Tim Rogers & The Twin Set
The songs of Tim Rogers weave and glide across the field the way an elite footballer dances through the defence.
It appears effortless to us out in the stands. Sometimes we mistakenly call it magic, although it is anything but. We don’t see all the work – the backyard games, the repetitions, the frost-covered training grounds, the hard losses – that go into making greatness.
For a songwriter, that’s life, the personal struggles, the birthdays missed, the long days far from home, as well as the triumphs, the hits, the encores.
Here is the difference between sport and art. Thirty-one years after setting off on a great rock’n’ adventure with You Am I, Tim Rogers is still operating at the top of his game, not in retirement but writing songs as rich and memorable, and as heart-breaking too, as any he has ever written.
The evidence is there on this year’s The Lives of Others, the 11th studio album from You Am I. It is an album recorded under difficult circumstances during a pandemic yet soaring from the speakers with all the power and grace under pressure of the band’s earlier classics like Hi Fi Way and Hourly, Daily.
The Lives of Others follows the 2017 Rogers solo set An Actor Repairs, the kind of record which confirms that, in certain circumstances, a songwriter can keep on getting better through the years. It features The Umpires Son, a story of childhood so vivid that you can almost smell the liniment and hear the bounce of ball on turf. Other songs, like One More Late Night Conversation and A Mother Daughter Thing, reveal the emotional honesty that songwriters can find with a lifetime of experience.
If you didn’t already know that Rogers is one of the great lyricists as well as one of the finest writers of a melody that Australia has ever produced, these two albums will set you straight.
A songwriter’s work is often seen by others as a personal soundtrack. But threaded through Rogers’ work are the fine details that so many identify with, whether it is the Arrowroot biscuits in You Just Don’t Do It For Me Friend (from the 1999 solo debut by Tim Rogers and the Twin Set, What Rhymes with Cars and Girls) or meeting on the town hall steps in If We Can’t Get It Together (from Hourly, Daily).
The circumstances that have led Rogers to another songwriting high in 2021 are in part because a life in a rock’n’roll band didn’t allow him to retire to a mansion in the Hollywood hills but carry on with the same joys, sorrows and doubts as the rest of us.
The local, it turns out, is universal, and the songs Tim Rogers writes are a soundtrack for a lot of lives of others too.
With a career spanning 30 years and a catalogue of fan fav’s and critically acclaimed songs Tim’s long awaited solo return is here with support of his newly to be released solo record Tines of Stars Unfurled; released Feb 2023.
Tines of Stars Unfurled is a bookend to Tim Rogers’ classic solo debut of ‘99 What Rhymes With Cars and Girls, marking the welcome return of his fiddle-and-squeezebox country-blues compadres The Twin Set, and the (slightly more temperate) barstool yarn-spinner’s perspective that made the You Am I frontman ARIA’s Best Male Artist 23 years ago..
PERFORMING SUNDAY, FEBRUARY 18
