October 2020

‘The Absence Of You’, the 5th and final single ahead of the release of Tim’s long awaited studio album Apart Together is out now.

Tim: “In this weird year, we’re more aware than ever that the absence of a loved one can, in a way, be as impactful as their presence. This is a song about that, I suppose. It’s also a frickin banger.”

Lyrics below.

Listen/download Absence Of You: Tim-Minchin.lnk.to/TheAbsenceOfYouWE

Pre-order Apart Together here: Tim-Minchin.lnk.to/ApartTogetherAlbumWE
– out November 20th

Credits can be found in the YouTube description.

**THE ABSENCE OF YOU** (Lyrics)

I take a walk on the Seine
Cross Pont Neuf on my way to St Germain
Love-hearts on padlocks on wire in the mist
Where young lovers kiss
And swear to be true
Echoes of ten thousand sighs of love
And yet I
Feel only the absence of you

Out of a window on the thirtieth floor
Central Park shines with the coming of dawn
Through eyes rendered weary by jetlag and wine
I turn round to find
There’s a girl in my room
For a moment we kiss
But her vodka-soaked lips
Taste only of the absence of you

I don’t know
What all of this means
If you are not here with me
And I am lost
When we are apart
There’s a hole in my heart
That light passes through
And the pattern it creates
Is the shape of
The absence of you

Spring has been found hanging round Soho Square
So I take my coffee and newspaper there
To bask in the not-warm-enough April sun
With the workers who come
To eat Pret with no shoes
But the grass to the side
Of the patch where I’m lying
Is flat with the absence of you

I don’t know
What all this is for
If you are not near to me
And I can’t sleep
Sleep is no fun when the unruly sun
Will reveal the truth
A space in my bed as cold as the dead
Exactly the size and the shape of
The absence of you

And all of this beauty
Runs over and through me
And pools round my shoes
And the puddle it forms
Conforms to the shape of
The absence of you

Tim will perform the entirety of his new album, Apart Together, in a one-off concert at the iconic Trackdown Studios, to be streamed at 7pm (local time) on November 19th, to celebrate the record’s general release.

Featuring extraordinary guest musicians, 6 cameras, 11 songs, and whatever pours out of Tim’s brain in between, the concert will be available online for just 48 hours, and will only be accessible to ticket holders.

 

Tickets go on sale at 12pm (Local time) Monday, November 2nd, 2020

shops.ticketmasterpartners.com/tim-minchin-live-stream

Ticket prices: AU$15 / £10 / €15 / US$15
You can buy tickets for whichever timezone works best for you.

Tim: “I’ve been thinking a lot about how to make live entertainment in this no-live-entertainment world, and – as always – how to make a virtue of the restrictions placed on us as artists. And I’ve concluded that we have a fantastic opportunity to make a new style of “live” concerts. Not like the old model, where cameras are inserted into seats in an audience, or put on the shoulder of a camera operator dressed in black, skulking around the edges of the stage, pretending she doesn’t exist. But instead, I want to bring the audience into the room with us. I want the viewer to feel like they have been invited into the studio to watch the final dress rehearsal for a concert, and have been given permission to stand in amongst the band, to sit down next to me (ewww), to be completely inside the experience.

This album we’ve made really lends itself to this sort of performance: the songs tell stories that ask the listener to stay engaged with every lyric; they are generally very personal; they vary in style from proper all-out rock-pop tracks to seriously intimate ballads.

I really hope people settle in with a really good set of speakers, a really good friend or two, and a really nice bottle of wine, and let me see if I can’t give them an online performance that isn’t quite like anything they’ve ever seen. Oh. That sounds like porn doesn’t it. *It’s not porn.”

Tim will also be raising money in support of Ausmusic T-Shirt Day during the stream, with all proceeds going to music industry charity, Support Act. You can donate here.

Apart Together …is full of gravity-defying balladry and beautifully observed moments
– American Songwriter

“If there’s an artist more naturally disposed to a hybrid of pop and orchestration, I do not know his name” – The Age, Melbourne

“Minchin is a genuine musical virtuoso”
-The Times, London

“His songs are jaunty or bittersweet or dark, but always fiendishly clever.”
-The Evening Standard

“As with all Minchin’s stuff, it’s a little bit funny, it’s a little bit sad, and it finds the beauty and romance in even the most tragic of circumstances.”
-The Guardian

“an LP’s worth of bangers, fizzing with his trademark acid one-liners, plus a goodly helping of more reflective ballads too.”
-Clash

‘Apart Together’… is a determinedly auto-biographical effort that has finally given him peace with his own voice, musically and metaphorically.
-NME