Tim Heidecker talks emotional ‘distance’ from albums, Bob Dylan, Weyes Blood, and European tour

Summarising Tim Heidecker in a bite-sized paragraph is difficult. Heidecker, the comedian, actor and musician is hitting Europe for a series of tours as his on-stage alter ego and also performing with The Very Good Band on the No More Bullshit tour. Ewan Gleadow sits down to chat with the Tim and Eric star, where they discuss gigs, sounds and the emotional disconnect between an artist and album once it releases.

Ewan Gleadow: I’ve spent all morning trying to think of questions to ask you, and I’ve come up with nothing. We’ll fire through though. We’ll fire through. You’re heading to the UK for your tour, excited?

Tim Heidecker: I am excited. I’m nervous, a little bit. We had a great tour in the States over the summer and I’m hoping that we can repeat those feelings. It’s the same group of people and everything. I mean, I love it over there. I haven’t been to a lot of the cities we’re playing before, so I’m excited. The short answer is I’m excited. 

Ewan: Good. I listened to Live in Boulder earlier this morning, great live record, thanks for sending it through.

Tim: Yeah, it’s not a bad live record.

Ewan: Not at all. Why Boulder for recording it? What was it about Boulder that made you say ‘this is the place to do the live record?’.

Tim: I think a couple of things. It was a process of elimination. We didn’t bring super high-end, multi-track recording setups for every show. But we can get pretty good recordings off the board and, you know, every night was different. There were some shows where the sound was terrible, but we were great. There were some shows where the sound was good, but we weren’t very on. Just listening to them, we listened to a bunch of them, and Boulder felt like it was all working. It was toward the end of the tour. I have issues with the lyrics. I can’t remember my own lyrics a lot of the time. There’ll be a song where I miss a line or something, and it’ll sound great except for me. That one, it was towards the end of the tour and by that point, we were super tight and I didn’t fuck up too much. That’s the reason really. 

Ewan: It’s been a while since you’ve brought a tour to the UK, too, hasn’t it?

Tim: Yeah, I was there doing standup about five or six years ago, five summers ago, with Neil Hamburger (Gregg Turkington) in London, but have never really played. We did a show in Manchester but I haven’t done the full jump in, get in the van and tour kind of vibe. 

Ewan: I’m sure it’ll be great. I’ve been listening to a lot of your records this week, digging up all those bits and pieces. Collaborations with Weyes Blood and James Murphy, obviously the latter in film rather than music, but how does it feel to work with these artists? What do they bring to the table through collaboration?

Tim: Add to that list Kurt Vile and Mac DeMarco, and Jonathan Rado, who’s a big indie rock music producer here. I think it comes from a place of mutual respect and admiration. I think that those people, you know, generally come from a place of being fans of my comedy, but also recognise that I’m taking the music very seriously too. They’re treating me as an equal or as though I’m in their wheelhouse. But at the same time, I don’t have a lot of the technical skills some of these people have. I’m not the greatest guitar player, but I have ideas and I have tunes and I have thoughts about how things should go. 

Those thoughts, I think they’re legitimate and decent. Every one of those collaborations was super organic, super happenstance and just natural. Digging what everyone is doing and committing to trying to make it work, is the challenge. Timings and schedules and availability, getting people together. But all these people that I’ve got to work with are just, you know, people I would want to hang out with. It’s all very natural.

Ewan: You can tell, especially on Fear of Death with Weyes Blood on there. Is it strange having so many people listen to your work? Does it still feel like it is your work?

Tim: You know, it’s a weird thing. I just finished recording a new record with The Very Good Band. We went to the studio together, which was a really lovely and wonderful experience. We’re still working on it, but a lot of it is done. I was thinking about this, it was so great and a lot of fun to make and spend time with these people, and I got kind of sad because I realised that, when you finish a record, it’s no longer yours. I let go of it. As much as I love hearing people say nice things about it, there’s a distance to that. I had my experience with the record already, I got to make it. The emotional moments of the first time a chorus comes together or the first time these things happen have already happened to me on these records.

I do have this weird distance from a record once it’s done. It’s not mine. It’s yours. You get to have your experience with it and I love playing the songs, that’s a fun way to reconnect with the music. I think by touring this live and playing some songs, like Fear of Death, we play that and it gets me a lot of the time. To be able to play that live for people, I do get to reconnect with the music, and I think that comes through playing it live. 

Ewan: It changes, too, on stage. We’ve seen that many times with various artists. Any Theatre of Magic songs planned for the show?

Tim: I think because I’ve bifurcated this tour as two, the comedy half and the music half, we do a good hour and twenty minutes of music, but there are a lot of songs and material that I have to get to and that, unfortunately, falls off the priority list.

