Tim Heidecker Slips Out of Laughter

Few comedians have had a thumb on ha-ha culture more than Tim Heidecker, who—along with his partner-in-crime, Eric Wareheim—has amassed a two-decade milieu unrivaled. If the only thing he ever contributed to the 21st century zeitgeist was Tim and Eric Awesome Show, Great Job!, his reputation would be safe. But he’s also made Tim and Eric’s Billion Dollar Movie and An Evening with Tim Heidecker, appeared in Bridesmaids, The Comedy, Us, I Think You Should Leave, Eastbound & Down, Check It Out! with Dr. Steve Brule and The People’s Joker. Later this year, he’ll appear in Pavements as Matador Records exec Gerard Cosloy. His call-in show Office Hours remains an institution. So, what else could Heidecker possibly have left to conquer? Well, the next great American rock album, of course.

Slipping Away is not Heidecker’s first dance with recorded music—in fact, it’s his fifth studio album (eighth, if you consider Cainthology, Titanic and Other Songs and Too Dumb for Suicide to be canon). He’s been writing and singing tunes professionally for more than 20 years, coming up in Philly rock bands and chumming it up with Ben Folds and Regina Spektor in 2008. When Awesome Show was still on, Davin Wood was tapped as the composer but Heidecker wrote and sang often. The two would form a duo together and, in 2011, release a soft rock-inspired record called Starting from Nowhere—a big, affectionate riff on Randy Newman, Warren Zevon and Boz Scaggs, fixtures of yesteryear still near and dear to Heidecker’s creative output.

As Bob Dylan was gearing up to release Tempest in the fall of 2012, Heidecker made “Titanic,” a 14-minute spoof of the rumor that the Bard was going to release a 14-minute song of his own about the RMS Titanic. It remains one of Heidecker’s greatest comedic works, as do his later Dylan parodies, like “Running Out the Clock” and “Long Black Dress.” I imagine that, in order to write a faithful ode to one of the greatest songwriters ever, you have to study the way he works. “None of this stuff is building skyscrapers. You learn how to build a basic track and how the bass should work, how you can use a tambourine in certain places,” Heidecker says. “Sometimes, I wasn’t feeling very inspired, or I didn’t have a song idea. I’d be like, ‘Can we try to record the first three minutes of “Hey Jude” just by listening to it and listening to exactly what they’re doing, trying to emulate the sounds?’ Of course, it comes out sounding like shit, but it’s teaching you. ‘Oh, it’s just the piano and the guitar here? That’s cool.’ ‘But it sounds so big. Why does it sound so big? Oh, there’s all this compression on it.’ You figure some of that stuff out that way.”

But now, Heidecker is in a place where imitation is just the first step toward originality. The first syllable of songwriting itself comes from just listening to music. “Sometimes I’ll get into habits of ‘Oh, fuck, I don’t know how to write any song that doesn’t sound like a Randy Newman song.’ How do I break that mold? People gave me shit for ‘Well’s Running Dry.’ When I was demonstrating it to the band, it sounded like the Fleetwood Mac lick in ‘Never Going Back Again,’” he says. “But, that’s just your point of reference—your jumping-off point. Once the band takes it and the song starts, it doesn’t sound like that at all anymore. But that’s how you write; you start by almost covering something or trying to emulate a certain sound or certain voice. And then, it goes off on its own.”

Heidecker began writing Slipping Away on his first tour with the Very Good Band (Eliana “Ellie” Athayde, Josh Adams, Vic Berger and Connor “Catfish” Gallaher) in 2022. “I usually don’t write on the road,” he says, “but in this case, we had a guitar backstage that my bass player Ellie brought along with her. It was one of just one of these instruments that you felt like you wanted to hold and pick around with. That started early, where the music was around me all the time.” Heidecker found himself always either on a bus with musicians or backstage talking music before and after gigs. About 40% of Slipping Away germinated from venue pianos or guitar noodling during downtime. When he returned from tour, Heidecker felt inspired to not only keep writing songs, but to keep the Very Good Band together. “I had put [the band] together for that tour, but we really bonded,” he says. “It was like, ‘All right, the next logical thing would be to try to make a record with this band.’”

