I’m reading a book right now called The Story of Modern Pop, and usually when I’m reading a book like that that goes through a lot of music, I’ll just have my computer on hand and every time they mention an artist or a song I’ll look it up, and if I enjoy it I’ll add it to the playlist. Last October, toward the end of recording his band’s new album, Car Seat Headrest frontman Will Toledo found himself in the middle of a terrifying panic attack. Nobody knew about it besides a select group of friends and a couple of family members, so there it sat on a small corner of the Internet in 2011. But I can change my mindset and take advantage of being the only one at the wheel for a while.”, If all goes well, he hopes that he can shape the beginnings of something to record with his bandmates when conditions allow, with the goal of finishing a new album to perform alongside Making a Door Less Open at some later date. Pop/Rock. I guess I’ve listened to a lot more music and especially live recordings in the past five years or so, where that’s basically the scene, where artists will have three-minute songs that turn into ten-minute songs, or whatever, and just sort of get into a groove and keep going with it. Some nights, Ives would stride to the mic to perform a perfectly ragged cover of Neil Young’s “Powderfinger” in the middle of a Car Seat Headrest song. I’ve just been actively trying to look for different types of music, and staying on top of that. From lyrical content that resonates with emotional truths to the catharsis of rocking out, Car Seat Headrest is in a league of its own. Now Thad Cockrell’s Playing ‘The Tonight Show’, Inside ‘The Show,’ Blackpink’s First-Ever Livestream Concert, Yes, You Can Get a Canon Digital Camera Right Now for Just $229, Read These ‘Bridgerton’ Books While Waiting for Season 2 to Stream on Netflix, Flo Milli’s ‘Roaring 20s’ Is an Absurdly Fun Song You Need to Know, How 2020 Changed the Music Business Forever, 18 Great Albums You Might Have Missed in 2020. … What did I like about that older music? If you buy a vinyl copy of Making a Door Less Open, you’ll hear it as a slow, dread-soaked plea for salvation; if you stream the album, you’ll hear a frantic breakbeat remix that feels like it’s flying apart at the seams. Sign up for our newsletter. I think it’s easier to be a musician, cause the overhead costs are super low when you’re starting out, because you can do everything on your computer, and there’s still an industry around it, which means there’s still a lot of people with money who don’t know what to do with it. The industry is trying to change to keep up with the DIY aspect of it, and I think that’s resulted in a very good place to be for musicians. Human bobert from amazing world of gumball is literally just will toledo. Life Worth Missing 10. As early as I can remember, I’ve always enjoyed the whole process of listening to music and even just looking at an album before I listen to it, and sort of imagining what’s gonna be on there, and I think one thing that always intrigued me was if an album had especially long songs on it — it just sort of really made me question what could be on there. By the week of the album’s release on May 1st, he’d gotten back into work mode, starting by taking a fresh look at a handful of long, unstructured jams left over from the recording of Making a Door Less Open. “To me, that was a good indication that we should keep that. The yelps and shouts that resulted made it onto the album. I read somewhere that a young Hunter S. Thompson learned and practiced writing by retyping classic novels like The Great Gatsby to get a feel for the flow of language as used by F. Scott Fitzgerald. save. “Brian Wilson was actively fighting this contingent of people who dismissed them as a dumb pop band because they wrote about cars and pretty girls and surfing. I get no satisfaction out of the delivery, because I give 100 percent in the creating, and then I’m just kind of spent.”. I mean, you’re kind of the ultimate success story these days with DIY…. Will Toledo in the custom-designed mask he had made for the promotion of Car Seat Headrest's new album. hide. Submit Corrections. 2010s. 131 votes, 36 comments. A lot of stuff is changing for the worse, but it seems like it’s been a change for the better. But there’s actually whole playlists of covers on YouTube if you look hard enough — I’ll leave finding those to my fellow hardcore fans and internet people. I was buying CDs in the CD age, and I remember how shitty CDs were, and what a ripoff they were in comparison to the actual product that it was. “We got pegged early on as garage rock, or Nineties-style alt-rock,” he says of the band, whose other core members are drummer Andrew Katz, guitarist Ethan Ives, and bassist Seth Dalby. Interviews; Lists; Streams; Videos; All Posts; Recommendations. Because you can make what you want and attract people who can give you that boost, essentially, and put you on a larger-scale market, and you can still have free rein over your own product, as long as you work with people who don’t suck, essentially. I saw him perform it in Chicago that September, and it absolutely blew me away. It’s just the flexibility of us being the people who mix it, and being able to mix it wherever as opposed to in a studio. “I think if you’re not stressed out at any point making a work of art, there’s a much higher chance that it’s not going to be good at the end of it.”