This post is part of a series called "Music Video Relapse", where we revisit a released music video to see how it's doing. Weekdays at noon EST.
Late last month, Eric Wareheim released his video for "Bubble Butt" by Major Lazer. It was amazing, of course, but fans of Tim & Eric may or may not know that Eric Wareheim is actually a pretty prolific and fantastic music video director, with videos from bands like MGMT, Maroon 5, and Depeche Mode in his videography.
Today we're looking at "You Don't Know Me" by Ben Folds (ft. Regina Spektor), which is notable for being the only music video we're aware of to be co-directed by Eric Wareheim and Tim Heidecker, as well as the only one that really took the Tim & Eric aesthetic and applied it directly to a music video. And it turned out pretty awesome.
The Tim & Eric elements are all there: the sound effects, the sub-par green screen efforts, and the odd-looking men with bluetooth headsets. Even some Tim & Eric crew helped out, including Tim & Eric editors Doug Lussenhop and Daniel Gray Longino. What's interesting about this video, however, is that Tim & Eric decided to bring an actual storyline into the mix, creating a video that ends up adding some emotion to the song dispite all the bizarre elements. If you're familiar with Tim & Eric's work, you know they are not particularly associated with emotional depth.
On top of that we get great moments like Ben Folds pressing a small piano-shaped button labelled "Portable Grand" on a shitty keyboard to mark a shift to a light piano solo. Also, noted Tim & Eric cameo maker Josh Groban is in this video for a few seconds, so there's that.
Eric Wareheim has gone on to do some pretty amazing videos, but Tim Heidecker has kept up his music video game with appearances, playing roles in videos like "You Have My Eyes Now" by Clues and "Soon Enough" by Aimee Mann.
