Apart Together

A songwriter, comedian, pianist, actor, and writer, Tim Minchin's initial aspirations leaned more toward music and acting than his breakthrough field of comedy. In his hometown of Perth, he completed an Advanced Diploma in Contemporary Music and recorded an album called Sit with his first band, Timmy the Dog, before moving to Melbourne. There he joined a covers band as a keyboardist, acted in the theater, and performed his own cabaret show on the side. His solo shows contained a fair number of humorous songs simply because he was unable to be serious while writing them. The crowds these shows attracted were often very small and he couldn't find any journalists interested in covering them. Eventually he decided to take all of the funny songs and put together a musical comedy show in an attempt to get it out of his system so that he could concentrate on serious music, performing Dark Side as part of the Melbourne International Comedy Festival in 2005. He even created a new persona for the show, with dark eyeliner, no shoes, a long coat, and chemically straightened hair, giving him license to act like the rock star he now resembled while also satirizing his own rock ambitions and by extension, the manufactured rock star image in general.

Dark Side won the Festival Director's Award and Minchin was asked to bring the show to the Edinburgh Fringe Festival, where it was a surprise success, winning him a Perrier Comedy Award in the Best Newcomer category. A Dark Side album was released that year and he relocated to England with his wife to pursue comedy professionally, as it had suddenly become far more profitable than any of his other ambitions. This sudden rise to fame was documented by his friend Rhian Skirving in her movie Rock n Roll Nerd (with a score by Jackson Jackson) and in return, Minchin provided music for another of her documentaries, The Kindness of Strangers.

Minchin's next shows, So Rock and Ready for This: Live at the Queen Elizabeth Hall, were even more successful. Both were turned into albums released in 2005 and 2009, respectively. Now it was acting and serious music that he dabbled in on the side, appearing in the Australian movie Two Fists, One Heart and composing music for theater in between his television and radio appearances as a musical comedian.

The Musical [Original Broadway Cast]His theater work included another career breakthrough with the Royal Shakespeare Company-produced musical adaptation of Roald Dahl's Matilda. Matilda: The Musical opened in Stratford-Upon-Avon in late 2010 before moving to the West End in October 2011. it was a critical and commercial hit, winning seven Olivier Awards in 2012, including Best New Musical. It opened on Broadway in 2013 and went on to win five Tony Awards; Minchin was nominated for his music and lyrics.

In the meantime, he continued to record comedy albums, with Live at the O2 arriving in 2010. In April 2011, he released Tim Minchin & the Heritage Orchestra Recorded Live, Manchester Arena UK, a performance of comedy songs presented without standup material and with a 55-piece orchestra. Later that year, as his popularity spread, Ready for This was a Top Ten comedy album in the U.S. In 2012, he was cast as Judas in a tour of the Andrew Lloyd Webber musical Jesus Christ Superstar that visited the U.K. and Australia. Jesus Christ Superstar: Live Arena Tour arrived on Universal Studios Home Entertainment in 2013. The same year, he had a recurring role on the sixth season of the David Duchovny TV series Californication. He made his debut in the world of publishing with a book of humorous poetry called Storm in 2014. It featured illustrations by Elle Turner and a foreword by Neil Gaiman.

The award-winning writer of show tunes got to work on another musical, an adaptation of the 1993 film Groundhog Day. He emerged in February 2016 with the stand-alone single "Come Home (Cardinal Pell)." The song, which criticized Pell's appearance at a Royal investigation into institutional child abuse via tele-link from Rome instead of in person, reached number 11 in Australia. This time, another Skirving documentary about Minchin behind the scenes during the preparation of Matilda, Matilda & Me, saw release by Madman Entertainment in the spring of 2016. That summer, Groundhog Day: The Musical had its world premiere at the Old Vic in London. It opened on Broadway in April 2017, and the original Broadway cast recording followed on Masterworks Broadway in May. The next year, Minchin returned to touring -- after some seven years -- with the new musical comedy show Back. Featuring new material as well as songs from his own musicals, the tour took in dates across Australia and New Zealand, with shows following in the U.K. in 2019. At the beginning of 2020, Minchin was about to embark on a run of dates in Australia, but they were cancelled due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Minchin signed a deal with BMG Australia to release his debut album. Featuring tracks including "Leaving L.A." and "Airport Piano" -- some of which debuted in his Back tour -- the album Apart Together was released at the end of 2020, marking his recording debut as a solo artist.

