Saw Paul Kelly last Wednesday night in Seattle, just a couple of nights after seeing Steve Van Zandt lead a sixteen piece band R&B band thru a blistering two and a half hour show at another venue.

They don't call it Rocktober in Seattle for nothing, and indeed the music scene comes alive here every Fall, at least as far as music I want to hear.

So ... Paul Kelly: Last Wednesday was the third time I've seen him in concert. That I saw him at all is a debt of thanks I owe to Peter T. and Big Al. Both were on me for years, talking him up and sending me CD's.

I saw him for the first time probably five or six years ago. He was playing a small dinner club with his nephew Dan Kelly, doing a two night presentation of the longer A-Z Concerts. He and Dan spent the first night playing Paul's song catalogue in alphabetical order from A-L. The second night completed the sequence M-Z.

Shannon and I were hooked. I had liked the CD's Peter and Al sent but seeing Kelly live was hypnotic: he was charming, genial, and above all a songwriter in a class of his own.

He came thru Seattle a couple of years later to the same club following the relaese of "Spring and Fall" and announced he was going to play the entire new album thru from start to finish, solo, for the first time.

Last Wednesday was the first time I got to hear him fronting a band. They played the new album "Life is Fine" from start to finish and then devoted the second half of the show to older material. The band is fabulous and featured the Bull sisters, Vika and Linda, on backing vocals. They each got a solo during the evening and knocked the place out.

Shannon and I bought a ticket for our friend Mike, who has done a lot of housesitting and cat care for us, as a way of thanks. Mike's a musically astute cat, easily conversant about any genre of music you can bring up. But he had never heard, or heard of, Paul Kelly. At the end of Kelly's new song, "Petrichor", I looked over to see Mike wiping his eyes, obviously tremendously moved.

Kelly had added, seamlessly as a last verse, a line from Dylan's "I Want You":

The cracked bells and washed-out horns Blow into my face with scorn But it’s not that way I wasn’t born to lose you