Tim Heidecker - What The Brokenhearted Do... (2019) Hi-Res

The comedian and musician brings his dry absurdity and taste for 1970s singer-songwriters to a novel venture: a fake breakup album.

As a singer-songwriter, Tim Heidecker maintains an intimate connection to mankind at its most pathetic. This extends to the most powerful men—his 2017 set of protest songs about the president—to the most mundane. On 2016’s In Glendale, he set music to the kinds of banal stories you reserve for lulls in conversation around people with whom you have very little in common: the time you ran into a celebrity in Los Angeles, that morning when you were too hungover to go into the office. Where Tim Heidecker the comedian is interested in exploding these familiar scenes with surrealism, nihilism, or his trademark is-he-even-kidding-anymore dickish persistence, his songwriting presents adult life in the dry, unromantic scenes it’s mostly filled with. The joke is that there is no joke; start getting used to it.

A breakup album seems like the logical next step for this fascination. 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. 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. 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.

Of course, there’s one thing that all those breakup albums have that Heidecker does not: actual heartbreak. 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. 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. “When I Get Up” is an incessantly upbeat pop song that makes a point of going nowhere. 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. The pose of rudderlessness and effortlessness, as always, suits him.