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Thursday, June 13, 2019
The Michigan Daily — michigandaily.com ARTS

Songs with a political bent seem 
to skew one of two ways: satirical 
or serious. As for satirical, think 
“Elected” by Alice Cooper (“I’m 
your Yankee doodle dandy in a gold 
Rolls Royce, I want to be elected”) 
or Prince’s “Ronnie, Talk to Russia” 
(“You can go to the zoo, but you can’t 
feed guerrillas”). More earnest songs, 
like Bright Eyes’s “When the Presi-
dent Talks to God” or Killer Mike’s 
“Reagan” take a different tack: care-
ful articulation of injustice, an unre-
lenting urge to expose wrongdoing 
and adversity.
These two approaches have often 
intersected in Tim Heidecker’s career 
as a singer-songwriter. Heidecker, 
who is best known as one half of the 
comedy duo Tim and Eric, tends to 
combine intensity with humor in his 
political music. On his recent single 
“To The Men,” however, he veers 
straight into quiet solemnity. 
Heidecker released “To The Men” 
on May 16, in the midst of a month 
of headlines about new state laws 
restricting access to abortion. The 
song is addressed to the lawmakers 
who passed these bills, and all pro-
ceeds from purchases of the single 
go to the Yellowhammer Fund, a 
nonprofit that supplies funding for 
women in Alabama seeking abor-
tions. 
The song is a tonal departure from 

Heidecker’s previous style. His 2017 
album Too Dumb for Suicide: Tim 
Heidecker’s Trump Songs is a com-
pilation of the tracks he released dur-
ing the first year of Donald Trump’s 
presidency, and they’re all scathing. 
On “Trump Tower,” he sings “Thank 
God for the First Amendment, letting 
me vent,” a line which encapsulates 
his attitude toward the entire album. 
Too Dumb for Suicide is antagonistic, 
shot through with moments of humor 
that feel both vengeful and liberat-
ing. The album makes me tired; it’s 
exhausting to be mad and also find 
humor in that anger. Listening to Too 
Dumb for Suicide, it’s easy to won-
der what might happen if Heidecker 
flipped his focus from Republicans 
onto those whose lives are lived in 
the shadows of their policies.
On “To The Men,” this is exactly 
what he does. “She was poor she was 
just 13 / She was 12 a month ago,” 
Heidecker sings. “She was living in 
Alabama / She was living in Ohio / 
She was living in Georgia / She didn’t 
have anywhere to go.” The song 
isn’t funny at all; it’s sad and angry, 
undiluted by humor. Too Dumb for 
Suicide is a middle finger to the presi-
dent and his allies, a big “fuck you” 
that’s engineered to anger Republi-
cans, not convince them of anything. 
“To The Men” is a plea to those same 
politicians and their supporters. It’s 
as direct and melancholic as an old 
country song, with no time or energy 
for irony. 
Heidecker wrote on Twitter that 

he listened to John Prine while writ-
ing “To The Men,” and this makes 
total sense. Prine’s musical interests 
are in some ways quite similar to 
Heidecker’s. Both artists are fixated 
on absurdity and grief, as well as 
the circumstances in which the two 
are inseparable. They write about 
politics in a similarly snide way: “But 
your flag decal won’t get you into 
Heaven anymore / They’re already 
overcrowded from your dirty little 
war,” sings Prine on “Your Flag Decal 
Won’t Get You into Heaven Any-
more” from his 1971 self-titled album.
Like Heidecker, Prine usually 
balances out cerebral contempla-
tion with wit. On “Bruised Orange 
(Chain of Sorrow),” Prine describes 
the tragedy of a young boy’s senseless 
death with the almost-funny forced 
rhyme of “nuder” and “commuter”: “I 
heard sirens on the train track howl 
naked gettin’ nuder / An altar boy’s 
been hit by a local commuter.” Prine 
also knows when this is the wrong 
approach, when the profundity of 
the subject cannot tolerate cunning 
or guile. “Sam Stone,” for example, 
tells the story of a veteran’s addiction, 
and it’s an absolutely gutting song: 
“There’s a hole in daddy’s arm where 
all the money goes / Jesus Christ died 
for nothin’ I suppose.” Prine employs 
a similarly somber tone on “Unwed 
Fathers,” in which he describes the 
loneliness and isolation of a teenager 
as she becomes a mother. 
Prine’s “Unwed Fathers” covers 
similar territory as “To The Men,” 

