Tim Heidecker, of Tim and Eric Awesome Show, Great Job!, can’t stop living in the past. Over the past couple of years, while making Awesome Show — which itself feels like a throwback to early-nineties public-access cable — he’s been dipping into the seventies for a side musical project. On March 15, Heidecker and Awesome Show composer Davin Wood will release the CD Starting From Nowhere, a parody-homage of earnest seventies soft-rock in the Dan Fogelberg, Christopher Cross, Rupert Holmes mold. He calls the music “dreamy, like honky prog-rock,” and is debuting one of the album’s honkier tunes, “Wedding Song,” on Vulture today.
Heidecker and Wood’s hobby began when they came up with an easy-listening song they immediately knew wouldn’t work on the show, but they couldn’t shake its retro, flare-panted vibe. They finished the track, and over a couple of years kept writing and recording more. “I really don’t know what our intentions were in the beginning,’ Heidecker told Vulture. “It was an exercise, a hobby. Just something we felt like we needed to do.” Explaining the record’s old-school sound, Heidecker says: “We both grew up listening to seventies music. It’s not the only music I like, but it has a number of levels. In general, it can be super self-important, overly produced, dated, corny, and overly sentimental.” While musically Starting From Nowhere is a tribute to the bicentennial decade, lyrically it’s a parody of it. “I don’t have anything important to say lyrically,” he says. “My goal was just to try to make Davin laugh.”
“Wedding Song” is about a man who proposes marriage after a one-night stand. “I imagine the woman being really repulsed, like, ‘I just met you! Why on earth would I want to marry you?’” Heidecker describes. The married Heidecker insists that none of his songs are “biographical in any way … I [just] wanted to write a gushy, super-sappy love song,” he says. “It has a Chicago feel with horns. I wanted it to be really embarrassingly sweet.” Mission accomplished!