New Podcast Release: Tim Minchin

In this episode of “Lives Well Lived”, Kasia de Lazari-Radek and I speak with Tim Minchin about the ideas and experiences that have shaped his work, from the slow, unexpected rise of White Wine in the Sun to the harder questions he has tackled in songs like Come Home, Cardinal Pell. We begin with the Christmas song that Australians know well.

Our conversation moves from there to his sense of how he has changed between nineteen, thirty-one, and fifty, and why becoming a parent marked the point at which he felt he had to grow up. We also explore what led him to write his most activist song, the frustration he felt with the privilege of church authority, and what happened when that song unexpectedly entered the mainstream.

Tim speaks about Storm and the empirical worldview that underpins much of his work, why he sees himself as someone who stays open to changing his mind, and why the poem still stands for him. He also explains what he means by a “reality romantic” worldview: the idea that looking directly at the truth of the universe, including our impermanence, can make it more rather than less beautiful.

We go on to discuss determinism, luck, and why he thinks the stories we tell ourselves about achievement can obscure how much of it begins outside our control. And toward the end of the conversation, Tim reflects on whether he has lived well, why he is happier at fifty than he has ever been, and how he has learned to let go of the idea that he can fix everything.

Below are highlights from our conversation. You can listen to the full episode on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or your preferred platform.

White Wine in the Sun and the Universality of a Secular Christmas

PETER SINGER:
Tim, of all your songs, the two most memorable are both distinctly Australian. I’ll start with White Wine in the Sun about Christmas in Australia, which, of course, means Christmas in summer, and northern hemisphere types find that very strange. But for Australians like you and me, it’s normal.

You make the point that you can enjoy Christmas without being religious at all. And that’s also my situation and that of most of the people I know. I found that Australia is much less religious than the US is. But still, Australians all celebrate Christmas. And your lyrics point more to the importance of family. For most of us, that’s what Christmas is: a time for the family to be together.

I asked various friends and family which of your songs was their favourite, and this one came out clearly on top. So, I hope you feel proud of having written an iconic Australian song.

TIM MINCHIN:
Yeah, I do. And particularly love that song because of the very slow growth. It’s 19 years old, and for the first few years, no one knew it at all because I didn’t have a record label. It’s like a meme that just spread, and now it’s very well known. So I love that it succeeded on its own merits just by being passed around. I wrote it when my daughter was three weeks old and she turns 19 in November, so I always know how old the song is. We always go back to Perth for Christmas. And what’s interesting about it is it is a very personal song and a very specific worldview.

Well, it’s, as you said, quite a universal worldview in Australia ‘cause we’re a very secular country. But it’s also about craving summer when you are in a northern hemisphere winter and you’ve had a baby and you want to take her home. But lots of English people and Americans love the song too, and some people read a sort of supernatural element into it — the waiting for you in the sun sort of thing.

And of course, it gets weird for me because people in the song keep dropping dead. My grandmother initially, and my mother much more recently. And so I have to sing it from the point of view of 19-years-ago me, which I could bang on about for ages, because there’s something beautiful about putting yourself back in time when you perform. But yeah, I’m shocked by its universality.

Who Tim Was at 31, and 50

KASIA DE LAZARI RADEK:
You’ve said something about a 19-year-ago you and I just couldn’t resist asking: Is there a big difference between you then and you now?

TIM MINCHIN:
I think there are big differences. I feel quite continuous — 31-year-old me and 50-year-old me. But I think the version of me I now identify as began about then. I think maybe when you have a kid, that’s when you suddenly have to grow up.

The person I was when I was 19 feels pretty different, but the person I was when I was 31 feels like the beginning of the current me.

Come Home, Cardinal Pell — Why Tim Wrote His Most Activist Song

PETER SINGER:
You’ve described this as the most activist song you’ve written. Given that most of our listeners are not Australian, they may not know who Cardinal Pell was or anything about the context in which you wrote it. So would you like to spell that out for them?

TIM MINCHIN:
George Pell was the most powerful member of the Catholic Church in Australia… he oversaw a pretty bleak era in Australian Church history… And then he went to the Vatican, and when he was asked to return to give evidence to a Royal Commission into institutional child abuse in Australia, he chucked a sickie…said he was too sick to return home.

I got asked by some activists to help them raise money to send survivors of abuse to Rome. And I said, all right, well, I’ll write a song and I’ll donate all the money… The song hit in a way that nothing I have done before or since has hit… We raised a lot of money and a lot of survivors got to go… And I’m very proud of it.

The Ethics of Calling Out Power and Privilege

KASIA DE LAZARI RADEK:
Was there any special reason for you to get involved in that kind of topic?

TIM MINCHIN:
It’s a really good question because I have no personal history of abuse. But the fact that we are still in the 21st century and are meant to revere people and elevate their opinions on matters of morality and ethics because they believe in a particular set of supernatural beliefs… it just struck me as so bizarre, that privilege of the church, that the rest of us are meant to treat them differently.

And that particularly grates when there are such extraordinary rates of institutional misbehaviour and abuse.

