Tim Heidecker has his elaborate music video dreams crushed in the clip for his new song, “When I Get Up,” set to appear on the comedian/musician’s upcoming album, What the Brokenhearted Do… out June 7th via Jagjaguwar.
The track is a sprightly, piano-driven rocker that nods both sonically and lyrically to Harry Nilsson’s classic, “Gotta Get Up.” “When I get up all I wanna do is go to bed again,” Heidecker croons, “If I go back to my dream land, you might be waiting for me/That’s where I go, I’m wanted/That’s where I want to be.”
The video for “When I Get Up” is played very straight, but also boasts a characteristically surreal edge. It opens with Heidecker emerging from a cardboard box then heading into a director’s office where he pitches a music video centered around a giant dance number. While the song plays, Heidecker does some awkward dancing in his chair while the director scribbles down a possible budget. When the song ends, Heidecker admits he only has about $4,000 for the video, far less than the director’s estimate. Dejected, Heidecker returns to his box, which suddenly disappears.
What the Brokenhearted Do… was produced by Jonathan Rado and follows Heidecker’s 2017 album, Too Dumb for Suicide, an album of Trump protest songs, as well as his recent EP, Another Year in Hell, which collected songs from 2018 that similarly satirized the president, ICE agents, Alex Jones and QAnon conspiracy theorists. These songs, unsurprisingly, made Heidecker a target for trolls, some of whom started a rumor that Heidecker’s wife had left him. The comedian, however, took this rumor and spun it into What the Brokenhearted Do…, writing songs as if he were going through a painful divorce.
Heidecker and comedian Gregg Turkington are currently in the middle of a live tour for their film review webseries, On Cinema, which is set to wrap May 18th in Austin, Texas. Heidecker also hosts his weekly “Office Hours” podcast and recently co-starred in Jordan Peele’s new movie, Us.