Tim will be opening Perth Festival in show-stopping style, 5th and 6th February 2021, live in beautiful Kings Park.
He’ll give a special performance of his, newly released, critically acclaimed album Apart Together with some of his favourite WA musicians, including the West Australian Symphony Orchestra (WASO) conducted by Jessica Gethin.
Each song has been reimagined by a different world-class orchestrator for the occasion.
New Dates: Saturday 20th and Sunday 21st February 2021. The Festival will contact ticket-holders. perthfestival.com.au
The limited edition double vinyl Matilda The Musical Broadway Cast Recording is now available for pre-order exclusively on Broadway Records.
Printed on BLUE VINYL, it’s the first release to have the songs in show order. It’s also the first physical format to include the special bonus tracks ‘Perhaps a Child’ and ‘Naughty’ (sung by all four Tony award-winning Matildas).
More details and you can pre-order a copy for your turntable here.
The gatefold vinyl features a 24-page booklet with illustrated lyrics, a poster, bespoke artwork and comes in two variants; translucent red and transparent ultra-clear with opaque red.
Tim: “I’m hugely pleased and relieved that people are connecting to this motley collection of songs. The reaction to the Livestream, especially, was incredible – testament to the brilliant work of a huge team of people who dedicated themselves to the mission of trying to make something different and gentle and fun and sparkly and special.”
APART TOGETHER ALBUM
“This crisply observed and tenderly considered pop album subverts expectations… From gorgeous love songs to self-deprecation, the comedian’s first non-comic record comes as a pleasant surprise”
-The Independent ****
“Apart Together is a masterpiece… A pure joy to listen to.”
-The Irish News *****
“The album is a triumph”
-Musical Theatre Review ****
APART TOGETHER CONCERT
The eve of the record’s release, Tim marked the occasion by performing the album in its entirety for a one-off streamed concert filmed at the iconic Trackdown Studios, Sydney and viewed worldwide.
(Photo by Damian Bennett)
“He makes this remote event feel intimate and spectacular”
-The Times ****
“The multitalented maverick returns.
The Australian songwriter retained his lightness of touch while also indulging in knowingly overblown anthems”
-Daily Telegraph ****
‘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.”
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
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
Hi all. Here’s an infrequent blog. Am writing it by way of diarizing this weird little moment in time, and because I know a lot of you followed the progress of this project on socials.
The fact that I named this upcoming album of mine “Apart Together” long before Covid hit kinda presaged the way in which it has grown to become – in my mind at least – an album very much of this time. And as more shits have hit more fans, I have become more dedicated to making it a testament to this fucking year, and to the idea of making lemonade out of lemons, whatever shape the lemons are.
Some of my nerdier fans (hi, bless you, love you) will have heard me say more than once that I think you should aim to bring everything you are into everything you do. I tend to say it about artists, but I guess it works for humans in general. I also often quote my mentor/director/friend Matthew Warchus (who was perhaps quoting someone else) who told me, back in Stratford-Upon-Avon in 2010 when I was anxious about whether Matilda was ready to open, that “any piece of art is just an artifact of the work you did in the time you had”. These two simple ideas have profoundly affected the way I go about my work… and this year have come to mean even more. This year, bringing “everything you are into everything you do”, means bringing your anxiety, and your disappointment, and your tiredness, and whatever else you are carrying through the pandemic months. And “the work that you did in the time that you had” could perhaps be extended to “… the work that you did in the time that you had in the space you were locked inside with the collaborators you were allowed to have contact with”!
Each single I have released this year has been an opportunity to make a little bit of art, and as our industry shut down, and then nervously semi-reopened, I tried to let the restrictions that came along govern the style of art-making.
Which brings me to the video for “Airport Piano”, the 4th single from my album, being released today!
Which, typical of this shit year, is also the day I have to get on a plane and fly away from my folks. Let me go back a bit….
A couple of months ago, our gorgeous mum, who is only 71 and very healthy, and who loves her family with a sort of nuclear fury and is widely and furiously loved in return, was diagnosed with a particularly nasty blood cancer. She’s actually stabilized and is doing great at the moment, but when she was diagnosed, shit went very bad very quickly, and my two sisters and I (the Sydney-based siblings) and our families scrambled to apply for travel exemptions so we could fly home to Perth to see her.
Endless phone calls and doctors’ letters and documents later, we booked flights and landed in Perth… then drove straight to the house in which we were to quarantine for 14 days. Hashtag-fuckin-blessed, by the way, that we were allowed to quarantine in a house rather than a hotel room, and doubly blessed that we have family friends who lent us their big old home with a big garden and a big garage, and triply blessed that two of our families were able to quarantine together! My youngest sister, Nel, and her hubby and their two little girls, and Sarah and Violet and Caspar and I all moved in.
This is Nel Minchin:
A lot of you know Nel is a film-maker. (Digression: the feature doc that she and Wayne Blair have made about Bangarra Dance Theatre is absolutely spectacular and heart-breaking and beautiful. It’s called Firestarter and it premiers next month, and will be playing at festivals all around the country. I will tell you more when I’ve found out more ways you can watch it.) Nel’s husband, Guy, is a creative. Both a capital-C Creative (in the ad industry) and a small-c creative, in that he just makes shit all the time. And he trained in photography.
And before Mum got sick, Nel and Guy and I were talking about making a music video for Airport Piano. Guy had the idea that we should do some sort of piano-painting art project, then sell it for charity, and the music vid would kinda document that process. (Told you he was creative). And – being a man obsessed with words – I had the idea that the art project should involve me spewing the lyrics of the song onto whatever hapless instrument we found. We had begun to plan the shoot in a studio, with proper crew and lights and all the stuff. But suddenly the we found ourselves with a garage, no gear and two weeks until the deadline. And we all had to work normal hours with our various (remote) jobs.
