He describes one track, “Nothing,” a Lennon-lifted piano ballad, as a “religious song for agnosticism,” a nihilist’s anthem with sparks of redemption. With a happy tambourine and Lady of the Canyon backing vocals from Natalie Mering, who goes by the musician’s moniker of Weyes Blood, Heidecker has crafted a sunny, psychedelic record that looks death in the eye and hums right along to it. His latest, Fear of Death(Spacebomb Records) is a reckoning of sorts, leaving behind the jokes to examine the looming specter of mortality and the questions that come with it. 2016’s In Glendale marked the comedian’s embrace of the form with songs like “Cleaning Up Dog Shit” and “I Saw Nicolas Cage.” In 2017, he released Too Dumb for Suicide, a collection of “Trump songs” like “Imperial Bathroom” and “For Chan.” On last year’s What the Brokenhearted Do…, whose cover featured Heidecker’s face with a single blue teardrop, Heidecker drove further into the void, imagining a fictional divorce from his wife and the ensuing existential crisis. In early March, the comedian and musician, along with his partner-in-crime Eric Wareheim, spoke of Pork’s Disease, a mysterious swine-induced zoonotic disease, on the live tour for his cult Adult Swim series, Tim and Eric Awesome Show, Great Job! The last week of the tour, they got to Seattle and saw few laughs. Though the joke was particularly ill-timed (or well-timed, depending on who you ask), it’s the type of grim comedy that has served as the bedrock of Heidecker’s career, even as he transitioned to music. Tim Heidecker doesn’t claim to be one, though he might as well. It’s only human, after all, when presented with the most cataclysmic, cruelly ironic, cable television-scripted version of reality to seek out our modern prophets who seemed to somehow see the chaos coming. It’s become a bit of a cliché to claim someone predicted the unpredictable events of 2020.
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