A return to rock with Tim Heidecker

There’s a moment about halfway through multi-hyphenate entertainer Tim Heidecker’s latest album Slipping Away in which all the quotidian joys and anxieties of everyday life he’s explored to that point give way to something larger, less defined, increasingly ominous. “Something Somewhere” is not a panic attack, per say, but acknowledgement of a cosmic force Heidecker can’t hope to fully understand, a wonderfully subtle look at the biggest questions of them all.

This isn’t the headspace one might expect from Heidecker, an actor, writer, podcaster, and comedian who has been working steadily now for over two decades. If you first came across Heidecker, as I did, by way of his surreal, irreverent, hilarious Adult Swim show Tim and Eric Awesome Show, Great Job! (a show he created with fellow Temple alum and Allentown native Eric Warheim) you might expect a songwriter for whom humor is the driving force. Heidecker can do that, and has on a number of occasions, but his career as a songwriter is far from a punch line. Over the course of the last half decade, Heidecker has established his bonafides a genuinely great indie rock songwriter, working alongside musicians like Weyes Blood, Mac Demarco, and Kurt Vile to carve out a career as a kind of modern-day Warren Zevon, downtrodden yet smirking. Slipping Away is no different, in which Heidecker is as concerned with catching a ball game with his daughter as he is exploring post-apocalyptic landscapes of his own design.

I got a chance to talk with Heidecker ahead of his show at Union Transfer this Friday about, among other things, his latest record, going to The Trocadero back in college, and the differences between comedy and music.

Sean Fennell: You’ve been a touring performer for most of your life at this point. I’m curious how different it is touring as part of a band as opposed to doing stand-up or even smaller comedy shows?

Tim Heidecker: There are significant differences. Obviously, there is a setlist of songs that get pretty locked in, but that could be true of comedy sketches or a stand-up set. But I find that every night I’m playing the set, I am adding new endings or in-between jokes. Just fun little moments that are keeping me and the band on our toes, and hopefully keeping the audience engaged. So it’s not just about us coming out and plodding through 12 songs, it’s more of a hang where things can constantly change, more of an open conversation that keeps me enjoying doing the show every night.

SF: You noted that this part of the tour feels like the end of the beginning. Are you and the band starting to really get in a groove?

TH: The band is super professional. They pick stuff up really quick. Even after the second rehearsal, it was clear everyone knew what to play. Now it is more about the flow of the show and what new songs we want to swap out, how we might want to reorder things. That took place the first couple of nights and now its more locked-in to a place where we can continue to fuck around. We just added a new coda to the opening song, “Well’s Running Dry”, that’s basically just The Beatles’ song “Don’t Pass Me By.” I just threw that together in the sound check and it was fun so, you know, that will probably stay in there now. I always feel like it takes a good week of being on the road to feel like all the nerves have shaken off and you get a better sense of what’s working and what’s not and just the overall flow of the thing. I think we are pretty much there.

Tim Heidecker | photo by Paige Walter for WXPN

SF: I know you haven’t lived in the area for quite a while, but having grown up in Pennsylvania and gone to Temple University, does this still feel like a hometown show?

TH: Yeah, definitely. I have a few friends who are still there. I don’t necessarily expect family there. Most of my family has moved away but Eric (Warheim) and I have always felt good coming back and the people seem to appreciate our strong connection to the city, especially the Temple connection.

SF: Were you someone who came into Philly a lot when you were younger for shows?

TH: Before I went to Temple, I didn’t go to Philly very often. Maybe once a year. Allentown, where I grew up, is equidistant from NYC to Philly, so we kind of split between those cities. We would have the New York stations and the Philly stations, but we were definitely a Philly sports team family. We went to Flyers games a couple times a year. I didn’t really go to shows outside of Allentown until I was in college. When I did get to college, though, I saw a bunch of great shows. I went to The Trocadero a lot and saw all the great ‘90s Matador bands…Pavement, John Spencer Blues Explosion.

SF: Is this around the same time you were starting to form your own bands?

TH: I had a couple of bands in high school. Some embarrassing hippie, little jam-bandy stuff with a bit of humor to it too, so not too far disconnected from where I ended up. Then when I went to college, Eric was really into the emo, hardcore scene which was very big in Philadelphia. There were a lot of Church shows and basement shows and house shows. I was kind of on the outer perimeter of that. I was in one of Eric’s bands for a little bit in college just sort of for fun, but I knew all the hardcore emo guys in our little clique.

SF: Did you always imagine you’d return to music, even if not to the degree where you are very much a touring musician?

TH: I really did put it away as an ambition once the comedy stuff took off. I felt much stronger doing what I was doing with Eric and doing comedy. That was really the first ten years of my professional life. That said, the music was always there, because there was always a need for songs. There were always sketch ideas, commercial ideas, or music parodies that required catchy, well-produced songs. So all the way through Tom Goes to the Mayor and Tim and Eric Awesome Show, Great Job! that became sort of my department on the show, to write or co-write those songs and then work with our music producer to get them to sound right. So I feel like I have been making music this whole time, it’s just now the songs themselves are a little less satirical and ironic.