First thing we did, is sent my Dad and my brother to Bunnings (equivalent to Home Depot / Homebase) and built a quick Drop-cloth studio.
Meanwhile, I put out the call for a free (or very cheap) piano, but as I did so, I realized that I wanted it to be a pretty good instrument. I thought if we want to auction it for charity and make some proper money, it should be very playable. For a while, I’ve been a Yamaha Artist… which I mostly agreed to so I could put a bit of energy into their charity work, and so they can help supply instruments when I tour. I didn’t expect them to ship me a brand new $12,000.00 Yamaha U1 within days of me asking the question. But that’s exactly what they did. It was so new, it came in a box.
And it therefore took a good while to pluck up the courage to take a frickin orbital sander to it.
Got the teen on the tools for a bit.
Destruction.
And painted it white.
Struction.
I called up the awesome Murray Johnston, who was Katie Milwright’s camera assist and focus puller on Upright, and asked him to hire us some gear and bring us everything we needed, and to advice us on set up. I also called up Richard and Fiona Rees-Jones (Head of Lighting and Head of Make Up on Upright) to advise on cheap lighting solutions. Total. Fkn. Legends.
We filmed the video in a day, and this is what the piano looked like at the end!
It’s currently out in Midvale being sealed / varnished, and will then be trucked to Sydney, where it will make an appearance in an online thing I’m doing (more on that soon).
And THEN we’re going to auction it for charity. We’ve chosen an amazing arts charity*, and I’ll tell you more about that when we get to that bridge.
That’s the story of our funky little clip. I really like it! Massive respect to Nel and Guy. And thanks to John and Liz Mair for all your generosity and loveliness.
We have been out of quarantine for 4 weeks, visiting family and – as ever – working working working to try to keep making and promoting these songs and clips. I actually filmed another whole music video this week! This time, it was a massive production at an amazing Perth venue with a cast of 18 and a crew of 45. But I’ll tell you more about that in a month!
I actually have to get back to Sydney today, which is very complicated and sad.
So it goes.
Loads of love and peace to all of you who read this far.
Tim x
Sept 2020.
*UPDATE (05/07/22):The Art of Music dinner raises money for Noro Music Therapy, an AMAZING charity which provides almost two thousand music therapy sessions in Australia every week.
I performed on my Airport Piano, after which it was auctioned, making – thanks to an incredibly generous couple – $60,000.00 for the cause.
Thank you to the amazing Jenny Morris, creator and organizer of the dinner; to Yamaha Music Australia – Music Products for donating the piano in the first place; all the incredible staff at Noro Music Therapy and the Art Gallery of New South Wales; and my sister Nel Minchin and bro-in-law Guy Patrick for helping me create the thing.
‘Airport Piano’, the 4th single from Tim’s forthcoming studio album Apart Together is out now.
Tim: “Airport Piano is almost definitely the funkiest tribute to midlife crises and the emptiness of acquisition ever recorded in the antipodes. It walks the line between extremely cool and extremely uncool with barely a teeter.”
If you’d like to read about the process and see lots of photos and video clips, click here for Tim’s Making-of blog about how he made the video, in a garage, whilst in quarantine in WA.
I wrote this song on an airport piano
I was the guy disturbing your journey from security
To gate twenty-three A
Maybe you noticed me
I wrote this song cos I had a spare hour
I was delayed trying to get back to my babies in Sydney
And I noticed the keys so I’m writing a song
Singin’
Women in SUV Porsches always look miserable
I don’t know why they’re so sad
Maybe it’s the calories they coulda had
Filling them up with regret
And men in cafes in ski resorts
Trying to connect with their sons
Look like they just wanna hit ‘em
I mean I’m sure that they dig ‘em underneath all the gear
A young man in Air Jordans
Just left me five dollars on the piano
Whattaya know
I always hated those airport pianos
Should be a law saying playing the theme from Beverly Hills Cop
Will get one of your hands chopped off
I wrote this song on an airport piano
I’m out of time I just need one more little rhyme
I gotta board that plane
They’re calling my name
So I’m writing a song
Singin’
Women in SUV Porsches always look miserable
Or is it only the Botox
They stick in their face to keep their looks from slipping
They’re kicking the can down the road
And men in mansions on cul-de-sacs
Having their midlife affairs
With the wife of a banker
While the banker is banging Bianca
But sadly they’re still gonna die
A guy buying Subway
Anxiously digs through his cabin bag
Smiles when his wallet is found
Pays for his six-inch
Then forgets that his bag is unzipped
So the contents of it
Is disgorged
And a jar of Viagra spills onto the ground
So it goes
Women in SUV Porsches always look miserable
And I know why they’re so sad
They thought they’d be happier than they were in their Fords
But now they’re bored of their Porsches
And they’re looking for more
They’re out there shopping for more
And their husband’s so fat in his new Lycra shorts
Trying to peddle his way back to ninety-four
Trying to wind back the clock to before
To before they had this boat and this house
And this buy-to-let mortgage
To before they had bought all the things that they thought
Would fill up the hole but the goal keeps receding
And his hair is receding there’s this book he’s been reading for
Six months but the words just swim round the pages
And god it’s been ages since they made love
And the kids are on drugs
With their ADHD and their anxiety
And their music is shit
And the time just keeps slipping away
But I’m sitting here playing and singing
And they are calling my name
Cos your flight’s gotta go when your flight’s gotta go
And I wrote this song on an airport piano
New York Magazine’s Vulture will be doing an Instagram live stream next week with Tim and Ben Folds interviewing each other for their ‘Two Friends’ series.
