And yet one of the lovely things about humans and the stories we tell is that objects don’t have power in them except for the power of the story you’re telling — and therefore, they do. There is no magic except your narrative of magic — and therefore, it’s magic.

I took piano lessons between the ages of about nine and 13. Since then, I don’t think I’ve done an hour of what you’d call practice. I’ve never sat down and gone, “Right, I’m going to practice my…” anything, ever. All I’ve done is just mucked around for 35 years.

My first piano was my great-grandmother’s piano. I don’t actually know where it came from, but it’s 100-and-something years old now. It’s this old Rintoul pianola — a pedal piano that played itself. My great-grandma was at times quite well-heeled, and she had hundreds of piano rolls.

My siblings and I used to stand around and sing old songs, all the way through to Men at Work’s Down Under and an Elton John mash-up of Crocodile Rock and Goodbye Yellow Brick Road.

The piano itself was quite shit, a big boxy thing with little doors where the roll goes, but the action was really light. It was bright and very fast, and it influenced the way I played. That was the only piano I ever had as a kid. It wasn’t like my parents realised I had some talent; they didn’t go: “We better get him a better piano.” There was none of that. It’s now in my mum’s house in Perth. They’ve had it redone, and it still goes today.

After doing an arts degree at the University of Western Australia, I was still living at home in 1996 when I said to Mum and Dad, “I’m going to take a year off to have a go at being a muso” — as if you can do it in a year, in Perth. But I thought the year would be enough to know whether it was for real, and in that year I acted in and wrote scores for four plays, and washed dishes and poured beers and just made shit.

Around this time I got a Yamaha P150 digital piano for my 21st birthday. I wanted weighted keys because I needed it to feel like a piano. The P150 had an actual weighted mechanism that mimicked the action, which is why it weighed 35kg, because every key had its own counterweight. I carried it into a lot of gigs, for years.

When Sarah and I got married in 2002 and we moved to Melbourne, her Yamaha U3 came with us because her parents went, “Well, we don’t need it in our house any more, it was always yours.” And of course, Sarah went, “Well, I won’t play it — but we need a piano because Tim plays.” That was the first time I had a piano in my house. You can see it in the Rock n Roll Nerd documentary that Rhian Skirving made in 2008. I wrote a lot of music on that piano, including Rock n Roll Nerd and Darkside, and all the things that made me have a career.

Sarah’s U3 was perfect and completely unremarkable. It’s the piano I probably got good on, to the extent that I’ve gotten good. Pianos are composing instruments to me. I perform on them, but the way I learned to play piano was by writing on them. I wrote my way to my skills.

That piano was a gift, and as lovers of metaphor and narrative, I guess it’s a pretty good symbol of what Sarah has given me my whole life: “You do what you do. Here, have the instrument that you do it on. Have the time. Have my support.”

She’s a good human, and she would never tell the story that way herself. But that’s what she’s done. She’s just gone, “Well, we’re having your life.” She was briefly on Twitter — before she found it scary that my fans were following her — and her Twitter bio was “Having the time of someone else’s life”. That’s her sense of humour, not a whinge, but there’s some truth in it.

When we took possession of that U3 it was flawless, even though it was 20-odd years old. Absolutely without a single chip on it, and I think I respected that. I don’t think I treated it too badly.

But this is what people don’t understand: you can deconstruct a piano in a minute. You pull the front off, and then the sound board at the bottom, and suddenly it’s laid bare, this fantastic mechanism. Most people who buy a piano would never dare to do that; it’s like taking the plastic casing off a modern car engine.

So as soon as I got hold of Anne and Ross Gardiner’s beautiful little piano, I was pulling bits off it, because I wanted to see the guts of the thing. It’s kind of like meeting a person: I’m not really interested in what you present. Let’s drink, so I can see your scars and how f..ked up you are. I don’t know if I’m going to be your friend until you tell me why you’re a f..k-up.

That’s why America is hard, by the way: American people, they keep the cover on the piano of their souls all the time. “Yeah, no, I’m fine. I’m doing great. I’m shiny!” Let’s take the f..kin’ front off and see your hammers and then we’ll be friends. But until you do that, you’re just a French-polished version of yourself.

The reason pianos are interesting is because they are huge pieces of furniture, and more so than other instruments, I think they have lives. They’re more like a person that’s adopted. Sarah’s piano has ended up back in Perth, in the home of my cousin Susie, who’s a music teacher. She has taught on it ever since, so this instrument now is the origin story of god knows how many students. It keeps going, and keeps having its own stories.

When things took off for me and I started playing bigger venues, I would have a piano on my rider. I would say: “I need a Yamaha C5, C6 or C7, and it has to have been built within this era — and if you don’t have one, you need to talk to your piano technician and tell them that I want a bright piano with a fast action, with hammers that aren’t too soft.”

Because I can’t play the way I play on a beautiful big Steinway, with big heavy keys and a slow action, or some piano that a venue might have that is their absolute pride and joy, like some 1930s Bosendorfer. They’re like, “But we’ve got this!” and I’m like, “Yeah, but I’m going to wrestle with it all night. Because I can’t play that. It’s not how I play.” I learned to play on a light, fast piano.

For years when I was touring early on, I’d have whole nights where I felt like I was having a personal battle with this instrument while I was doing a show for 500 people. It was just a f..king battle of wills that I had to win against this instrument whose action was, however hard you hit, it was sort of going, “Yeah, all right, I’ll play that note, fine …” F..k you! It’s horrible. I’m not saying I want the best piano; I’m saying I want a piano I can play.

