Broken Dreams Club Interview: Tim Heidecker

Photo Credit: Chantal Anderson

As the creator of programs like “Tom Goes to the Mayor” and “Tim and Eric Awesome Show, Great Job!” Tim Heidecker—more so than any other artist—helped establish the absurdist, surrealist comedy stylings that are ubiquitous today. His influences can be found in everything from television commercials to programs like “The Eric Andre Show” to the work of comics like Nathan Fielder, Julio Torres, John Early and Kate Berlant.

For the past decade, however, Heidecker has also cultivated a second career as a plainspoken and earnest musician, embracing the sounds of 70s’ Laurel Canyon singer-songwriters as well as troubadours like Randy Newman and Elvis Costello. Last October, Heidecker released “Slipping Away,” his latest collection of folk-inflected rock songs. 

On February 22, Heidecker and his Very Good Band will perform at Bimbo’s 365 Club. Prior to that show, Broken Dreams Club spoke with Heidecker about the inspirations for his new album, among other topics.

Your latest tour kicks off next week here at Bimbos’ here in San Francisco. How are you all preparing for this latest batch of shows?

We’re going to rehearse this week, but the San Francisco show is going to be interesting, because we’re not doing a warm-up show first in Los Angeles, like we normally do. We’re just jumping into the deep end. It’s a whole new set, and we’re going to try some new things that I haven't done before on the road, so it's going to be a scary first show for me. I'm sure we'll learn some things. It'll be interesting to get audience feedback from the Bay Area. I mean, it will probably make for a really fun, unique show. We might make some mistakes, but I always kind of like seeing that as an audience member—that human element of the performance.

You’ve been pretty prolific touring these past few years. You’re never taking more than a few months off between shows. How important is it for you to maintain this live music schedule, and how are you able to fit this in with all your endeavors?

Once I jumped in and put this band together it started this cycle, where my first tour led to a record with the band, and then some opportunities to play some more behind that. America is so big and there's so many places to play. You can do one route one year, and then a totally different route the next year. You get to go away and not always play the same places. So, we were able to do that for a couple years and then we were able to go to Europe. You have to plan these tours so far in advance—that’s sort of the scary thing. I think we started planning this tour a year ago, and so it's just been sitting on my calendar. It’s like this slow moving train coming my way. But I'm excited to play with this band, and to get out there and check in with the people of this country, and play these songs from the record. Maybe play some songs that I haven't played live before, and do some new stand-up comedy I’m excited about.

Obviously, you first made your name for yourself through your comedy, but you’ve been playing music for most of your life as well, right? What was your introduction to music, and have you been playing pretty much consistently since you first started? I mean, music was always an integral part of Tim and Eric…

I mean, in high school, I was a big classic rock fan, big music fan. My cousin played guitar, and some of his friends played in, like, hardcore bands and punk bands. And it was just the thing to do. I wasn't a sports guy. I was kind of into theater and music, before comedy. Really, I loved comedy too, but music was something you could actually do with your friends. You could make videos and stuff with a camcorder, but you really couldn't do much more than that with comedy. But you could put a band together, and you could rent a four track tape machine, and you could play shows. So that's what I did, and that's what most of my friends  did. And so, I kind of always maintained that part of my life. And I think in the past 10 years, it's been something I’ve taken a little more seriously. I find a lot of satisfaction in songwriting and trying to make the best records possible. 

“Slipping Away” is your latest collection of slice-of-life California folk that is composed of really pretty songs, and even more, it’s just a disarmingly earnest album. Tim and Eric basically set the template for the absurdist, ironic comedy that is absolutely ubiquitous everywhere now, but you’ve said in recent interviews how it took you a while to kind of emerge from that cocoon of irony. What did it take for you to arrive as this songwriter who is really devoid of that irony—whose songs are candid and honest and plainspoken?

I think it has a little bit to do with boredom with where I was at creatively. I'm very antsy and always looking for the next thing to do, and never really satisfied with where I am. And those kinds of tendencies have always been with me. I think I sensed that I was stuck in a creative place. So, it seemed kind of natural to me that, after 10 years of sort of very deep irony and disassociation with feelings, that the most interesting or most severe turn I could make would be to be very open and honest. And it's also just better for the music. My thing is to try to hold all these things together, or hold all these things at once, and it's sort of project based. If I want to make a record, I want that record to feel as well conceived and earnest and moving as possible. And if I'm making a season of On Cinema, I want it to be the funniest, craziest, sickest, stupidest thing you've ever seen. I just want the thing that I'm making to be the as pure a version of that thing as possible.

One of the things that makes “Slipping Away” so enjoyable is that your fears and insecurities are so damn relatable. For someone who has been so insanely prolific over the years, to hear a song like “Well’s Running Dry” is almost shocking in its plaintiveness. I would never imagine that someone like you struggles with creative blocks, but it also is a reminder that you’re a human like the rest of us. Is that something you confront a lot—finding moments where inspiration just doesn’t arrive? 

