and The River Song, are poems that I wrote and later put to music. The other three came along the usual way as sounds sung to chords that then turned into words, sometimes slowly, sometimes in a rush.
"As the name of the album confirms, what links them all is the natural world; trees, birds, animals, plants, dust, desert, water and human nature's small place in that world. Most of my pieces were written over the last four years, but I didn't realise I had the makings of another album until I put the songs in a folder and saw the titles staring me in the face."
Kelly went into the studio in March and May this year with his usual companions: Peter Luscombe on drums, Bill McDonald on bass, Ash Naylor and Dan Kelly (his nephew) on guitars and Cameron Bruce playing keyboards.
"I love playing with them. They can morph from delicate scientists to big riff rockers and all states in-between."
Nature also features many women singers: Australia duo Vika and Linda, Kelly's daughters Madeleine and Memphis Kelly, Melbourne songstress Alice Keath, who sang on Kelly's album Seven Sonnets & a Song, and the classically trained Kate Miller-Heidke, who plays the siren luring a lover to their death in Born to Follow.
The first single from the record is With the One I Love.
"It comes with a clip that was directed by Sian Darling and shot in Melbourne's old magistrate court," Kelly says, "where Ned Kelly was tried and sentenced to death in 1880."
Paul Kelly's new album Nature was released on October 12.