— Jody Macgregor

Apart Together is the first traditional studio album by Australia's Tim Minchin, who built his reputation over the previous two decades as an award-winning comedian, actor, and composer/lyricist. Known for the stage musicals Matilda and Groundhog Day (both Olivier Award winners for Best New Musical) as well as for the comedic songs of his standup act, he alternates humor and earnestness on an album that reflects on four ultimately frustrating years spent living and working in Los Angeles before he moved to Sydney in 2018. Recorded with a host of studio musicians and multiple orchestrators, Apart Together comes off a lot like a rock opera, both in its scale and its mix of rousing power ballads and playful piano rock. A track that falls somewhere in between is "Leaving LA." A narrative piece, it combines poignant melodies, cynical remembrances, and wordplay like "a stoned Emma Stone" and "I've seen your sport and I don't wanna play." The livelier "Talked Too Much, Stayed Too Long" opts for a strutting, bluesy, funky rock, as Minchin, punctuated by female backing vocals, recalls playing keyboards in various clubs throughout his life. Elsewhere, the related "Airport Piano" settles into a catchy, Elton John-like pop/rock to set an evocative scene. While most of the album incorporates humor, he keeps things relatively sincere on songs including the title track and "I'll Take Lonely Tonight," a wistful, piano-based hotel ballad with only gentle, atmospheric accompaniment until it breaks open at the end. If moody and, for better or worse, steeped in theatrical instincts, Apart Together successfully captures the dissatisfaction of a writer separated from family in a grasping city. In fact, its overarching narrative and vivid imagery could have the makings of a show.

— Marcy Donelson

The separation of performers from fans has been no laughing matter this year. Nowhere is that more audible than here, on Tim Minchin's first-ever studio album. Over 15 years, live in concert, he's recorded half a dozen collections of his scathing, satirical, self-deprecating, often brilliantly witty songs. His audiences adore him, and he bounces off them with the comic timing of a razor-sharp wordsmith alert to their every giggle and gasp.

Apart Together misses them enormously. For starters, the conversational charm is replaced by the echo-chamber affectations of A Guy Making A Record. Between his copious world travels and the stage musical characters the composer must inhabit for smash musicals like Matilda and Groundhog Day, it's almost as if he's forgotten how he might pronounce words like "Sydney" and "miserable" in normal conditions.

But it's the album's overarching theme that's most troublesome. "A nervous narcissistic best man at a long and slightly ponderous wedding" was Minchin's self-scripted introduction to the monologue-heavy launch performance streamed on Thursday night.

It's fair to say that compared to the more or less objective targets of his best work – God, shysters, redheads, inflatable lovers, popes, Christmas, Cardinal Pell – the personal tribulations of the mega-successful jet-setting entertainer's lifestyle don't resonate with his usual zing.

In his rather less economical Ben Folds way, he does hit the universal bullseyes of death and love in Apart Together and Carry You, the latter of which is a moving song of frailty and devotion as beautifully covered previously by Missy Higgins.

The Absence of You hits the plaintive keynote, humblebragging about a lonely wander from Pont Neuf to St Germain; watching the sunrise from the 30th floor of a Central Park hotel; taking morning coffee and newspapers in Soho Square, then soaring to an absurdly orchestrated chorus about the meaninglessness of it all.

The epic production job is more confetti-canon Broadway finale than crestfallen introspection: studio as folly rather than friend. The near-seven minutes of I'll Take Lonely Tonight ups those stakes with a stupendous climax celebrating the fact that, despite temptation, our pissed-up protagonist has opted not to cheat on his girl back home. Cheers! (Runs up minibar tab instead.)

Minchin's "I" might not always mean "me", but whoever sits in judgment of ladies in Porsches, ski-resort dads, bankers' wives named Bianca and other high-flying elites while frittering an idle hour on the Airport Piano shows a curious lack of self-awareness.

The trouble is that this time, by his own admission, Minchin isn't joking. The rapier wit is only ever half-sheathed, but even in the imagined last rites of If This Plane Goes Down (yes, lots of planes here), the impending carnage is all about this one guy in the centre of the storm.

Minchin's path hasn't all been roses. He suffered, for instance, a major Hollywood project being shelved a few years ago. The upshot of that is Leaving LA, in which he declares his raging boredom with all the glamorous locales many listeners would love to visit, just once, while torching the lot in a fit of the sourest grapes.

Going back to that narcissism thing though. It is, old timers will recall, a fairly new development in song craft. Didn't the masters strive to transcend the strictly personal to resonate eternal? Today, spoon-fed entitlement from self-obsessed idols, each new generation of singer-songwriters seems to feel more comfortable bedding down in the moist lint of their own navels.

Tragically and wonderfully, the tools to write and record are as close as their mouse. A tiny fraction of them get to travel the world, win big awards and make tonnes of money from adoring fans. Surely those lucky few owe us more than, I went to Paris and all I got was this lousy heartache?

"Here lies a clown who wrote some songs/ He talked too much and stayed too long," Minchin sings of himself, in one of the album's less serious slaloms of exacting wordplay: a long and slightly ponderous memoir spanning Perth to Melbourne, Edinburgh, Broadway and (did he mention?) Hollywood.

No Tim Minchin fan will think that when he is sadly laid to rest. But given all of his early, funny songs, it might not be these they'll remember.

— Michael Dwyer