When we moved into a little flat in Crouch End, London in 2006, there happened to be a shop up the road called Muswell Hill Pianos. I bought a black Kawai K300; a good upright with a good action, nice and bright. It was the best piano in the shop that suited me for my budget.

That piano went into our flat in Crouch End, and subsequently into our house in Crouch End. On it I wrote If I Didn’t Have You, Prejudice, White Wine in the Sun and bits of [2010 stage musical] Matilda.

That piano then came with me to Los Angeles [in 2014], and sat in my home office, and then came to Australia with us three years ago, and sat at the Giant Dwarf [theatre in Sydney] for the last 2½ years, because it couldn’t come up my stairs at home.

Giant Dwarf is owned by The Chaser guys, so I said to them: “In exchange for keeping my piano here, can I come and write when the house is dark?” It didn’t really work out, actually — it’s a bit far from home — but just recently I put it on a truck and took it down to this little bush block we’ve bought.

So that Kawai has gone from Crouch End to Hollywood Hills to Redfern, and now to the Southern Highlands. It’s sitting in a little house in the middle of a bunch of trees, that hopefully family and friends will stay in forever.

During our last year in London, I heard from a piano tuner about a Yamaha C7 that a woman at a venue in North London had to sell.

I bought it and that piano went to LA, all boxed up, and went into our front room, and that was the moment at 39 when I had my first grand piano in a house, and that was pretty great. It’s now in my front room in Sydney.

In this f..king weird year, I decided that Airport Piano should be my fourth single from my debut album. For the music video I talked to my sister Nel, who’s a filmmaker, and my brother-in-law Guy Patrick, who’s in advertising.

Guy said: “You should do an art project where you get an old piano and just f..kin’ paint it, and that’s the music video.” And I thought, why don’t we get a shitty old piano and I’ll write the lyrics of the song on it, so that “I wrote this song on an airport piano …” becomes a literal joke?

Then I thought, “Actually, I have to not lowball this.” If I make this a good video, and if I make it an interesting artefact of the moment, then I’ll be able to sell this for an arts charity and make proper money, so that it’s a nice piano that some rich person can have in their house as a quirky piece that they’ll have a story about.

I’m always looking for ways to make the work be about more than just the work, so I rang up Yamaha and told them about the charity idea, and they were straight on board — but they don’t have a bunch of pianos sitting around unaccounted for; they import them on order and distribute them to shops. I went, “Can you give me a white one, so I can write on it?” They only had a black one, a U1, so I went, “All right, we’re going to strip that f..ker down!”

Then a few months back, my mother was diagnosed with a particularly nasty blood cancer, so my two sisters in Sydney and our families all applied for travel exemptions to get to Perth as soon as possible. Thankfully we were allowed to quarantine together in the same house for two weeks, so we made this thing in the garage.

I absolutely loved doing it; it took a lot of work and a lot of support from Guy and Nel. It’s a fun song that becomes quite bleak, and the video real­ly added to the sense of middle-aged “time’s passing” panic, which the whole album is riddled with.

I’m not very precious about pianos at all; my whole philosophy is they’re made to be beaten up and used and stained. But once I’d managed to do all that writing without making a single significant error, I was like: “OK, how do we seal it?” You can’t French polish it, because all the art paint would come off, because it’s too heavy. I did all this consulting about how to seal it, and this furniture guy on the outskirts of Perth did it.

Now it’s on a truck across the desert to Sydney, and I’ve been pretty worried about it. I told them, “Please, if we’re going to auction it, don’t break a chunk off.” But of course, people move pianos all the time, and they know not to f..k them up, so it’ll be fine.

I’m going to play it at an online streaming concert, where I’ll perform the whole album with about 15 musos, and then in Junenext year I’m going to auction it at a fundraiser called Art of Music.

Last year I co-wrote and acted in a television series called Upright, and the whole point of it is that instruments carry stories. Near the end of the show, my character Lucky Flynn gives a monologue that reflects how I feel about music, which is that it’s not ever been a discipline in my life; it’s been a form of expression.

I feel so lucky that I can play, and play in a way that I can play in my sleep. I’m not the best pianist in the world, but certainly I think when people watch me play, it doesn’t look like I’m putting much effort in. There’s not a big barrier between me and my instrument, and that’s an amazing thing to have stumbled on. However much I’m frustrated by my lack of jazz chops, I do feel very grateful that I can just play.

I think pianos are meant to be sat on and jumped off, and they’re meant to hold your coffee, and they’re meant to serve the purpose of being an extension of you. It takes a lot of years to get there, but that’s what you hope for. And if it’s precious, and you’re worried about scratching it, or worried about whether you’ve washed your hands, it’s never going to be that. If you’re dirty, then your instrument’s dirty, because it’s just an extension of you.

I certainly love beating the shit out of pianos, and if they don’t do what I want, I’ll hit them harder, and then they’ll get stubborn and tell me to f..k off, and I’ll go, “No, f..k you — I’m playing you, not the other way around.” They’re not artefacts; they’re instruments. They’re a voice. Ideally, you get to a point where your instrument is a part of your voice, and they help you give character to your expression.

So the idea of a piano being pretty and holding a vase? That’s just furniture.

Apart Together is released on Friday, November 20, via BMG. Tim Minchin will perform the album in a ticketed online concert on Thursday, November 19, at 7pm.