Pell — again, I know people have different sets of beliefs — Pell was a sexist, by my estimation… He was a homophobe, by my estimation… He was a conservative. A Catholic conservative. And so at every juncture of ethical interest, he and I were not simpatico. So when he chucked a sickie, I was just like: this is absolute nonsense. And then someone basically offered on a plate the opportunity to say my feelings. And at that time, I had realised that I have a certain ability with words and comedy and the intersection of that with logic and politics. So I just went: hold my beer motherfuckers, you know? It was a bit of a flex. But what happened is that it got played on mainstream radio, and the Catholic Church threatened radio stations with legal action. And someone tried to get me done for hate speech, and, you know, it had an impact.

When Pell was himself charged with abuse, his legal team was still pointing to my song as a reason why he didn’t get a fair trial years later… which I feel no pride or smugness or shame about. I could have a big conversation about whether Pell’s reputational problem was the fault of my song or whether my song was a result of Pell’s reputational problem. I think that’s pretty clear to me. But they had to use whatever defence they could find.

Storm: Satire, Evidence, and Why He Built a Straw Person

PETER SINGER:
You do have this beat poem Storm. I’m not sure when exactly you wrote that, but it’s certainly satirical. You portray a dinner party with a guest who’s called Storm, who really gets under your skin by saying things like, there’s no such thing as knowledge, there’s just opinion, and by praising alternative medicine, to which you say, well, alternative medicine by definition either doesn’t work or isn’t proven to work, because if it did, it would just be called medicine.

And your wife, who, you say, knows what happens next, sends you a warning glance. So you try to restrain yourself, but after a while, it all gets too much when she goes on. And, to adapt your own words, you ‘get shitty with a good-looking hippie with a fairy tattooed on her spine and butterflies on her titties.’ It’s a great poem and I tend to agree with the sentiments expressed, but I’m wondering: do you still get invited to dinner parties whose guests have not been screened for their views?

TIM MINCHIN:
Storm is an incredible straw person. She was an amalgam of… I built her out of straw and burnt her in a classic Socratic sort of style. I like that poem.

It was interesting that the thing that’s changed about how that poem is perceived is that it never crossed my mind, studying feminist literature in the nineties, that making my straw person a woman would later feel sexist. But even for me, I’ve gone: oh, that feels quite like a man hectoring. At the time, I was just equal opportunity bad ideas. It never crossed my mind that I shouldn’t make my interlocutor a woman.

But I’m quite proud of it. I consider myself someone who — as I say in the poem — you show me any piece of evidence and I’ll change my mind. I’ll turn on a fucking dime. I’ll carve the words “fancy that” on the side of my cock, I think I say. So, my whole worldview is empirical. I believe in staying open to the changes in the evidence.

What’s interesting is that I haven’t changed many of my ideas in the poem because I wasn’t asserting facts. I was asserting a way of examining the facts. So it stands up for me. Certainly it’s good beat poetry. There’s not a lot of beat poetry in the world, so it’s a contribution to that rare form.

Reality Romanticism — Making Science Beautiful

KASIA DE LAZARI RADEK:
Please tell us what the “reality romantic” worldview is.

TIM MINCHIN:
Well, I’m just playing with alliteration, but across the different genres in which I work, perhaps the thing I have tried to do most as an artist is bust the myth that reality or science is in opposition to art, that to understand photons, to understand how the sun functions is to ruin the sunset, to unweave the rainbow. What my job as an artist has turned out to be is to point, as brutally as possible, at the reality of the universe and, nevertheless, make it beautiful. The more you look at the truth, the more beautiful it is. The more you try to blind yourself to the truth, the more you limit your capacity for beauty.

Believing in the afterlife, for me, is a sad idea, because the most profound way to engage in life is to engage in it as a temporary state… an incredibly unlikely temporary state. So many of my songs land where Storm lands: Isn’t this enough? Just this world? Reality romantic is: we are gonna die. It’s beautiful.

Determinism, Luck, and Why He Thinks “I Didn’t Do It”

KASIA DE LAZARI RADEK:
In the third lesson of your book Nine Lessons, you say: “Remember it’s all luck.” But is it really?

TIM MINCHIN:
I’m a pretty hard determinist… I am a reasonable songwriter for the same reason a child murderer is a child murderer… it’s all emergent and all we have is influence and genes… It is very important that we congratulate each other for the work we do in feeding positive stuff into the determinist system.

“Happiness Is Like an Orgasm”

KASIA DE LAZARI RADEK:
You said happiness is like an orgasm – if you think about it, it goes away. Is your experience different?

TIM MINCHIN:
I’m trying to disabuse people of the mythology that happiness is best found by sitting around doing long weekend courses with some guru. At some point you just gotta go: “My happiness is not the work of my life. The work of my life is to be a good plumber.” And then you’ll suddenly find you’re happier because you’re concentrating on something else.

Did He Live Well?

PETER SINGER:
How are you going to rate your life overall?

TIM MINCHIN:
I think I’ve been privileged… I think I’m happier at 50 than I’ve ever been … I’m approaching a place where I’m satisfied with my altruistic contributions… mostly I’ve been lucky… I get to talk to some of the smartest people in the world quite often, which is the thing that makes me happiest.