There’s a continuity in Heidecker’s work. His last album, High School, was a collection of great adolescent fables—stories about making dumb choices when you’re too young to do anything but make dumb choices. On Slipping Away, we’re transported right into adulthood, and Heidecker is singing about fatherhood, touring, fame, and everything that falls in-between. It was a natural transition, a flood of post-pandemic worry filled with medal-pinned earnestness. His characters are dads with no sense of purpose beyond fatherhood; his songs are arguments against writer’s block. On Slipping Away, the end is nigh, but it could’ve been much, much worse. “There were even a few more songs that I cut that were pretty literal, in terms of feeling the taste of apocalypse—the taste of something terrible happening,” he says. Slipping Away is a storyteller’s point-of-view, arriving conceptually as a series of short stories about characters related only through unfortunate circumstances—all of whom are informed by how Heidecker feels. “The stuff that’s technically in the third-person, it all comes from my own fears or anxieties or perspective of the world,” he continues. “In Glendale, my first record, is definitely a ‘dad in midlife crisis’ kind of record, so it’s not brand new territory for me.”

Though we are now more than four years removed from COVID-19’s origins, its side-effects are lingering. The way that singer-songwriters are still grappling with the setbacks of the pandemic are immense, as new music still comes out with a shine of dystopia to it. I imagine it’s an unavoidable mark of a life post-COVID. “The pandemic has been talked into the ground,” Heidecker admits, “but, at the time of writing [Slipping Away], it wasn’t quite so in the rearview mirror. I think I got quite a bit of PTSD from that experience, that there’s a big hole in our lives from that couple of years that deserves to be not ignored and explored artistically.” Take a song of his like “Bows and Arrows”: He sings of “cities burning” and “bugs crawling over me”; “I don’t think I have the fight, I’m not getting stronger, I don’t know if I can make it through the night,” he admits over a melody he calls the “reverse version” of Talking Heads’ “(Nothing But) Flowers.” “It’s a subject that I’ve tried—and failed—a number of times to do, projects about a post-apocalyptic world,” Heidecker adds. “There’s projects that Eric and I had that were around that. It’s just a rich subject. I was watching that show The Last of Us. I love those kinds of shows, because I would be terrible in those situations. In that situation, I’d be the first to get eaten by the wolves or taken over by the prepper tribes. I’d be put down pretty quick.”

Of course, writing about apocalyptic themes is not a novel idea. It’s been beaten into submission since The Walking Dead stopped being just a comic book, and it found audiences decades prior thanks to Cormac McCarthy, The Twilight Zone and George A. Romero. But, unless you’re doing, as Heidecker puts it, a “cookie-cutter zombie movie,” what you have to say about the tiny Armageddons we endure just by living is going to be original. So, Heidecker pulled the smallest human stories out of the macrocosm of existence and did his own Waiting For Godot with a macabre, singer-songwriter glaze. “I’m not making an Andrew Lloyd Webber rock opera out of the subject,” he insists. “A lot of it is in the imagination. I like stories where the characters don’t know everything that’s going on. They’re just living with the information that they have. Some of the songs are coming from that point of view, where things are a little murky.”

Sure, Slipping Away is canonically not a rock opera, but that doesn’t mean sequences like “Well’s Running Dry” → “Trippin’ (Slippin’) → “Like I Do” → “Dad of the Year” or “Something Somewhere” → “Bows and Arrows” → “Hey, Would You Call My Mom for Me” aren’t epic in their own catchy and oddly splendid ways. These are stories and feelings—lyrics meant to be heard and, in the country and folk tradition, meant to be catchy. “I care deeply about albums being an experience to listen to,” Heidecker says. “There’s a thought-process behind the order of these songs; there’s a journey that I hope to present to the listener. I mean, I don’t know how many people actually do that—sit down and listen to songs—but this record, in particular, feels very intentional in the way you’re supposed to experience it.”

There’s an intentionality behind Heidecker’s approach to collaboration, too. Over the years, he’s worked with acts like Weyes Blood, Kurt Vile, the Lemon Twigs and illuminati hotties. His greatest non-Eric Wareheim creative partner is unquestionably Jonathan Rado, one-half of Foxygen and one of the greatest producers of the last decade—amassing a catalog brimming with names like the Killers, Alex Cameron, Whitney, Father John Misty and, naturally, Weyes Blood. “Rado has been a good friend and a mentor, musically,” Heidecker says. “He’s the kind of guy where, whatever we’re working on, I’m like, ‘Do you want to plug in an organ?’ He plays this great organ part on bows and arrows, and it makes the song and ties it all together.” On all of Heidecker’s pre-Slipping Away projects, he made great use of session players and guest musicians. But, at the end of the day, it was always just him while others would come in and out. “I really wanted the experience of making a record with a band,” he says. “I’d book their time for two weeks and, whether they were playing on every moment or not, the intention was ‘I’d like you guys to just be here for this, to get your opinions and thoughts and make it a true collaboration and not just a work-for-hire experience.’”

