Groundbreaking Australian musician Tim Minchin today releases the first single from his debut studio album via BMG.
The single, Leaving LA, is a bittersweet break up song with the place he called ‘home’ for four years. A little sad and a little funny, it is a predictably sardonic and poignant song on the conundrum that is La-La Land.
Using a combination of pop and orchestral stylings that Minchin is renowned for, the track comes from the wreckage that was his US residency where Minchin experienced the demise of a $90 million Dreamworld animated film project; the closure of his Broadway musical ‘Groundhog Day: The Musical’ after a six month run and to add to this, what he describes as an 'untenable' life in the US under Donald Trump.
Post LA, Minchin's return to Australian home soil with his wife and two children was a welcomed one for the composer, actor and musician.
Following the single Tim releases more music later in 2020 with his forthcoming debut studio album.
Accompanied by a ‘film video’ that took thousands of hours to make, Tim worked with his childhood friend Tee Ken Ng to create what Tim describes as “the most wonderful piece of animation I have ever seen”, an irony not lost on him, having spent 4 years creating an animated film in LA which was axed.
Minchin says this about the song: “‘'Leaving LA' was written in my final year living there. It is meant to reflect the bitterness I felt when the project I had been working on for 4 years got trashed. But it’s also meant to feel a bit sad, and a bit funny, and a bit fond. It’s bittersweet; like a break-up song written for somebody you’re still a little in love with.
The perceived glamour of Hollywood is laughable once you’ve lived inside it. Don’t get me wrong, there are brilliant people there making wonderful art, but it’s pretty damn ugly to look at, shamelessly materialistic (obviously), and full of desperate - and desperately unhappy - people. It’s also full of tourists leering at obscene houses, and frantically searching for a good spot from which to take a photo of an old real estate sign.
I try my best to steer clear of clichés, but the famous sign felt to me like an unexploited metaphor: it, like the town it teeters above, is iconic, unique, two-dimensional… and, if you’re expecting glamour, a bit disappointing.”
