NEW YORK (AP) — To many Australians, Saturday is extra than simply Dec. 21. It is “Gravy Day,” all due to a lyric in probably the most unlikely Christmas songs ever written.
“How to Make Gravy,” written by singer Paul Kelly, has turn out to be a vacation basic in Australia over the previous few a long time. It was cited this week by the nation’s prime minister, Anthony Albanese, as he introduced a call to launch 5 drug smugglers from jail, and is the topic of a brand new film that creates a narrative behind the tune.
“It has become our most-loved Christmas song,” Jeff Jenkins, of the Australian publication The Music, wrote this week.
The story is ready in a jail, the lyrics coming from a letter an inmate writes to his brother to go alongside a recipe for the household’s Christmas dinner. The tune is about far more, although, as “Joe” expresses remorse, longing, worry, paranoia, some humor and the near-universal vacation emotion of somebody who needs to be some other place.
The prisoner is writing, because the tune says in its second line, on the twenty first of December, “and now they’re ringing the last bells.”
The inspiration behind ‘Gravy Day’
Kelly wrote “How to Make Gravy” in 1996 after being requested to contribute to a vacation album being put collectively for charity. He needed to file a canopy of the Band’s “Christmas Must Be Tonight,” however another person had already claimed it. So Kelly tried placing phrases to a melody he had kicking round.
Inspiration got here from certainly one of his favourite vacation albums, “A Christmas Gift for You from Phil Spector,” and Darlene Love’s recording of the basic “White Christmas.” Love contains author Irving Berlin’s often-bypassed first verse, the place the singer talks of being in Los Angeles whereas wishing to be someplace snowy and chilly.
“There’s a clue,” Kelly mentioned in a TED discuss explaining the tune’s origins, and off he went.
The story of ‘Gravy Day’
Within the tune, “Joe” imagines the household gathering with out him. “Who’s going to make the gravy now?” he mentioned. “I bet it won’t taste the same.” He passes alongside a recipe, one Kelly acquired in actual life from a former father-in-law.
The narrator asks his brother to kiss the sleeping youngsters, and to “give my love to Angus, and to Frank and Dolly. Tell ‘em all I’m sorry I screwed up this time.”
He gossips about Mary and her new boyfriend. “Do you remember the last one? What was his name again? What was his problem? He never did get Nina Simone.” In efficiency, Kelly has often changed Simone with Joey Ramone or “a little too much cologne.”
He asks Dan to take care of his spouse Rita, and photos the dancing after dinner. “Just don’t hold her too close, oh brother please don’t stab me in the back,” he sings, shortly catching himself to notice the idle time in jail that “turns imagination into fact.”
The conclusion is a promise: “I’m gonna pay ’em all back.”
An uncommon vacation tune with lasting resonance
Kelly’s love for Shakespeare, the bard’s mixture of comedy and drama, can also be evident within the composition. One in every of Kelly’s first clues that he had tapped into one thing was a name from his real-life brother. He’d been driving and heard the tune for the primary time over the radio, and needed to pull to the facet of the street in tears.
It is a vacation tune with out mistletoe or holly. Structurally, it would not have a catchy refrain, or any refrain in any respect. But as years glided by, his followers would request the tune in live performance all yr, not simply the vacations. A few of them started marking Dec. 21 by leaving a can of gravy on their entrance porches.
“I can’t predict what songs will become popular or speak to my audience,” Kelly mentioned this fall in an interview with The Related Press, and “Gravy” is a major instance.
The evocation of household is the tune’s most vital ingredient. Kelly’s personal giant household gathers every Christmas Eve to sing carols. Bella O’Grady, a 27-year-old girl who moved to New York and attended a Kelly live performance in New York this fall for a style of house, mentioned “How to Make Gravy” all the time evokes heat emotions of vacation celebrations.
Typically very heat. Whereas lots of the tune’s feelings are common, a reference within the lyrics to anticipated warmth on Christmas Day — “I hear it’s going to be 100 degrees” — locations the setting clearly in Australia. Down underneath, the vacation is initially of summer time.
Gravy Day in Australia this yr
Prime Minister Albanese alluded to “Gravy Day” in his choice this week to launch the 5 males who had been convicted in 2005 of smuggling heroin from Indonesia to Australia.
“Australians speak about what it’s like to have someone who’s a loved one — they sing the great Paul Kelly song — in jail over Christmas,” Albanese mentioned, in line with The Nightly. “Who’s going to make the gravy? Well, these families had their loved ones in jail for 20 Christmases, and that was enough.”
Utilizing the characters in Kelly’s tune and constructing a narrative round it, filmmaker Nick Waterman made a film of “How to Make Gravy” this yr that’s airing on the Australian streaming service Binge. It’s being proven in some film theaters free on “Gravy Day” weekend.
So what’s in that gravy recipe, anyway? “Just add flour, salt, a little red wine and don’t forget a dollop of tomato sauce for sweetness and that extra tang.”
It is all within the tune.
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David Bauder writes concerning the intersection of media and leisure for the AP. Comply with him at http://x.com/dbauder and https://bsky.app/profile/dbauder.bsky.social.