Perhaps the most interesting credited performer on Slipping Away is Tracy Newman, whose voice crawls out of an avalanche of distorted, augmented noise at the end of “Something Somewhere.” Newman is singing “Last Night I Had the Strangest Dream,” an Ed McCurdy-penned track made famous by Pete Seeger, Simon & Garfunkel and Joan Baez. The melody sounds like it’s coming from a Victrola at the end of a dark, doomy hallway, serving as an entrance for “Bows and Arrows.” “I felt like it was too drastic to go from ‘Something Somewhere’ to ‘Bows and Arrows,’” Heidecker says. “I wanted a transition piece, and I was asking Vic [Berger], because he’s so good about making audio collages, if he would make something. And, as I was talking to him, I randomly had this YouTube clip of Tracy Newman singing that song. And I was like, ‘This is awesome. It’s beautiful. Who is Tracy Newman?’ I didn’t know who Tracy Newman was.”

After looking her up, Heidecker learned that Tracy is the sister of comedic legend Laraine Newman. “Laraine is somebody that, for whatever reason, is at a lot of events and I’ve met her over the years,” he says. “She’s like the nicest person in the world, and here was this video—the video is from ‘65, right back in the glory days of folk music. Tracy was a folk singer.” So, Heidecker wrote to Laraine, mentioning that he’d love to use that clip of Tracy on his record, and the Saturday Night Live alum put him in touch with her sister. “She’s still around, still making music, and she gladly said, ‘Do whatever you want with it,’” he continues. “It’s very weird how, at the moment I’m looking for something, I find it and happen to have this connection to it. I’m really grateful because our production company [Abso Lutely Productions] just produced her daughter Hannah Einbinder’s stand-up special. It’s nice when this world becomes very small and we’re all trying to just make stuff and be supportive of interesting things.”

Heidecker and the Very Good Band captured most of Slipping Away in limited takes, which wasn’t a deliberate choice so much as it was a necessary circumstance. “Everybody in the band are really talented and really quick learners, and my songs are not prog-rock, super-complex arrangements,” he says. “They’re pretty straightforward, and we were recording on tape. I have gotten really used to doing it that way, because it sounds better. Marginally, it’s got a certain quality to it, and it makes you treat the process differently.” Tape isn’t cheap but, for Heidecker, having to be that precious didn’t necessarily add pressure to the process, but it kept him and the band from doing the same thing 100 times over. They rehearsed the tracks a few times and went, even if they weren’t getting the entire song from soup to nuts on that very first go. “You talk about it ahead of time, and then you tape the damn thing,” he says. “You treat the recording of it as what it was meant to be, which is a recording of a moment in time.”

Slipping Away is, for Heidecker, a “continuation” of his path toward sincereness—an attempt at being straightforward in his songwriting and “uninhibited” in the company of vulnerability. His rock throughout the process was Athayde, whose vocals add a Gram Parsons and Emmylou Harris dynamic to the record. “She comes from a very serious music background,” he says. “Everybody in the band is pretty serious about music; they’re very good at it—and it’s always intimidating for me, because I feel like I’m the weakest link, musically. I think the songs are good, but, from a player standpoint, I’m not a session musician. She really pushed me to sing better. If something is too complicated on the keys or the guitar, somebody else can play it. I don’t need to be playing on everything. But, with singing, I was really trying to figure out what the best way to perform some of these songs and arrange them was. Having somebody to do that with, it’s not always the case. Sometimes, it’s me navigating that alone.”

With Heidecker and Athayde sharing a mike, separate voices tell the same story within a song. “Hey, Would You Call My Mom for Me” and “Bottom of the 8th” are obvious moments of this synergy, as they sing sweetly about taking shelter behind home plate in the rain or wanting to come home after striking out on their own. “I can’t anymore, go it alone,” they harmonize, and your heart pangs. “I like the way our voices sound together. I think my voice, in general, sounds better with someone else, or doubled, or with backing vocals to support it. I kind of left it to her to find the harmonies and to find what works,” Heidecker says. “When I put this band together, I was looking for a bass player who could sing. I had just done Fear of Death—there was so much of me and Weyes Blood singing together—so it needed to be a female.” Athayde had worked with Weyes Blood in the past, joining Natalie Mering’s band for their Tiny Desk Concert in late 2019, and worked on Fear of Death as well.

