How To Make Gravy

Cover Type: Hardcover
Book Condition: Fine
Jacket Condition: Fine
Publisher: Hamish Hamilton
Publisher Place: Australia
Publisher Year: 2010
Edition: First Edition

Description: 568 pages. Book and Jacket appear to have hardly been read and are both in Fine condition throughout.

Publishers Description: This extraordinary book has its genesis in a series of concerts first staged in 2004. Over four nights Paul Kelly performed, in alphabetical order, one hundred of his songs from the previous three decades. In between songs he told stories about them, and from those little tales grew How to Make Gravy, a memoir like no other. Each of its hundred chapters, also in alphabetical order by song title, consists of lyrics followed by a story, the nature of the latter taking its cue from the former. Some pieces are confessional, some tell Kellys personal and family history, some take you on a road tour with the band, some form an idiosyncratic history of popular music, some are like small essays, some stand as a kind of how-to of the songwriters art from the point of inspiration to writing, honing, collaborating, performing, recording and reworking.Paul Kelly is a born storyteller. Give him two verses with a chorus or 550 pages, but he wont waste a word. How to Make Gravy is a long volume thats as tight as a three-piece band. There isnt a topic this man cant turn his pen to contemporary music and the people who play it, football, cricket, literature, opera, social issues, love, loss, poetry, the land and the history of Australia … there are even quizzes. The writing is insightful, funny, honest, compassionate, intelligent, playful, erudite, warm, thought-provoking. Paul Kelly is a star with zero pretensions, an everyman who is also a renaissance man. He thinks and loves and travels and reads widely, and his musical memoir is destined to become a classic it doesnt have a bum note on it.

ISBN: 9781926428222