That’s not to say Beatles songs are entirely out of the question. I started listening to it and noticing that even the songs that weren’t on the nose about death, there was loss or the end of something.” I think really only until after it was done, I could listen to it and wonder what the record was going to be called and what the cover was going to be. It just went so well that we said, ‘Well, let’s do this again and try to put enough songs together.’ So, I started thinking more about what the themes were, and songs came up naturally that fit into that. I think after that first session, I went off and we all decided we wanted to try to flesh out a full record, but that wasn’t the original plan. “But the first song was ‘Fear of Death’ and I had that, and the other songs weren’t exactly death-oriented.

“Because the sessions came up very quickly, I had to throw some stuff together, and I always have a folder of songs I’m working on or demos,” Heidecker tells InsideHook. The record (out today), which features vocals from Weyes Blood’s Natalie Mering and contributions from keyboardist Drew Erickson, The Lemon Twigs’ Brian & Michael D’Addario, Foxygen’s Jonathan Rado and Spacebomb’s Trey Pollard, isn’t a concept album per se, but most of its tracks deal with demise in some way or another - the kind we all start thinking about a little more frequently once the aches and pains of middle age start setting in.

He didn’t even know he was making an album about mortality until the theme revealed itself at the last minute. But while his new album Fear of Death feels eerily relevant to these trying times, Tim Heidecker had no idea what was on the horizon when he wrote and recorded it. Between a pandemic that has taken the lives of 200,000 and counting and the wildfires ravaging the West Coast, you’d be foolish not to be afraid of dying these days.

Fear of death tim heidecker