“I could see parallels between writing songs and writing short stories,” Paul Kelly tells Apple Music. “They’re both short forms. You have to get a lot of information across in a short time.” For proof of Kelly’s ability in that area, look no further than “To Her Door”, a song about a couple that “hit the skids” so “she took both the kids”. The potential for redemption comes in the second verse, when the husband writes to his wife and says, “I want to see you”, leading to him “shaking in his seat, riding through the streets, in a Silver Top to her door”. Will the reunion work out? We’ll never know. “Ending it unresolved was probably where the [author Raymond] Carver influence came in,” says Kelly. “The thing particularly about Raymond Carver’s stories is that there was always a lot happening around the edges. Often these stories might end with something about to happen or something unresolved. There was a world to continue outside that story.” “To Her Door” may be the centrepiece of Kelly’s second album with backing band The Messengers, but it’s by no means the only highlight. Opening track “Dumb Things” was inspired when the singer overheard two mates talking in a pub, one of whom said, “I’ve done all the dumb things.” The lilting “Bradman” is a tribute to the legendary cricketer, one of Kelly’s favourites. “‘Bradman’ went way back to my childhood, when I would read a lot of cricket books, and there's a famous biography of Bradman by Irving Rosenwater who was a statistician,” recalls Kelly. “I remember reading that book again in my mid-twenties, and ‘Bradman’ started coming out of that.” As ever with Kelly, Australia and its characters provide a rich creative well from which to draw—witness the rollicking “Forty Miles to Saturday Night”, a song about getting ready to blow off steam after a hard week on an Outback station (“There’s a place on Fortune Street/And a band down there called Gunga Din/And Joanne from Miner’s Creek/She said that she’d be back again”).