News and Blog

Full transcript below

Stream/download ‘Carry You’: MissyHiggins.lnk.to/CarryYou

‘Carry You’ Official VIDEO and lyrics

Tim wrote ‘Carry You’ for the television series UPRIGHT. Co-written and starring Tim, UPRIGHT follows two misfits thrown together by chance in the middle of the Australian desert, as they forge an unlikely bond in their quest to get a precious piano from one side of the country to the other. Tim asked Missy Higgins to record the song, in her distinctive style, for the closing credits. UPRIGHT is available in Australia on FOXTEL, on NOW TV in the UK and on Super Channel Fuse for viewers in Canada. More details and a teaser here.

Transcript:
Missy Higgins: Hi Tim.
Tim Minchin: Hi Missy Higgins. So, we’re in a beige hotel room to talk about… what’s it called? ‘Carry You’!
MH: ‘Carry You’.
TM: We put out a song together.
MH: We did! Yeah.
TM: A dream come true.
MH: How did you get the idea? What made you decide to ask me?
TM: So we have Sarah Belkner, who plays keyboards and sings in both our bands — yours for some years, right?
MH: Yes, she was mine before you stole her. (laughs)
TM: Yeah, I totally stole her. I stole all my band off various ­people. So Sarah Belkner, I said: “I’ve got this song — do you reckon Missy would do it?’’ or maybe Sarah’d heard it by then. Because I was in post-production for URIGHT, I had this idea, and the song — for those who haven’t seen it — exists in the world of UPRIGHT. The character Lucky plays it in the middle of the desert, in episode five, and I had this idea that we should repeat the song over the credits, but that it shouldn’t be him singing it becaus­e he’s come on a whole journey and he’s not in the same headspace and I wanted the audience to have that reflective thing. And I thought it’d be really good to be a female voice, and it’s very Aust­ralian — anyway, it seemed so ­obvious to me that you were the right person to sing it. And Sarah mentioned that you were in ­Canberra, I think, so we just got together, didn’t we. What do you think?
MH: I think it’s beautiful. I mean Sarah’s production was so minimalist and classy and I think she made it really simple from the first version, remember? We had drums and it was more organic but it was less contemporary.
TM: Yeah, that’s right
MH: She kind of made it a bit more modern.
MH: Were you nervous about bringing out or writing a song that was, I guess, much more earnest and heartfelt than most of your comedic things?
TM: Yeah, and it’s so nice to hear someone who’s a proper vocalis­t singing my stuff as well because my voice is a storytelling machine. It’s not a beautiful thing; it has a function. But it was amazing — my son said: “This is like a proper song!’’ (laughs.)
MH: (laughs) Like “what’s that supposed to be?”
TM: (laughs) Yeah, totally. How did you interpret it? Or is that a silly question?
MH: Yeah, I think… When I heard it, yeah, it felt like a song about longing with a tinge of regret, I guess. I didn’t really intellectualise it too much. I think I just kind of felt it in my heart and I loved the few little specific lyrics in there too about Cottesloe Beach and the fish and chips. They’re the things I really love in songs because they’re so visual.
TM: I wonder if audiences of UPRIGHT know who Lucky wrote ‘Carry You’ about, at the end.
MH: Yeah, because it could be about three different things right?
TM: Right, right
MH: So, even I, when I watched it at the end I couldn’t quite… I mean, I had in my mind who I thought it was about, but it really could have been about a few different things.
TM: Yeah, yeah
MH: How’s the response to the series been for you, in general?
TM: It’s been amazing. For the first time in my life probably since Matilda I thought “This is good”. Usually I have massive crises of confidence and I didn’t. I never had a crisis of confidence about UPRIGHT, I just went “I think this is the sort of thing I want to be involved in” and so many things we were very lucky with, in the people we found to work with on it, all the way down to being able to get you to do the final moment. Just, sometimes things fall your way and a lot of things fell our way.
TM: So thanks for doing that for us, for our show.
MH: Such a pleasure. I loved it. It’s such a nice challenge, in a way, to take on somebody else’s song and see if you can reinterpret it through your own lens and yeah, I immediately loved it when you played it to me.