I go through periods of dry spells and this mix of maybe feeling uninspired or not very creative. And I also go through periods, where there are things that I want to do, but nobody else wants me to, or that there's no market for. You know—shows don't get picked up or movies don't happen or whatever. I have plenty of that—there is plenty of rejection in my life—me and all the people I work with. And then I have feelings of procrastination, or feeling not motivated to finish something that I started—just like everyone else. I do have nice periods of productivity where things happen. But in between all those, I wallow in that kind misery of not being always clear about what to do next. 

In that same vein, you’re very humble and grounded on this album. I’m not being hyperbolic when I say that you’re a titanic figure to so many people like me—the absolute pinnacle figure of creativity and comedy—yet on “Dad of the Year,” you seem to be coming to terms that your original dreams and aspirations might not ever come true. That seems almost a little unduly harsh, but also a reminder that we all face self-doubt. How do you cope with those feelings and are there moments when you can kind of indulgently reflect and realize that you have had a profound impact on a lot of people?

I appreciate that. The record came out really good, and I'm really happy with it and the feedback I get is always nice. People seem to really like it—but it's not like it was on any best-of list, you know what I mean? That’s sort of my career. I think that there is real appreciation. I hear a lot of nice stuff, but I think from the beginning, even with Tim and Eric stuff, there was always this sort of feeling of not being treated the way some other people are treated. We don’t maybe get the recognition that I think we deserve. And that that might not be your perspective, but it is mine. So, when I'm playing “Dad of the Year,” I do feel that way sometimes. 

The New York Times did a really nice story about you recently!

For sure. And not to get into the weeds of the media, but there is the kind of media where it’s like a profile or an interview or conversation, and those are always really nice. But then there's this other editorial side, that is maybe a little snobby or a little dismissive of me. And that’s probably because of the insecurity of them asking, ‘is this a joke?’ ‘Is he being sincere?’ I think there is a feeling of not really knowing. Like—where am I coming from, even though I'm very explicit about my intent.

One of the joys of your album is the commonplace things that make you happy. “Bottom of the 8th” is just a sweet song about enjoying a baseball game with your daughter. When you were in that moment, were you thinking, ‘man this would make for a good song?”

That one definitely was written on the road. It was a combination of things. My daughter is getting to the age where we can go and do things together, and it's really fun. And she loves baseball. I love baseball. We go to the games, and we can hang out like a couple of pals. You know, it's really a beautiful thing. I was literally in North Carolina in the summertime, down the street from where the Durham Bulls play. It was all swirling in my head. I sat at the piano and just started playing a song about taking my daughter to a baseball game. And it's probably because I was missing my family on the road. But yeah, it just felt like one of those songs where I was surprised it hadn't been written yet.

And then there is “Trippin (Slippin)” which is about as close as you get to the hedonistic rock n roll lifestyle. What was that experience like—eating some mushroom in a random hotel, right?

I had dabbled in that stuff years and years ago in high school, like probably a lot of suburban Gen Xers, and really hadn't returned to it in a long time. I felt very paranoid. I'm not a drug guy, and I don't do that kind of stuff very much. And I was nervous. But there is this sort of a mushroom renaissance happening the past few years and we had finished most of the tour. We had like two more shows left. We had a day off. We were in the desert, and I really had grown very close to the band and really enjoyed them, and we just got along so well. And we had a bag of mushrooms from a good, trusted source, and I thought, ‘I'll take a little bit’, you know, and that was the key. The dosage is so important. When I was 17 years old, I’d probably take, like, a whole bag of the stuff and then feel like the world was coming to an end. You find that little dose that makes you feel like things are cool and you can sit by the pool and just relax. So, I wrote that song coming from that earnest place of like, an embarrassingly honest drug song.

You have so many great contemporary musicians on Office Hours, and you’ve toured with indie rock heroes like Snail Mail and Waxahatchee. And your pals with Weyes Blood and the Lemon Twigs and Jonathan Rado. Still, a lot of your music seems drawn from that Laurel Canyon rock and Randy Newman kind of singer-songwriter era—are there any newer musicians who inspired or influenced this album?

I mean, first of all, all those people you mentioned seem to also draw from that era and that's probably why we all get along pretty well. We have the same musical language or whatever. But yeah, we had this guy, Christian Lee Hutson, on the show recently and he talked about This Is Lorelei. Do you know that guy?

Yeah—that album is one of my absolute favorites of 2024. 