Ewan: That’s understandable, but what impresses me about that is how much of a backlog you have. There doesn’t seem to be much time to unwind. High School released last year, Fear of Death before it and on top of that comes the comedy work, film work. Is keeping busy a priority?

Tim: Yeah. I generally say yes. I feel like there are times when it becomes a little hectic. I’m super happy talking to you right now but I’m driving to a place in the valley here to scout a location for a commercial we’re shooting next week. Then I’m going from here back to helping mix the record that we did last week. Then I’m checking emails, catching up on the Oscar special for On Cinema, so yes, there are periods where it becomes a little overwhelming. There are periods of me just lying around and staring at the wall, you know, feeling like I’ve got nothing. It’s generally a nice balance. I’d like to find a world where it’s maybe a little more organised and a little less chaotic.

Ewan: It’s the adrenaline of a full schedule, and then losing focus because there’s so much to do. It’s a sudden and strange feeling.

Tim: The best part about it, like every one of the things I do is collaborative with other people. It can be very easily thought of as recreational, like I get to spend time with my friends and do creative things. I try to look at it that way.

Ewan: Definitely. You’ve also done a fair bit of work on your lonesome though, those Bob Dylan covers for instance. I hate comparing artists to other artists, but there are inflexions of Dylan, of Randy Newman and of Elvis Costello on the new Live in Boulder album. What is it about their vocal structures, their presence, that attracts you to their work?

Tim: I think they all come from a place of, you know, not traditionally beautiful voices. Not singer voices. They’re songwriter voices. I didn’t realise until the other day, Ellie, our bass player who is very musically minded, classically trained and everything, said that I write songs based on the song, not how I sing it. In other words, I write the song I want to hear and I’m the one singing it, but I’m not writing it for my voice, I’m writing it for the song. I think those guys do the same thing, it sounds kind of counterintuitive but they’re not writing for their voice. That’s how their voice sounds. 

The words and the tune, they’re so important and cut through. The performance has to meld with that, with the story you’re telling or the point of view you’re telling. I mean, Bob is my all-time guy. What I think of as the first coming was in the middle of doing the Tim and Eric stuff, and I thought it was starting to get really thought of as one note, you know, as kind of one thing. I was wanting to do more, wanting to do music, wanting to be politically active and wanting to expand my horizon of what people think and how people think of me. You just look at Bob and see every three years this guy has just blown up the perception of how you’re supposed to think about him. He’s thrown it all away and started over or grown, evolved, whatever, for his own art and for his own journey. People can catch up whenever they want to catch up, he just became a guide for how to live my artistic life. 

Ewan: I got very lucky and saw him in concert last year. Stunning. I’ve got such a soft spot for Down in the Groove, but you yourself do quite the impression of him.

Tim; I love it, there are a few impressions I can do and it’s coming from a place of love. You can’t do an impression without knowing the material. It’s so fun, it was fun for me. 

Ewan: Lenny Bruce is quite the choice too, the Shot of Love track. 

Tim: I never grew up knowing that song and now I do it live. I do it in the show and people don’t believe it’s real. It’s so strange and they think we’re making it up, but I had only heard it a few years ago. I didn’t really know that record that well. It’s so funny and weird but also pretty, it’s right up my alley. 

Ewan: It’s the ideal slot. Obviously, we spoke there of the music found on the show but there is comedy too. What is it about the irreverence of the show, the style of your comedy, that attracts audiences? It’s horrifying, it’s rude, it’s gruesome and that’s the beauty of it. It feels as though that landscape has come to the forefront, compared to where it was a decade ago.

Tim: Yeah. I think it works well with an audience who is media literate and know where things are at. Those that know there are certain redundancies to the standup comedy form. My audience already knows the moves. It’s not surprising or entertaining anymore. When I come at it, I come at it from the angle of knowing that this is hack-y, something you would see on a Channel Four comedy standup special or whatever. So let’s goof on that and have fun satirising the element. My character is such an abject failure, it goes back to the very fundamental comedy. You know the premise, but to see people fail is funny in certain circumstances. When I fail and the character’s arrogance shows his dim-wittedness, it works pretty well. 

I’ve done it in environments where they weren’t quite clued into what I was doing. It can be very uncomfortable, but if you’re buying a ticket to my show, you probably know where I’m coming from. On the US tour, they were laughing before I said anything. It’s kinda nice.

Tim Heidecker is set to tour the United Kingdom and Europe on the No More Bullshit tour from March 16, 2023.

Tickets for available dates can be purchased here.