![]() A short film by the duo called Tom Goes to the Mayor was selected for screenings by the Philadelphia Institute of World Cinema and was included in The University of Pennsylvania's Institute of Contemporary Art. Background īoth Pennsylvania natives, Heidecker and Wareheim met in 1994 at Temple University in Philadelphia they became instant friends and collaborators, creating short films and cartoon strips that they put on. Steve Brule, Tim & Eric's Bedtime Stories, and Beef House. They are the creators and stars of the Adult Swim television series Tom Goes to the Mayor, Tim and Eric Awesome Show, Great Job!, Check It Out! with Dr. In mining songwriting’s most fruitful subject matter for its most unglamorous revelations, Heidecker leads us toward a punchline consistent within his catalog: it’s a breakup album, with all the heart scooped out.Tim & Eric are an American comedy duo consisting of Tim Heidecker and Eric Wareheim. This deep-rooted adventurousness and indifference to popular perception actually aligns him more with fellow indie artists on Jagjaguwar than any comedian he came up with in the ’00s, and by this metric, Brokenhearted is his fullest musical statement yet. His career has long been defined by an instinctual drive to not repeat himself as soon as one of his ideas starts to gain traction in popular culture, he’s often moved onto something new, in a different medium, with different collaborators. “We’ll figure something out,” he mutters in defeat, conceding to the low stakes of this type of project as a whole.Įven with its humble aspirations, Brokenhearted makes a compelling case for Heidecker as a musician, beyond his more recognizable creative outlets. In the music video for “When I Get Up,” Heidecker plays himself pitching an elaborately choreographed visual accompaniment, only to be told that the budget is not nearly big enough to accommodate the concept. ![]() (“As great as he is,” Heidecker once observed, “He only has so many moves.”) His own songwriting takes similar short-cuts, as he limits his scope to the immediately visible and moves as swiftly as possible from one idea to the next. It’s a tendency that also shows why he is particularly gifted at parodying (and forecasting) the late-career work of artists like Bob Dylan. ![]() ![]() Spreading this mood across 11 folk-rock tracks, Heidecker seems to take a “Well, how hard can it be?” approach to songwriting-an openness to cliché, stream-of-consciousness, and the first rhyme that comes to him. The pose of rudderlessness and effortlessness, as always, suits him. As with his brilliant comedy series “On Cinema at the Cinema” and “Decker,” Heidecker’s dry delivery and the seemingly strict template belie how much craft is actually going on under the surface. “When I Get Up” is an incessantly upbeat pop song that makes a point of going nowhere. In the place of emotional specificity or raw nerves, he gives us spot-on genre exercises (the On the Beach drag of “Finally Getting Over,” the sunny jangle of “Insomnia”) and a few keyed-in moments of inspiration. He’s been clear about this record being “non-autobiographical.” It was inspired by a rumor spread by right-wing trolls about his wife leaving him, and the pain in the songs rarely feels like more than just a writing prompt. Of course, there’s one thing that all those breakup albums have that Heidecker does not: actual heartbreak. You sense that he sourced his pain from a long history of classic rock bummer anthems, and there’s something inherently entertaining in hearing him carve out a space among them. Produced by Foxygen’s Jonathan Rado to sound like the spur-of-the-moment brainstorming session that it probably was, Heidecker’s latest album, What the Brokenhearted Do…, captures vignettes of the newly divorced in all their moments of crisis and stasis. It helps that Heidecker’s musical influences-Los Angeles heroes like Randy Newman, Harry Nilsson, and Warren Zevon-are known for making their ugliest thoughts sound clever and sweet. A breakup album seems like the logical next step for this fascination.
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