Davin Wood and Tim Heidecker.

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!





Listen to "Wedding Song" by Heidecker & Wood:



