Paul Kelly performed live on the eve of the release of his 24th album, Nature, and shared some thoughts with ABC Radio's Myf Warhurst.

Here's what the Australian music legend had to say.

On another new record ...

"It's always exciting," he said.

"I love that period after finishing the record and before it comes out, like you're sitting on this little secret. I get a thrill every time.

"You've made this thing and you know it, you know it inside out ... but nobody else has heard it yet, and you're just waiting to let it out of the cage, or out of the burrow, or wherever it has come from.

"When I write songs I put them in folders on my computer, and I was looking through the songs I'd written which I hadn't recorded yet and I just looked at the titles.

"There was a song called Little Wolf, Seagulls Of Seattle, Morning Storm, With Animals and I thought I know there's a theme there, I know what the title of the record's going to be.

"I called it Nature then, and that sort of helped me write a few more songs to fit."

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On poetry ...

"Five songs [on this album] are poems by Dylan Thomas, Walt Whitman, Sylvia Plath, Philip Larkin and Gerard Manley Hopkins," he said.

"I've been putting poems to music over the past four or five years, just for fun really.

"I think song lyrics and poetry often blurs.

"It's a fairly modern idea that poetry should be something you read on the page. Original poetry was always sung, the Greek tragedies were sung, Homer was sung.

"Poetry's got all these other things going on with sounds and assonance and rhythms that even if a poem is mysterious and not really making sense [on paper], it makes sense aurally.

"Some songs, I think, you could read on the page and they'd work like a poem but other songs look pretty flat without the music."

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On The Beatles ...

"I got a lot of my music from older siblings. I had three older siblings, including [my guitarist] Dan's father, so that's when I first started hearing singles coming into the house and that's when I first heard The Beatles," he recalled.

"They sounded like they came from another planet.

"I can still remember hearing I Should Have Known Better in the schoolyard and it just sounded completely like, it didn't sound like anything else I'd heard before, it just sounded really fresh.

"It's amazing to go back later and listen to The Beatles when you start studying them, and just hear how in some ways those early songs are really simply put together, but they're always surprising.

"If you want to be a songwriter, all you have to do is just study The Beatles' songbook.

"They wrote every kind of song and they always had a little twist, something surprising in their songs which is I guess what all good songs need."