Yeah. I don't listen to a lot of new music, but when I find something like that, I just listen to it all the time. I listen to it every day. And so that hopefully will turn me on to some other things. I've been listening to my own music trying to get ready for this tour. And I've been going back to early Dylan because I ended up really liking “A Complete Unknown,”—

which I was very surprised about. I thought it was going to be, you know, not good, but I ended up really liking it. I'm such a big Dylan fan. Yeah, so I started going back and listening to those early records that I hadn't listened to in a while, and kind of marveling at what just unbelievable well of creativity that was happening when he was so young.

Looking ahead to this show at Bimbo’s—are you excited to be coming back to San Francisco? Are you familiar with the venue at all?

Yeah—I'm excited. I've never been there. The past few times I've been to San Francisco, we played at the Palace of Fine Arts, which is not like my favorite room. Just kind of felt a little more like you'd see an opera there or something. But we’re happy to be playing in San Francisco. Ellie [Athayde], our bass player, is excited because her parents are from the Bay Area. She said her parents used to go to Bimbo’s when they were teenagers. 

And you’ve got Kyle Mooney opening! That’s amazing! What can we expect there? Will you be joining him at all? I know you mentioned to expect a little comedy alongside your music…

Yeah—Kyle's opening, and then I've been doing this routine. It's not my stand up character, but I've been doing this routine in LA that's really fun a little bit more for me. I haven't really talked about it very much, but I've been collecting YouTube comments and Instagram comments and Facebook comments and I've curated some conversations that I think are interesting to discuss. I've done that with a little slide show. I want to dedicate a good 20 minutes of the show to me goofing around to break up some of the music. A side of me that you probably see more on Office Hours. I'm still putting that together, but I'm excited—it will be a multimedia thing.

Is Kyle going to join for that? Or is he going to be doing his own thing?

We’ll probably overlap a little bit. It will be a new thing for this tour—picking up different, different openers along the way. We’ll have Neil Hamburger and DJ Douggpound. I’ve got this great community—not only of the audience, but of people like Neil and Doug. I’d rather just try to keep it in my little clique, and I think the audience is gonna love it.

And to transition just for a moment to some of your other endeavors. The latest season of On Cinema debuted on Christmas and it’s as epic as ever. Newman Heidecker seems to have a nice new sheen to his face.  When you and Gregg first started this, did you have any inkling at all that it would still be going 15 years later and not only that, but it would also evolve into this all-encompassing cinematic universe?

We had no idea. I mean, we started small, but it did occur to us early on that they're always going to put out movies, so we could always do this—there's always something to talk about. And once we got season four or five, we realized that you could tell some pretty interesting stories without spending a lot of money, because you can just talk about things. You don't have to really see them happen. It’s more like radio play or something. And so, it’s kind of compounded on itself, and the stories got more complicated and more involved. But at the core, there was always this grounding foundation of two guys, who hate each other, talking about movies. And every year, I think ‘does this still work?’ ‘Is this still funny?’ Even when we're shooting it, there's this uncertainty about it, but then the cuts start coming in, and we're like, ‘yep, there it is.’ I feel as happy about it as I've ever felt. And there isn't really any reason to stop, now that we're doing this paid model, the subscription model, which has been working. I'm always looking for it to expand, and we're working on getting an app and getting it so you can watch it on your TV and stuff like that. It's like running this small business that is not always fun, but it's great that we can keep doing it. Gregg still makes me laugh. I still make myself laugh.

Yeah, the last few episodes were as funny as any On Cinema episode ever. One of the things I think must be enjoyable for you is the evolution of the Tim Heidecker character. There’s a new look every season. I can imagine it’s fun to just embrace that ridiculous nature of the character. 

Sometimes the story drives that, and sometimes it’s just where I am at in my life. And yeah, We have a text thread that throws looks and ideas back and forth. I don’t think we thought this new look was going to be that great at first. And then when we started doing the hair, we all just started laughing. And everyone's running around, like, ‘you gotta come in and look at this’. Eric [Notarnicola], our director, when he first saw me, came by and was just like, ‘Oh my god. Wow.’ I mean, we still crack ourselves up like that.

And I’d be remiss if I didn’t ask if you have any future creative projects planned with Eric. Anything in the works there?

Yeah, we are writing something that we've been planning to write for a while. We’re going to start before I go on tour, and then hopefully be writing when I get back. And it's a movie idea that is still in the early stages. But hopefully that will find its way into your lives sometime this year or next year.

Anything I missed here? Any other upcoming projects you’re working on at the moment? I’m finally catching up on What We Do in The Shadows and you’re great in that…

At this point, my life is just touring, and then Office Hours and On Cinema—and a little acting. So that's it, right now. I'm not looking to do more than that.

Show Details: 
Tim Heidecker and the Very Good Band with Kyle Mooney, DJ Douggpound and a special command performance from Tim “no more bullshit” Heidecker
Where: Bimbo’s 365 Club 
When: 8 p.m., Wednesday, January 22 
Tickets: $48.88, available here.