. Twin Fantasy isn’t just another one of Toledo’s Bandcamp albums. If a song can do everything in three minutes, what world is it going to explore in that additional amount of time? Will already managed to get his interpolations of Dido onto Teens of Denial, and They Might Be Giants onto Twin Fantasy— who knows what will come next? Styles. I’m also interested in how the variety of cross-genre influences he absorbs, as documented through his Spotify playlists, are making an impact on his creativity, and I am very curious to see how they make appearances on the next record. While it’s true that many of the legends we rock fans worship tend to be in the septuagenarian or even octogenarian category these days, younger artists like Will, who is succeeding at so many of the things we valued about the rock artists of the past, show us that it’s still possible for songwriters to create lyrics that get under our skin, melodies that stick in our heads, and that you can’t beat drums, guitars, and bass for creating the perfect mosh pit. Good, yeah, you can probably tell from the video it’s one of the longer pieces. Read more. Yeah, I guess that was sort of Teens of Denial as well, but I feel like with Denial I was also working with a stricter aesthetic range, where it was all very guitar-based, and everything had a similar tone to it, and right now, sort of everything is on the table as long as it doesn’t drag and it feels like there’s energy throughout the song. Yeah, we have our sound guy [John McRae] who also tours with us, he’s been the engineer in the studio, which just means he’s setting everything up and hitting the buttons, and then outside of that, it’s just been me and Andrew. (I had gotten a taste of it when a secret demo version was included on the first 1 Trait Danger flash drive, and somehow had the presence of mind to whip out the iPhone when I recognized it on stage. 306. He’s a pretty regular dude who also happens to be a “rock star,” whatever that means in 2019 — and he’s certainly helping to deconstruct the previously toxic notions of what it meant to be a rock star in eras past. “It’s a shame that it will be harder to do that. And I think we’re doing that enough in the live show that I can feel content with the actual albums, saying “okay, we can save the jam for the live show,” and just make the song. Making a Door Less Open, released 01 May 2020 1. But yeah, to me that feels like the core of it should be three and a half minutes, but it’s still like a minute longer than that. I think that it is possible to find the right indie label who is going to support you in your career, and I think there are very little restraints other than the restraints that everybody has to go through these days. Rock survives thanks in large part to innovators like Will, able to synthesize what we’ve loved about rock music over the past decades into something that feels both familiar and fresh. “To me, that puts it in line with a lot of Teens of Denial, which also talked about alienation in its own way.” Still, it feels new enough to surprise and disorient. You can see and hear how he experiments, pushes boundaries, assesses his strengths and weaknesses, and tries new strategies to be better each time. I guess there still is, but it’s sort of tempered by a lot more different experiences, and more direct social activities. One of Will’s signature covers — a song he performs solo— has become hip-hop artist Frank Ocean’s indie rock-inspired masterpiece “Ivy,” a track Will’s been performing since Car Seat Headrest’s fall 2016 tour (Frank Ocean’s Blonde was released in August 2016). I can’t get enough of it. Since its release in 2011, the album has amassed an online cult following, with the internet forums 4chan and Reddit playing major roles in the album's success. It felt like Toledo and his bandmates were in a sweaty wrestling match with the classic-rock tradition. “I had a few weeks where I was pretty depressed,” he says. Life went on, and Toledo … “We have these longer pieces where we’re just going on for 10 minutes or more on certain ideas, and a lot of them are catching my ear in a different sort of way,” he says. Are you guys recording the album already? hide. I don’t think that was a great way of making money either. It just feels like I wasted my time. It’s not too shabby for both Will and I to be where we are now, two kids from the American suburbs of the East Coast: a guy who started out as a teenager recording music in the back of his parents’ car, and me, living out my fantasy from when I was 13 (lol, a very long time ago now) of being rock writer William Miller in Almost Famous — or his mentor, the real, legendary rock writer Lester Bangs — a fantasy which implanted itself in my brain in tandem with my teenage music fan angst about my inability to meet Julian Casablancas when I would see The Strokes play in Boston, or the time my parents blocked the opportunity I had to meet Lou Reed at a record store signing. “There’s no way to avoid it,” he says over the phone from his Seattle home. Even as conventional wisdom says rock is dead, or kids don’t listen to rock anymore — it couldn’t be further from the truth. Around this time, Toledo began performing live shows with fellow students Katie Wood, Austin Ruhf, and Christian Northover, recording and releasing a short live album in July 2013 entitled Live at WCWM: Car Seat Headrest at the university's studio . As Joni Mitchell once said, “an innovator must change what went before.”. We want to hear from you! Synths and streamlined melodies entered the picture, as did a brash, over-the-top sense of humor. I didn’t even realize that “Can’t Cool Me Down” is also a little longer, isn’t it? It’s a great concept — that you can be DIY, or you can be a huge label — you can listen to anything, from anywhere. Like a new challenge, challenge yourself. So I kind of enjoyed the idea of working with that approach, where you just had to very quickly put stuff together. I definitely don’t make playlists that are very navigable, but they’re really just for my own archival purposes. I don’t even know if this final version has everything I wanted to say — because I want to say everything. Am I going to not be able to deal with it?’”, Around the time of the Twin Fantasy tour, Toledo began considering the Sixties pop he’d grown up on from a different angle. What more cross-generational, old-guard, rock