but in this song, the protagonist has 
the baby: “From a teenage lover, to 
an unwed mother / Kept undercover, 
like some bad dream,” Prine sings. 
“While unwed fathers, they can’t 
be bothered / They run like water, 
through a mountain stream.” Prine, 
like Heidecker, is using the song to 
raise money for abortion access; on 
May 28, he released a new version to 
raise money for Alabama’s chapter of 
the ACLU. 
Both “Unwed Fathers” and “To 
The Men” name the men who are 
intimately involved in motherhood, 
whether it’s the teenage fathers who 
disappear 
or 
the 
politicians who limit 
women’s 
choices. 
Too 
often, 
abor-
tion is framed as a 
women’s issue, and 
Prine and Heidecker 
use their music to 
discuss 
the 
flaws 
in this logic. They 
explain how men 
can walk away from 
an accidental preg-
nancy and women 
cannot, and how this 
fundamental differ-
ence is perhaps part 
of why some men 
find it so difficult 
to let women make 
their own decisions 
about parenthood — 
it’s a right men have 
enjoyed all along, a 
right they have never had to consider 
or maintain. 
“Unwed Fathers” and “To The 
Men” are powerful in the same 
ways. They were both written by 
men known for their ability to find 
humor in miserable situations, men 
who understand when to put away 
clever wordplay because the gravity 
of the topic demands it. For Prine and 
Heidecker, the particular despera-
tion of the situation is slightly out of 
reach — it’s something neither of 
them have or could ever experience 
firsthand. The songs are perhaps 
more heartbreaking for this fact; 
as straight white men, Prine and 
Heidecker are of the same demo-
graphic as the men who passed the 
“heartbeat” bills, but unlike those 
politicians, they have deep reservoirs 
of empathy and imagination. “Have 
you seen a young girl dying / Have 
you seen ‘em take their final breath,” 
sings Heidecker in the closing lines of 
“To The Men.” 
The story told by Heidecker in “To 
The Men” is grim, whatever your 
opinions on abortion. It’s unclear 
what happens to the protagonist, but 
there’s no good resolution: Either she 
bleeds to death at an illegal abortion 

clinic, or she has a baby while she’s 
still in middle school. In our imper-
fect world, accidental pregnancy 
happens, as it always has — to middle 
schoolers, to survivors of rape, to 
mothers, to the reckless and to the 
responsible. When it happens, some 
women will want and need abortions 
— that, too, will always be the case.
What’s missing from the abortion 
debate is the fact that abortions hap-
pen whether or not they’re legal. Pro-
choicers often argue that those who 
don’t like abortions should simply not 
have them. While I don’t think all (or 
even many) anti-choice politicians 
are actually motivat-
ed by moral impera-
tive, those who are 
vehemently sure life 
begins at concep-
tion will probably 
not be convinced by 
this suggestion. For 
them, ignoring abor-
tion is akin to ignor-
ing genocide.
When 
I 
think 
about people whose 
politics I disagree 
with, I wonder if 
there’s 
anything 
that might convince 
them to re-examine 
their beliefs. Maybe 
this interview with 
a woman who had 
a 
third-trimester 
abortion (her baby 
had genetic issues 
and would have suffocated during 
childbirth), or maybe the story of 
Savita Halappanavar, who died in 
Ireland in 2012 because she was mis-
carrying and doctors refused to give 
her an abortion. 
These stories are powerful, but I 
wonder if they’d feel too distant or 
too rare to convince abortion oppo-
nents. Halappanavar lived in Ireland, 
not the United States, and the story 
of the late-term abortion is far from 
typical. It might be a stretch to say 
“To The Men” could change some-
one’s mind on abortion, but what if 
it has that power? Everyone’s stance 
on abortion is guided by feelings as 
much as, if not more than, facts — 
there are smart people on both sides 
of the issue, people who can look at 
the same biological concepts and 
come to opposite conclusions. Maybe 
music is the way to foreground emo-
tions, to recognize their centrality in 
the debate over abortion. Songs like 
“To The Men” and “Unwed Fathers” 
won’t brainwash anyone, but they 
might have the power to cultivate 
new feelings. 

Heidecker’s ‘To The Men’ 
is addressed to everyone

MIRIAM FRANCISCO
Daily Arts Writer

MUSIC NOTEBOOK

This is 
songwriting 
at its most 
bare and 
convincing, 
nothing more 
than a story set 
to music.

ROLLING STONE

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