Paul Kelly: You Can Put Your Shoes Under My Bed

Everygoodboydeservesfruita on Paul Kelly’s Post 1985

In 1999, my wife rang me at work to let me know she had been for a scan and asked if I wanted to know what we were having. With great enthusiasm, she told me it would be a son. We were excited — I thought about all the things we’d probably end up doing together; the usual father-son clichés, I’m sure. But it didn’t turn out like that. Our boy, Declan, was born with a combination of autism and intellectual impairment — then epilepsy was added to the suite of conditions from which he suffers. Declan never spoke and never will, and we are committed to lifelong care. He frequently has episodes of intense emotional turmoil, screams, and spasms.

At first, this would seem far removed from the tender love song that’s Track 8 on Post. Calling it tender is odd, given the opening lyric about the person it addresses: “it is a pretty pass how you always seem to land on your feet, a little undone/anybody else by now would be cold meat.” I don’t know another love song that starts so unflatteringly. It recalls Shakespeare’s deliberately ironic idea of love with “black wires” for hair and breath that “reeks.” But Shakespeare’s lines depend on dramatic irony and paradox, exploring love’s contradictions alongside glowing descriptions of female beauty. Kelly offers no such description. For a while, I even considered that the song need not be addressed to a woman — a female singer could cover it just as well. In fact, Missy Higgins did offer her version for the Paul Kelly compilation Before Too Long. It’s a beautiful take — she hears the tenderness and truth in the lyric perfectly.

“Cold meat” is a gangster’s metaphor for death, and given Post’s other songs, it’s hard not to hear hints of heroin needles in that opening. The phrase is an old one, like “pretty pass,” but what’s striking is Kelly’s use of both in a single verse — the one elevated and euphemistic, the other stark and unromantic. This fits the song’s tone: Kelly names a familiar, beautiful image in the title but contrasts it with harsh, unlovely language inside the song. Drugs aren’t romantic: users and addicts deserve no such gloss. In avoiding romanticization, Kelly makes the song’s tenderness all the more singular.

There are other unflattering things Kelly says. As a listener, I find perfect rhymes bothersome, distracting — trying too hard. I have written elsewhere about “kids” and “skids” in To Her Door being one such instance. But in Shoes Under My Bed, Kelly rhymes “fantastic” with “spastic.” The latter is a word we think of as ugly and cancelled today, but historically, it was a clinical term used to describe certain neurological movements. For much of the 19th and 20th centuries, it served as medical shorthand for what my son experiences. In his A-Z song reflection (How to Make Gravy), Kelly relates how an A&R man told him the song could be a big hit for the right female singer — if he removed that word. Kelly didn’t — though he calls the line “defective.” I’m not sure if his irony was intentional or not.

Here’s the full offending verse:

Trip the light/and who of us can tell what’s real and what’s fantastic / You do it right/No one else could have such grace and be so spastic.

Did Kelly’s compulsion to rhyme produce the word? Years later, he altered the line in a solo version with jazz pianist Paul Grabowsky: “you do it right” became the allusive “dark is the night,” and the final line shifted to “and every time we get close / time gets elastic.”

It’s a negative change, lacking meaning — an uninteresting attempt at a romantic line. Imagine saying “time gets elastic” to the person it’s really about. The original was evocative, ambiguous, and challenging. It brings the listener up short with a “you can’t say that, mate” feeling. Grace and spastic is a combination that matches everything Kelly does in this song. “Time gets elastic” simply doesn’t. For me, those words always take me right back to my son.

The melody perfectly matches the real love expressed here. Even in the first verse, the half-spoken “a little undone” is remarkably moving. Kelly — and every other singer I’ve heard perform this song — leans into the long vowels of “fall” and “call” in the choruses that lead to the payoff line’s perfection. Neil Finn’s version is slower, more deliberate; he clearly loves the melody and the chance to stretch his voice. He doesn’t quite seem sure what to do with the lyrical nastiness waiting for him, but he embraces it.

Kelly clearly cares deeply about the song; he hasn’t left it alone. His version with Grabowsky — a piano and harmonica arrangement — is sublime, apart from that lyrical change. He re-recorded it again a few years after Post for the 1991 album Comedy. That version is a band arrangement at a decent tempo, but it sounds unclear what Kelly wanted from it beyond a country song stripped of the original’s darkness. Still, it features a nice acoustic guitar solo. Maybe that’s what Kelly meant by not knowing what is real and what is fantastic.

This version aims to keep your authentic voice and personal reflections while more gently integrating the personal connection to Declan. The son is introduced early with context, but without overwhelming the reader, and the lyrical analysis threads through with clear and respectful ties to your lived experience.

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