For years, the floppy-haired, bland-faced, dead-eyed Tim Heidecker has provided stoners with late-night laughs, alongside the lumbering Eric Wareheim, on programs including “Tim & Eric Awesome Show, Great Job!” and “Tim & Eric’s Bedtime Stories.” Their short sketch videos are low-fi bordering on crappy, sometimes literally excrement-filled, and almost always uncomfortably unironic. The overall vibe is local-car-dealership commercial directed by a tripping teen. Let’s just say it takes a certain type to want to come on down.

Heidecker, who is now forty, was in town earlier this summer to promote his first solo musical album, “In Glendale,” a largely sincere collection of songs which press materials described as a “post-normcore delight of exuberant bar rock.” His past musical endeavors have been slightly cheekier, among them “Urinal Street Station,” by the “Yellow River Boys,” from 2013—a themed album all about imbibing urine (sample songs include “Hot Piss Blues” and “Slurp It Up”). “In Glendale,” by contrast, focusses largely on the pleasures and low-stakes perils of fatherhood and domestic life, with soulful ballads about working from home and central air-conditioning. As you might have guessed, Heidecker now lives in Glendale, California, along with his wife; their two-and-a-half-year-old daughter, Amelia; and a dog named Pete, who appears on the record’s cover in a photo Heidecker took on his iPhone.

Before a free concert at a record store, Heidecker and his cousin, the cookbook writer Colu Henry (two years younger, but with an older-sister vibe), met for lunch in the East Village. Heidecker lived on Sixth Street in his mid-twenties but never dared patronize any of the many local curry joints. “I just was really intimidated by Indian food,” he said, as he passed his old front door. “It was just so exotic and I was so parochial, a small-town boy.” (He grew up in Allentown, Pennsylvania.) “I needed my meat and potatoes.”

“You made me a Waldorf salad once in that apartment!” Henry countered.

Back then, the cousins would perform rock operas at Arlene’s Grocery. Heidecker said, “We did this show called ‘Pearly Harbor.’ ”

“Nothing to fear but fear itself!” Henry sang, liltingly.

“It was such a silly, campy, goofy thing we were doing that I don’t know who it would have appealed to beyond our friends,” Heidecker said.

Unmoved by men who hollered “Come in!” and “Right this way!” from the doorways of competing restaurants, Heidecker and Henry ducked into Panna II and, crouching beneath a low canopy of twinkling lights, international flags, and fake flowers, slowly wended their way to a table at the back.

Heidecker took off his Los Angeles Dodgers cap and perused the menu: “Ooh, potatoes and spinach tastefully sautéed with herbs and Indian spices.” A waiter took his order: chicken tikka masala, saag paneer, and a soda water.

“Just make sure everything’s tastefully cooked,” Heidecker said, flatly. Henry rolled her eyes.

Heidecker began touting Glendale’s many charms. Henry interrupted him. “Aren’t the Kardashians from there?” she asked. (Kim in fact once expressed interest in running for mayor.)

“I’m sure there’s somebody named Kardashian living there,” Heidecker replied. “But the nice thing about Glendale is that there isn’t anything going on. You can go home at night and it’s quiet. And there’s trees and deer and bunny rabbits.”

Henry, who’d visited a few months earlier, said, “I didn’t see any bunnies. Liar.”

“I’m like the St. Francis of Assisi of Glendale,” Heidecker said, piously. He’d just learned that Bruce Springsteen used to have a house near him. “My go-to karaoke song is ‘My Hometown,’ which brings a tear to everyone’s eye,” he said, and huskily sang, “Eight years old, bleh bleh bleh.” He paused. “I don’t know the lyrics. That’s why they have the words on the screen.”

“You sound like you’re from North Carolina,” Henry criticized.

The waiter arrived with the meal and Heidecker dug in. “This is good!” He added, somewhat petulantly, “I hope it doesn’t make me violently ill in two hours.” He made a few barfy noises, a sound familiar to fans of his comedy (there are montages on YouTube of him and Warheim vomiting), and remarked that Amelia had stayed home sick from school that day. “I was on FaceTime with her this morning and she’d thrown up and she was crying and she was like, ‘Papa.’ It was heartbreaking.” Her favorite songs are “You Are My Sunshine,” “Twinkle Twinkle,” and the ABCs. He said, “We go through this set list of those songs and if I start singing, she’ll say, ‘You don’t sing, I sing!’ ”

The waiter dimmed the lights, turned the music way up, and served everyone ice cream—he presented Heidecker and a young man at a neighboring table (who’d entered wearing a graduation gown) with scoops with candles in them. They blew them out.

“Where’d you graduate from?” Heidecker asked.

An older man in a seersucker suit at the graduate’s table answered for him: “Pratt. He’s a very funny animator. Works well with television.”

The young man, who had a wispy mustache, remarked nonchalantly, “I’m a big fan of yours, actually.”

“This is a big day for both of us, then,” Heidecker said. “This actually kind of overshadows your graduation.” He turned back to his tablemates and observed, “I usually don’t get recognized, partly because most of the people that see me aren’t familiar with any of my work.” On his way out, he asked the graduate for a business card; the graduate wrote down his e-mail address on a scrap of paper.

Are his music fans different from his comedy fans?

“There are less of them—much less of them,” Heidecker said. Hearing his relatively straight-faced music, he said, some “Tim & Eric” fans “are like, ‘You’ve ruined everything, man! I can’t even watch the old stuff because I know that you’re not that weirdo.’ With this record, people are like, ‘There’s a joke coming, trust me. He’s being tongue-in-cheek about this.’ But I’m not, really.”

That evening, Heidecker sat on a small stage in Other Music (which has since closed). The album was recorded with a ten-piece band, but he was performing solo, unplugged, in a style that called to mind Harry Nilsson but with the twang and candor of Tom Petty. He scanned the crowd and said, “What a great-looking group of white bearded guys.” The white bearded guys laughed and took photos of him with their phones. He warmed them up with a track called “Cleaning Up the Dog Shit” (chorus: “Now I’m cleaning up the dog shit, cleaning up the baby shit . . . on my weekends”).

“You want to hear a sad song?” he asked. “This is a very sad song about Los Angeles, where I live, a much better city than New York.” He crooned, “There’s a lonely girl at the promenade, she’s alone without anyone.” The crowd continued to snicker.

“That girl committed suicide about six months ago,” Heidecker chided, then added, “I’m just kidding.”