After decades in comedy, Tim Heidecker is ready to get serious about music

LOS ANGELES (AP) — Tim Heidecker is working through his existential dread.

“There’s a million things to think about as you’re trying to go to sleep at night,” he said. “ Post-pandemic, in the age of Trump, you know, North Korea, whatever it is."

Best known for his absurdist comedy and creative partnership with Eric Wareheim, Heidecker has leaned more into songwriting in recent years. Through music, he has recorded some of the dark meditations that keep him awake.

“Slipping Away,” his latest album out Friday, vacillates between semi-fictional apocalyptic storytelling and poignant, vulnerable reflections on fatherhood, aging and success. “I’ve got bills to pay / I’ve gotta keep working every day / I’m not gonna go down in history / Only my family, will remember me,” he sings on “Dad of the Year.”

Although Heidecker is communicating genuine fears in his more fictional songs, particularly as he thinks about what the world will be like for his kids when they get to be his age, he also thinks these stories make for interesting art. “Birds all falling out of the sky / Bees don’t sting and no one knows why / The air is thick, I can’t breathe / If I had anywhere to go you know, I would leave,” he croons on “Bows and Arrows.”

“The subject of the songs that deal with this post-apocalyptic hellscape world and people suffering — it all sounds like a lot of fun, I know,” he laughed. “But I think I’m a fan of those kinds of TV shows and movies. I don’t see that a lot in rock music or in pop music, but it is fertile material for me to think about.”

Often when comedians venture artistically outside of what they are known for, audiences aren’t quite sure how to react. And although Heidecker, who started playing guitar as a teenager, has been making music in addition to his myriad comedy projects for years, he admitted it’s taken people some time to grasp his sincerity.

But the skeptics haven’t deterred Heidecker. The 48-year-old has had some impressive musical collaborators over the years, including Mac DeMarco, Weyes Blood and Father John Misty.

Even as he spends more time making and touring his music, Heidecker has maintained his expansive comedic world-building through his weekly call-in show, “Office Hours Live,” and his sprawling satirical movie review series “On Cinema,” which he has hosted with Gregg Turkington for more than a decade.

While motivations for that level of output can sometimes be financial or stem from a need to keep busy, Heidecker says for him, artistic collaboration with others — be it music or comedy — is what inspires him to be prolific.

“The spirit of creativity should be completely intertwined with communion of friendship and doing stuff with people you want to do stuff with,” he said. “I want to do more things with these people, you know? And whatever that is, it will be either good or bad or connect with an audience or not connect with an audience. That’s kind of like secondary.”

That ethos has moved Heidecker to put in the sometimes-difficult work required to maintain those friendships and collaborations, something Wareheim thinks Heidecker is particularly gifted at.

“We’ve been working together for over 25 years and that is hard. I’ve been through lots of relationships since then that have not worked,” Wareheim laughed. “Tim has always been super, super fair and is always giving credit and building up the people around him.”

The pair, known professionally as Tim & Eric, met while attending Temple University. They instantly hit it off. Even as they started making skits together, both maintained their diverse interests — something that is still true today.

Heidecker continued his musical pursuits and played in a few different bands, until writer and actor Bob Odenkirk discovered the comedy duo. Odenkirk worked with them on a pilot, which was eventually picked up by Adult Swim, and their fate was sealed. “It was like, ‘Okay, this is what we’re doing,’” Heidecker recalled.

He often made music for their show but never seriously pursued it as a career. But after having kids and reconnecting with the songs of Randy Newman and Warren Zevon, Heidecker had a kind of epiphany.

“I sort of discovered in my 40s that these were guys that seemed a lot like me,” he said. “They didn’t have to leave their sense of humor at the doorstep. They could incorporate it into real songs. They weren’t parody songs.”

So he slowly began moving away from the satirical and silly songs he had been putting out, like his 2017 concept album critiquing former President Donald Trump or his record, “Urinal St. Station,” released in 2013 by one of his bands, The Yellow River Boys.

“I’ve been testing the waters and talking about things that are a little more personal and a little more private and getting more comfortable doing that,” he said.

And while Heidecker has resigned to the fact that some fans of his comedy will never get it, he has also been pleasantly surprised by people who have expressed their appreciation for his vulnerability, particularly in response to his previous record, “High School.”

“I found a lot of guys my age or in their 40s who had similar experiences or were at a similar place in life,” he said. “That’s something I never really got from the comedy stuff we did, was this feeling of like, ‘That connected with me and I relate to those experiences.’”