At the end of “Bells Are Ringing,” Heidecker’s daughter, Amelia, sings—ending the record with a cool hint of optimism, tying the father-daughter themes together: “But underground, maybe there’s love growing,” Amelia wonders, as the debris of a guitar solo falls down around her. “Not a lot, but it’s all we have. And it might just be enough. It might just be enough.” Those lines weren’t in the original draft; Heidecker planned for Slipping Away to conclude with “Everything old once was young, everything young someday dies” but had a change of heart. “It was like, ‘God, this song is really beautiful and the arrangement of it is so good, but what a downer,’” he explains. “What a bummer it is, lyrically, and I just felt that was a cop out, to just have nothing else to say except that—that things are bad and I’m breaking up the band. The lyrics were just one-note, which felt appropriate, but if I’m going to do this whole thing and put all this time and energy into putting out something—an ‘artistic statement’—why not add a little bit of [hope]? Because, it’s true—there’s always the possibility that things will get better.”

“[Amelia] likes making music,” Heidecker continues. “Her and her friends come down to my little studio and make music. I think she’s gonna do what I do, eventually in life—I can kind of feel it. But, she was a little resistant to it, the many layers of her singing to create a chorus. She was a little embarrassed by it, and then I was embarrassed by it. To play it, it’s like, ‘Whoa, this is pretty vulnerable, pretty potentially cringey stuff. But everybody was just like, ‘This is awesome. This sounds so cool.’ Nobody batted an eye; no one said to me, ‘Dude this is lame.’ So I just said, ‘Okay, let’s do it.’”

Depending on what side of 1970s music you land on, me contextualizing Slipping Away as part of a pre-Hotel California lineage of Americana-inspired rock ‘n’ roll may be a polarizing connection to make. But when I put this record on, I hear those country strings washed with a kind of baroque, psychedelic aura. All of my neurons fire just right when these songs play. Knowing that the Flying Burrito Brothers’ quadrant of the music-making world is Heidecker’s comfort zone, the way “Trippin’ (Slippin’)” beats on with a nostalgic, dew-drop degree of warmth radiates especially bright. But don’t get it twisted: He’s not a crank; he just loves that sound. “I love records that feel like there’s a continuity—a palette of paints that are used,” he says. “It’s not every paint, it’s not every color. It sounds like a band. And a band doesn’t have a kitchen sink of sounds and instruments and tools to use. That’s the band I’ve assembled. I don’t know exactly what is so appealing to me about it, but I feel like the songs couldn’t be any other way.” He pauses for a moment. “My guitar player, Catfish, he’s an incredible six-string player, but he’s also a masterful pedal steel player. And that instrument, to me, is the sound of angels when played well. And, when you add that texture, it becomes that sound.”

In an interview with The Guardian last year, Heidecker said he knew it would take three records before people would know for sure that his music isn’t a joke. After High School came out and he toured it across two summers and through Europe in-between, everything finally felt legit for him. “I came out and did my stand-up character for 30, 40 minutes and my fear was that then everyone would leave or everyone would laugh at me and then leave, or boo, or whatever,” he says. “But it was the opposite of that. That was a surprise—not just for me, but for a lot of the people I heard from in the audience that were like, ‘Dude, I knew you did music, I didn’t know it was going to be that good. I didn’t know the band was going to be that good and I didn’t know you were going to be that committed to it.’ I could see people singing along. That experience became very affirming, like, ‘Oh, this works.’”

Heidecker once said that his first ambition was making music and that comedy was a last resort. Comedy wasn’t Plan A, B or, hell, even Z. But now, both stand-up and songwriting co-exist with each other in the axiom of Heidecker’s artistry—and having those parts of himself coalesce so neatly reaffirms his relationships to both. “I love to laugh, I love to goof around. I get to do it every week on Office Hours. I get to do it with On Cinema. I just was hanging out with Kyle Mooney the other day, and all we were doing was bits. I never want to give any of that up, and no one’s asking me to,” he says. “When I’m grooving with the band and connecting and the harmony’s working, I’m also having a great time. They compliment each other nicely. They make me feel like not all my eggs are in one basket. I hope, later down the road, it all blends into one thing that I’m doing—even though some things are funny, some things are not funny; some things are mean, some things are sweet. They’re all going to be different, but I hope it feels like one big old career. One big old piece of work.”

On Slipping Away, Heidecker wrestles with the ways “Can I?” become “Should I?,” lamenting the past without becoming complacent about the future. It’s his Sail Away—the big, worn-in gravy train that yanks him out of every label anyone has ever boxed him into. He compares his life on the road to that of a minor league pitcher; he’s taking mushrooms and wasting summery days; his childhood dreams of being a big star are squashed by hours lost behind a desk; he’s feeling every bit of his age. He’s the father of the year. He’s missing his mom and has nowhere else to go. Of course, none of these “he”s are him. But, then again, all of them are, aren’t they? Life is funny, like a crossword puzzle or a jumble. And, at 48, Heidecker is still filling in the blanks. He’s still growing into all the best parts of himself.

Matt Mitchell is Paste’s music editor, reporting from their home in Northeast Ohio.