Riki Lindhome by no means supposed to go solo. Since 2007, the comic, actress and musician has carried out as one half of Garfunkel and Oates, a raunchy comedy duo additionally starring Kate Micucci. However because the COVID period set in, Micucci turned a brand new mother and began writing kids’s music, and Lindhome started to reevaluate her personal path. At first, she felt frightened. However Lindhome is, by her personal admission, naturally predisposed to seek out the constructive in all the things.
“Before, it had to be something that was true to both of us,” Lindhome informed The Instances. “So I started thinking, ‘What only applies to me?’”
The reply turned out to be proper in entrance of her. Now 46, Lindhome, who began appearing professionally within the early 2000s with bit roles in “Buffy the Vampire Slayer” and “Gilmore Girls” and has since appeared on “The Big Bang Theory,” “New Girl” and “Wednesday,” had been on a yearslong, typically demoralizing fertility journey.
It began when she was 34 and determined to freeze her eggs, an expertise Lindhome chronicled in tune (the Emmy-nominated “Frozen Lullaby”) and on Garfunkel and Oates’ eponymous IFC present, which ran for one season in 2014. “I think we were the first show to do realistic egg-freezing storylines with the shots and stuff,” she says. “There are so many medical shows, but [we] couldn’t find the shots for IVF at the prop house. Our prop people had to make them from the pictures I took of my IVF drugs.”
Lindhome ended up writing the remainder of her fertility story right into a one-woman musical, “Dead Inside,” which premiered eventually yr’s Edinburgh Fringe Competition and has at present been operating on a semi-monthly foundation on the Elysian Theater in L.A. As she workshopped the present round comedy golf equipment and small levels, Lindhome additionally realized she had a solo comedy report on her fingers; now, her debut album, “No Worries If Not,” got here out on April 4.
Throughout its 11 tracks, which function contributions from Fred Armisen (Lindhome’s husband since 2022), Nicole Row, Eric Jackowitz and manufacturing trio Polyglam, Lindhome traces her maze-like “hero’s journey” to motherhood whereas poking enjoyable at different quadragenarian quandaries. As an illustration, on the Barry White-styled “Middle Age Love,” Lindhome jokes about intercourse after 40 (“F— me like an animal, if that animal’s a turtle / You can c— inside me, it’s OK — I’m infertile”). Elsewhere, on “Don’t Google Mommy,” Lindhome imagines her future little one Web-stalking her at some point (“Because mommy writes comedy songs that are a teensy bit obscene”).
Lindhome additionally features a few songs that didn’t make it into “Dead Inside” — “90 Percent Sure,” a back-and-forth duet with fellow comic Ken Marino, appears again on the comic’s breakup with an unnamed ex-boyfriend. After attempting to conceive naturally, experiencing a miscarriage and spending 1000’s on a number of failed makes an attempt at IVF, Lindhome and her ex parted methods when he informed her that he wasn’t up for having extra kids. (Lindhome’s ex had two kids from a earlier relationship.) “[My ex] said that he was only 90 percent sure he wanted to have a baby and he deserved to be 100 percent,” Lindhome says. “So I wrote a song about all the things that I’m only 90 percent sure I’m going to do to him. But don’t worry, because it’s not 100, so it could never happen!” In the meantime, on “Infertile Princess,” Lindhome adopts the lens of a Disney heroine: “Pocahontas got pregnant just by talking to a tree … If I was like Ariel, I’d be fine, because she makes 20,000 eggs at a time.”
Whereas Lindhome solo retains her trademark singsong, sweet-and-sour supply, the themes inside her work have deepened to mirror a extra difficult stage of life. As an illustration, Garfunkel and Oates wrote expletive-laced, satirical pop ditties about dangerous and embarrassing intercourse, spiritual “loopholes” (IYKYK) and self-satisfied pregnant ladies, amongst different issues. However Lindhome takes the system one step additional by getting ultra-candid (however no much less acerbic) in regards to the social isolation round attempting – and failing – to conceive.
“There’s so much blaming,” she says. “When I was going through all of my stuff, a lot of people’s first reaction was to give me advice. Like, here’s what you’re doing wrong. Despite their best intentions, they were making me feel like it was my fault. That should not be it. Your first reaction should be, ‘I’m sorry that’s happening. How are you?’
“I was feeling so overwhelmed [by the advice] that I stopped telling people what was happening,” Lindhome continues. “Then I felt super isolated. I’m like, where is the middle ground? From that point, I was like, ‘I refuse to be ashamed about this.’”
As she ready to debut “Dead Inside,” Lindhome remained unsure that it or its accompanying album would join with audiences who had not undergone fertility struggles. That’s why she known as the album “No Worries If Not.” “My old music was more crowd-pleasery, not in a bad way. It was just for more people,” she says. “And this one is about menopause and fertility trauma — such specified things that [I feel], like, ‘If you don’t like it, I get it!’”
A lot to her shock, nevertheless, a variety of audiences responded to “Dead Inside” and its music with overwhelmingly constructive suggestions. “When I started [performing] in Edinburgh, I was a little taken aback at first, because it would be a lot of women sharing their experience, and I was very touched,” Lindhome says. “And it was raining all the time. So I always found myself standing in the rain, hugging and crying with people.”
What’s extra, Lindhome has been fascinated to learn the way audiences she by no means anticipated to narrate have related to the fabric. “[A] number of straight men without kids who felt included in this were like, ‘I understand the feeling of not having information and not knowing my way out.’ And I’m like, ‘Oh, right, that is universal.’ I’m talking about it in a fertility sense, but everyone feels like there is some key that they don’t have, that they can’t get through the door they need to.”
Lindhome’s private story has a cheerful ending, too. In March 2022, Lindhome welcomed a son, Keaton, by way of surrogacy and a donated sperm and egg. And whereas she totally anticipated to be a single mother, she reconnected with an outdated buddy, Fred Armisen, whereas filming Netflix’s “Wednesday” in Romania. The summer time after Keaton was born, they obtained married.
“My life changed so much so quickly,” Lindhome says. “It was funny because when I fell in love on set and had a baby and all this stuff happened at the same time, I was like, ‘This was so fast.’ And my “Wednesday” costar Jamie McShane was like, ‘Well, if you look at the physics principles, you lost everything in a day and you gained everything in two weeks. It’s equal-opposite reactions. That is really the appropriate cadence for you, scientifically.”
Trying forward, Lindhome remains to be tweaking “Dead Inside,” which she desires not less than one other yr to develop. (“Dead Inside” will run in New York on April 3; Austin on April 12; and again in L.A. on April 23.) “Things change every performance,” Lindhome says. “I want more time to make it happen. My goal would be to do an off-Broadway or off-off-Broadway run. Then after that, maybe think about trying to film it.”
For now, Lindhome hopes “No Worries If Not” will assist individuals to snort in regards to the issues which might be outdoors of their management. “I hope people feel seen,” she says. “When I listen to comedy music, I just want to have a good time. And then if they come to see the show, I want them to feel less alone, especially women who’ve gone through that stuff. I want them to feel like it’s not your fault. I think that’s true with most things in life. So much is luck … But you just keep going.”
