To many Australians, Saturday is extra than simply Dec. 21. It is “Gravy Day,” all due to a lyric in one of the vital unlikely Christmas songs ever written.

“How one can Make Gravy,” written by singer Paul Kelly, has turn out to be a vacation traditional in Australia over the previous few many years. It was cited this week by the nation’s prime minister, Anthony Albanese, as he introduced a choice to launch 5 drug smugglers from jail, and is the topic of a brand new film that creates a narrative behind the music.

“It has turn out to be our most-loved Christmas music,” 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 cross alongside a recipe for the household’s Christmas dinner. The music is about way more, although, as “Joe” expresses remorse, longing, worry, paranoia, some humor and the near-universal vacation emotion of somebody who needs to be elsewhere.

The prisoner is writing, because the music says in its second line, on the twenty first of December, “and now they’re ringing the final bells.”

The inspiration behind ‘Gravy Day’

Kelly wrote “How one can Make Gravy” in 1996 after being requested to contribute to a vacation album being put collectively for charity. He wished to file a canopy of the Band’s “Christmas Should 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 one in all his favourite vacation albums, “A Christmas Present for You from Phil Spector,” and Darlene Love’s recording of the traditional “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 is a clue,” Kelly stated in a TED discuss explaining the music’s origins, and off he went.

The story of ‘Gravy Day’

Within the music, “Joe” imagines the household gathering with out him. “Who’s going to make the gravy now?” he stated. “I wager it will not style the identical.” 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 kids, and to “give my like to Angus, and to Frank and Dolly. Inform ‘em all I’m sorry I screwed up this time.”

He gossips about Mary and her new boyfriend. “Do you keep in mind the final one? What was his identify once more? What was his downside? He by no means did get Nina Simone.” In efficiency, Kelly has sometimes changed Simone with Joey Ramone or “a bit an excessive amount of cologne.”

He asks Dan to take care of his spouse Rita, and footage the dancing after dinner. “Simply do not maintain her too shut, oh brother please do not stab me within the again,” he sings, shortly catching himself to notice the idle time in jail that “turns creativeness into reality.”

The conclusion is a promise: “I am gonna pay ’em all again.”

An uncommon vacation music with lasting resonance

Kelly’s love for Shakespeare, the bard’s mixture of comedy and drama, can be evident within the composition. Certainly one 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 music for the primary time over the radio, and needed to pull to the facet of the highway in tears.

It is a vacation music 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 music in live performance all 12 months, not simply the vacations. A few of them started marking Dec. 21 by leaving a can of gravy on their entrance porches.

“I can not predict what songs will turn out to be well-liked or communicate to my viewers,” Kelly stated this fall in an interview with The Related Press, and “Gravy” is a main instance.

The evocation of household is the music’s most essential 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 residence, stated “How one can Make Gravy” all the time evokes heat emotions of vacation celebrations.

Generally very heat. Whereas most of the music’s feelings are common, a reference within the lyrics to anticipated warmth on Christmas Day — “I hear it is going to be 100 levels” — locations the setting clearly in Australia. Down underneath, the vacation is originally of summer season.

Gravy Day in Australia this 12 months

Prime Minister Albanese alluded to “Gravy Day” in his resolution this week to launch the 5 males who had been convicted in 2005 of smuggling heroin from Indonesia to Australia.

“Australians talk about what it is prefer to have somebody who’s a cherished one — they sing the nice Paul Kelly music — in jail over Christmas,” Albanese stated, in keeping with The Nightly. “Who’s going to make the gravy? Properly, these households had their family members in jail for 20 Christmases, and that was sufficient.”

Utilizing the characters in Kelly’s music and constructing a narrative round it, filmmaker Nick Waterman made a film of “How one can Make Gravy” this 12 months 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? “Simply add flour, salt, a bit pink wine and remember a dollop of tomato sauce for sweetness and that additional tang.”

It is all within the music.

____

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.