SF: I wonder if I’m on the right track here, but I found Slipping Away to have two really distinct halves. Are you someone who puts a lot of focus on how a record is sequenced?

TH: Definitely. I don’t go into writing it with that kind of linear thinking but things reveal themselves nicely when you start listening back. Natural dynamics start showing themselves throughout the process. I like that a lot of the writing is subconscious stuff that you don’t find out about till later. That can then inspire other songs that might be a little bit more specific. When I am writing a song like “Bottom of the 8th,” which is a baseball song that is also about me and my daughter, I didn’t sit down with that intention, the song just kind of came out of me without thinking about it. But then after that song is out there, it leads me to a song like “Dad of the Year”, a more literal attempt at writing about my life at the moment.

SF: I saw you talk about how this record has more characters than other stuff you’ve done. What does that kind of shift in perspective do for you as far as approaching new or novel ideas?

TH: It’s not something I do very often but I found it an interesting exercise to tell stories through songs. They don’t always have to be true and they don’t always have to be about me. That’s obviously sort of the Randy Newman, unreliable narrator thing. Some of these songs are very much about me, and very autobiographical and reflective and some of me inhabiting a character. I think I was just freed up by remembering that you can do whatever you want with songwriting. Telling stories is something that I have been doing for a long time in different forms and it’s fun to do it with this medium. Just painting a little short story with the three minutes I have of your time. I don’t think I had ever really done it in this kind of way except in the sense of a more satirical thing. On the Trump record I did there are definitely songs from other people’s point of view that aren’t me at all but not in a serious, dramatic way.

SF: You seem very busy – acting, writing, podcasting, etc. – do you have to carve out time for songwriting or is it more compulsive than that?

TH: Not in any kind of disciplined way. I usually let small kernels of ideas build up – voice memos, little riffs, stuff like that. Periodically I’ll go through and make an attempt to work on something for a bit. But I find that generally my songwriting comes in big dumps of ideas. I think this is true for most songwriters, but the writing of the song itself usually doesn’t take that much time. If it takes too long, it probably isn’t a very good song. It either happens or it doesn’t. I think that might be Lindsay Buckingham who said that. There’s then the process of making it better, writing the third verse because those are usually the hardest. I don’t really worry too much about the details of it, because ideally you want to have something pretty rough and basic so when you bring the band in so they have space to work and add their spices to it.

SF: What’s it like looking back at what comes out of those big idea dumps and kind of reckoning with whatever came pouring out?

TH: I saw this quote from Mike Nichols where he was talking about writer’s block not being a thing because even when you aren’t writing or working, you are constantly processing the world and your subconscious is doing so much work taking stuff in. Although I might not be very productive in the moment, because the focus is on touring and trying to relax when I’m not playing and the grind of travel, whatever is going on right now – in the world, in the news, in my relationships with people – is all going through the gears and it will output something of use to me at some point.

SF: I’m always interested in how musicians handle feedback, positive or negative. Does it feel different to see or hear people talking about you as a musician than, say, a performer or actor?

TH: It’s always similar. There is always going to be a chorus of people who are going to be quick to tell me how shitty I am whether I’m doing comedy or music. That’s the first thing the internet will provide for you. In live performance, comedy is a little easier to get immediate reactions from because either they laugh or they don’t. In music you kind of have to wait till the end of the song. Then there are songs, like “Hey, Would you Call My Mom For Me?” where everyone is quiet and they listen and I see people’s faces taking it in, but there isn’t this rapturous applause at the end. But I don’t even think that would make sense. It probably just doesn’t feel appropriate to be cheering for the sentiment of that song, which is a very sad song. Then of course big rockers tend to get more reaction. The thing that I love doing this tour, and having done music for a little while now, is looking out there and seeing people singing along. That’s something you certainly don’t get from comedy. That really blows me away. It’s this surreal experience that these songs that I make almost for myself, and are all very personal, have people singing every single word.

SF: At the moment, is your well dry or are you getting a healthy flow of new ideas pouring in?

TH: It feels fairly dry. I wrote a little country song the other day, almost as a joke, because it was raining in Chicago, and so I started playing this little thing. There’s a certain craftsmanship to songwriting. You can just sit down and do it, like doing a crossword or something. Not that it means it’s going to be a great song. There isn’t any sort of big theme that’s hanging over me right now that I am looking to jump into. There is this white whale of an idea of if I was going to do a musical, what would that be? I sort of get close to that with some of these concept albums, but is there a world where I go all the way in on that? I’m such a fan of Jesus Christ Superstar and that era. But then, how do you do that without it becoming a parody of that? How do you do it in a way that feels fresh, sincere, and interesting? I don’t know, but that might change.

XPN Welcomes Tim Heidecker & The Very Good Band to Union Transfer on Friday, February 7th; tickets and information can be found at the WXPN Concert Calendar.