Creed Bratton Won’t Be on the Upcoming ‘Office’ Reboot, But He Does Have a New Record

When Covid hit a little over four years, Creed Bratton’s entire life shut down. He couldn’t play gigs, book any TV or film work, appear at fan conventions for The Office (he played Dunder Mifflin’s resident weirdo across all nine seasons of the show) or even see his granddaughters. Just about the only thing he could do was write songs, which he’s finally going to share with the world Sept. 27 with the release of his new LP Tao Pop.

Check out leadoff single “Corner of the Universe,” which features Elliot Easton of the Cars on guitar. “It’s a fun, catchy, summer song,” Bratton tells Rolling Stone via Zoom from his home in Los Angeles. “It’ll put people in a good mood.”

The cheerful song sparkles with optimism about the future of mankind. “When we turn the corner in the universe,” Bratton sings. “The planets cooling down/All the hard work is paying off/We won’t go down this round.”

Bratton was inspired to write the tune after reading an article in Popular Mechanics about how the hole in the ozone layer is actually shrinking in size. “It’s somewhat tongue-in-cheek,” he says. “But instead of all this stuff about how we’re going to hell in a hand basket, I wanted to be the one guy saying we can fix this thing. If we get together as a human race, we can actually improve things.”

The song was cowritten by comedian Vance DeGeneres, whose career in music goes back to the late Seventies when he played bass in the Louisiana new wave band the Cold. He’s best known today as the brother of Ellen DeGeneres and for his work on The Daily Show, but he never left music behind. He met Bratton years ago on the set of The Office.

“Vance is really good friends with Steve Carell,” Bratton says. “And they ran Carousel Productions together. We were sitting round craft services one day and he came up and went, ‘I know you’re a musician. We should get together and play.’ I really liked him.”

Over the years, DeGeneres became part of Bratton’s wide circle of musical collaborators, which also includes multi-instrumentalist Dillon O’Brian, and producer/engineer Dave Way, who has worked with everyone from Fiona Apple and Fall Out Boy to Paul McCartney, Mick Jagger, Neil Young, and Ringo Starr. Tao Pop is Bratton’s fifth album with him. “Dave and I have this intangible thing,” says Bratton. “When he’s working with me, his hands are just a blur. His sensibilities are just so good.”

Other songs on Tao Pop include the dreamy “Chip in My Brain” (“Dreamt I had a chip in my brain/to keep me mellow and from going insane”), the playful “Toy Boat” (“Fonzie’s cool, Ponzi’s not/I need to pee but there ain’t no pot”), and the poignant “I’ll Always Be Dreaming of You,” which he co-wrote with O’Brian. “We’ve both been married before,” says Bratton. “And that song was inspired by one of those situations where you’re with a woman, the love is not there, and there’s nothing you can do about it.”

Bratton plays every month at L.A. club the Baked Potato with Tim Hockenberry, and he’s headed to the U.K. in October for a series of shows to promote Tao Pop. He may play additional U.S. concerts in August and September, but he can’t book anything until he finds out when he’s needed on set of an upcoming Jonathan Banks movie provisionally entitled Castmates. “It’s about a young girl who’s a writer,” Bratton says. “Her mentor goes off to Hollywood, and he comes home all chewed out. He has to figure out if he wants to encourage her or prevent her from going through what he just went through. I play this enigmatic guy who appears every once in a while when she’s feeling down to encourage her.”

He hopes the movie will show people his full range of talents as an actor. “I’m hoping to get more dramatic roles,” he says. “My success has been like a double-edged sword. I’ve been typecast as Creed from The Office. People only see me as that odd, strange person when I can do a lot more. I just went to a Dodgers game with Dave Way, and we met Brent Spiner from Star Trek. People just see him as Data and we commiserated about that. It’s not that we’re unhappy in any way about how our lives turned out, but we can do more.”

Spiner recently had the chance to play Data one last time on Star Trek: Picard, but don’t expect to see Bratton on NBC’s upcoming revival of The Office. The show is being overseen by original Office showrunner Greg Daniels along with Nathan for You executive producer Michael Koman (who happens to be married to Office actress Ellie Kemper), but it doesn’t take place at Dunder Mifflin. It instead centers around a small-town newspaper. The only connection to the original show is the largely unseen documentary crew from The Office is filming them. Domhnall Gleeson and Sabrina Impacciatore have been cast in leading roles.

“The show will be fantastic since Greg is a comic genius,” says Bratton. “Rainn Wilson said that I should be on it with no explanation, just sitting at a desk in a backroom, and I’ll mumble something occasionally when they walk by, but they’ll never say what I do or mention my name. The thing is, we couldn’t get the original group together anyway. That’s impossible. And I won’t actually be on the new show. I’m just very grateful I was on the original one. I get up every day and think about how lucky I am. But I’ve done it. Let them go and have their run, make more people laugh. Make me laugh. I’m sure it’ll be great. You wouldn’t think Parks and Rec would have turned around and been great, but it was great.”

And even though he won’t be on the new Office, the old one is still creating work for him. He recently filmed an AT&T commercial with Wilson, Jenna Fischer, Craig Robinson, Brian Baumgartner, and Kate Flannery that was so lucrative he thought about using the money to buy a new house. He also appears at fan conventions every few months.

“I have mixed feelings about those even though I like seeing Rainn, Kate, and Oscar,” he says. “I like meeting the fans, but [conventions] can be exhausting. Rainn calls them ‘Celebrity Salt Mines.’ People come up to me and go, ‘Remember when you said ‘cool beans?’ I go, ‘Yeah, I remember that.’ ‘Remember when you said, ‘Which one is Pam?’ Remember when you threw the car keys to nobody?’ I’m like, ‘Yeah, I do remember all that…’

“Other fan interactions really do mean a lot to me,” he continues. “People tell me they were having family problems, health problems, or psychotic problems. They tell me that watching The Office became a sort of therapy or it brought them together and kept them grounded.”

Looking ahead, Bratton — who is 81 — says he wants little more than the chance to cut a few more albums, and hopefully take on new, interesting characters in TV or movies. “I’m pretty darn content with the way things are going in my life right now,” he says. “I don’t want to say that I need this or that. I’m just grateful that I get to keep running solid.”