NPR's Scott Simon speaks with Australian comedian and composer about his touring show, "An Unfunny Evening with Tim Minchin and His Piano."
SCOTT SIMON, HOST:
Irony is hard to define, even harder to rhyme in a song. Nobody does it more artfully, lyrically, melodically than Tim Minchin. The Australian - and I'll try to make this alphabetical - actor, comic, composer, lyricist, singer, sentimentalist and skeptic composed the Olivier and Tony Award-winning musical "Matilda" and the Olivier and Tony-nominated "Groundhog Day." He is now on his first North American tour in more than 10 years, "An Unfunny Evening With Tim Minchin." It includes some of his hits from the stage and then songs like, "Apart Together," an unlikely song of enduring love that begins, comfortably enough, with a reference to one of our local stations.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "APART TOGETHER")
TIM MINCHIN: (Singing) KCRW, on the way to a show, heard the story of an elderly couple found dead in their mobile home. They'd been there a month, they say. Seemed to be no decay. I guess the upside of freezing to death is that you tend to stay that way, locked in each other's arms, eyes closed and faces calm.
SIMON: Tim Minchin joins us now from the road in Portland, Ore. Thank you so much for being with us.
MINCHIN: Pleasure, Scott. Thanks for having me again.
SIMON: We've got to make it plain - I gather your father loves that song.
MINCHIN: Yeah, Dad liked that song. When that song came out, my mom was terminally ill. And, yeah, but I guess they see the world a bit like I do, so they see the romance in the darkness.
SIMON: What made you hear that news item and say, there's a song in there?
MINCHIN: Oh, it's worse than that. I never heard the news item. I just made it up. I just...
SIMON: Ah.
MINCHIN: ...I don't know where it came...
SIMON: Fake news. Go ahead, yeah.
MINCHIN: I don't know where it came from. I was just sitting down going, I need to stop writing songs about my own experience. And I used to listen to KCRW a lot. But I just - you know, something Shakespearean about - or clash between this sort of Shakespearean "Romeo And Juliet"-ish you know, lovers dying together up against a sort of trailer park, poverty-stricken America. I don't know why I liked it.
And when I started writing it, I didn't have the chorus. I didn't have the hook, which is, I think this could last forever. Girl, let's fall apart together - so the central theme of the thing, which is that marriage is really a commitment to watching the person you love most in the world decay and then trying to find the romance in that.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "APART TOGETHER")
MINCHIN: (Singing) Girl, let's fall apart together.
SIMON: Why do you call this "An Unfunny Evening"? I've got to say the video I saw - people were laughing from the moment you tried to sit down.
MINCHIN: Well, I found myself a comedian, you know, at about the age of 30, having had no intention of being one, although always having been aware that when I get on stage, I tend to make people laugh. And I loved it. And I find it hard to sort of explain this without feeling like I'm sneering at the career I was gifted.
But I just - in the middle of me becoming a well-known comedian, I also wrote "Matilda The Musical." And when that came out, I really noticed the difference between an audience laughing for a night and something like "Matilda," which is a huge collaboration that takes years to create and that, if you're lucky, like we were, it really lives in culture and kind of changes the world a bit.
And so I've been on a bit of a journey to just create shows over the years that allow me to not have comedy as the main imperative. And all my songs have those quirks in it, and I change it every night. Like, my talk is quite improvised. But I have to admit people laugh all night because it is my want to make them laugh. I can't help myself trying to make them laugh.
SIMON: Yeah. You also sing a song from "Matilda," "Quiet." Before I ask you about it, let's hear a little bit. A young girl sings about a noise in her mind.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "QUIET")
MINCHIN: (Singing) And the heat and the shouting, and my heart is pounding, and my eyes are burning, and suddenly everything, everything is quiet, like silence but not really silent - just that nice sort of quiet.
SIMON: This is a quiet you know in your own family life.
MINCHIN: It's been an amazing song in my life because I have a kid who had a - she's absolutely great, and I don't want to overstate her distress. But she did have quite a few tough times when she was young, and then especially when she became a teenager. And then she got diagnosed as being on the spectrum and all that sort of thing. And so it's been quite interesting how, you know, my life has cracked open to the autism world.
SIMON: Well, you hear from a lot of people - right? - from families.
MINCHIN: Yeah, I tell a story in the show about the first time I got a letter from someone trying to describe the effect that song had on their kid. They had a high-needs autistic kid, a nonverbal kid. And I think you probably know, Scott, that I'm pretty pragmatic about stuff, but then every now and then you get - something happened to you or someone responds to something you make that really makes you feel like it was worth it.
SIMON: You know, for a proud and outspoken skeptic, you can really churn out the tears.
MINCHIN: Yeah. Well, I think I believe that stronger than anything, and the same with "Apart Together" and everything we've talked about. I remember talking to you years ago about "Storm," my poem, which ends with the line, isn't this enough, just this world, just this wonderfully unfathomable natural world? Like, I see unbelievable beauty in the universe and in humanity. For some reason, I find the stark, sad beauty of humanity - the lost aspirations of climbing trees, the fact that love is watching your favorite person in the world decay, the fact that death is inevitable - I find it unbearably beautiful. I think, in fact, it's all there is that's beautiful.
SIMON: Yeah. Do you hold any hopes for what your songs, your music can put into our lives?
MINCHIN: The audience my stuff has found has so, so far outstripped my expectations. I grew up in Perth, West Australia, and I had piano lessons up to about grade three, and then I did a course in my late teens, but I'm not a highly trained muso, and I can't read or write music. And I just never, ever thought I would have a musical on Broadway - I mean, just absolutely nowhere near my aspirations.
(SOUNDBITE OF TIM MINCHIN SONG, "AIRPORT PIANO")
SIMON: Tim Minchin - his "Unfunny Evening With..." is now on tour through August - Los Angeles tonight, then Denver, Austin, other cities, winding up in New York at the end of the month. Thanks so much for being with us.
MINCHIN: It's a huge pleasure, always is. Thanks, Scott.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "AIRPORT PIANO")
MINCHIN: (Singing) I wrote this song 'cause I had a spare hour. I was delayed trying to get back to my babies...
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