n roll validation do you need? Yeah, I think that’s a good way to keep your mind activated when you’re not working on your own material. Because when you look at the numbers, at how many people are paying for streaming and how much they’re paying, versus how much they’re streaming and how much money needs to go out to artists — they’re operating at a loss, essentially. What was really challenging about this piece is that I wanted to write about literally everything I’ve ever thought or felt about Car Seat Headrest’s music, and every related tangent. The Stef Chura record that you produced, that was really cool. hide. Twin Fantasy would later be followed up by 2012's Monomania and Starving While Living EP. I’ve really loved the really long songs you do, and I was kind of wondering how you developed those, cause it’s something you’ve been doing since early on. Can't Cool Me Down 3. Car Seat Headrest’s four core members: Katz, Dalby, Toledo, and Ives (from left). So when I write now, it does feel less like writing, and it can come from a variety of sources — just putting notes together, putting beats together, it just sort of accumulates. The material I’m working on right now, there’s sort of a spread of lengths of songs that are in the pool right now, but they’re all sort of concerned with that mentality — if there’s a way to make this shorter and more succinct and more direct, let’s do it, and I think that’s where my mind needs to be, because after years of writing these longer pieces, I sort of naturally write longer pieces, and if you’re not careful about that that can lead to a lot of bloat and less interesting material. American singer and guitarist most widely known because the creator from the single project-turned-indie rock-band CARSEAT Headrest. Oh, nice! To first rehash some facts: the better part of a decade ago, Will made a whole bunch of DIY albums in his home state of Virginia, in the back of his parents’ car and while off at college; got signed by Matador Records and built his band in Seattle with Andrew, guitarist and singer Ethan Ives, and bassist Seth Dalby; found critical and commercial indie success with 2016’s Teens of Denial (the album that changed everything for me) and the reworked, 2018 version of his cult 2011 Bandcamp hit Twin Fantasy, whose promotion included global tours, festival appearances, and a set on The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon (their second appearance on there, actually), with a year-plus addition to the core Car Seat Headrest band of hard-rocking Seattle trio Naked Giants for extra instrumental muscle — commemorated with the 2019 release of Car Seat Headrest’s first live album, Commit Yourself Completely; and became the subject of a three-part TIDAL documentary, which provided the most current views of where Will and Car Seat are right now, in 2018–19. It’s exciting and inspiring to see these kinds of innovative covers, the responses from one groundbreaking artist to another — in Frank and Will’s case, wildly popular and acclaimed artists who are tearing down their old genre standards that still operate in the context of heteronormative dude vibes and traditional songwriting conventions. I need to explore more before I turn to greatest-hits legacy band touring.”, Years earlier, when he was first imagining what a life in music might be like, Toledo had thought a lot about Brian Wilson, a key early influence. That was interesting and it was a challenge, because I was also involved in the writing process for it, where she had ideas that weren’t fully finished, and we had like a week to more or less finish writing the album, and then a week to go into the studio and record it. “It was really stressing me out.” The next day, instead of going back to the studio, he stayed home and wrote a new song. That was an interesting challenge to me, how can we take what’s good about these tracks and make it work in three and a half minutes. “But it was huge for months and months, repetition after repetition, and the production started sounding really good to me.”. “I do like having other people to bounce off of,” he says. Creating music from that immediate musical perspective, rather than thinking about it and trying to generate something out of my own mind. There was this whole weird labyrinthian submission process, and it was very up in the air whether anything you sent them would get posted or not, and so it seemed like a real shift in the culture when the streaming services came along, and then services like DistroKid came along, where if you paid $20, or maybe even less than that, a year, you could put your own music on all these services and people were gonna be able to access it. So that’s what I’ve been doing, and I’ve only gotten like 100 pages into the book, but I feel like I’ve listened to that many songs because of it. “I didn’t feel like I was good at that much, other than having this world in my head and creating [music] out of that,” he says. And as an anonymous person on YouTube said, Will is basically single-handedly saving rock music as we know it — which you can see reflected in Car Seat Headrest’s sold-out, cross-generational shows, where you can find everyone from the kids born in the 2000s to their grandparents who saw Neil Young live in the 1970s singing along to “Drunk Drivers/Killer Whales” and “Drugs With Friends,” or moshing to “Beach Life-in-Death” and “Destroyed by Hippie Powers.” Whether you’re a fan of rock-pop, post-punk, grunge, alt-rock, guitar feedback, unconventional song structure, or introspective lyrics, there’s something for everyone. Especially for musicians — like I said, I know a lot of visual artists, people who draw, or write comics, et cetera, for a living, and I think it’s harder to do that but still possible. Do you think you’ll keep producing records? In 2018, when Car Seat Headrest toured the U.S. to support a new, full-band revision of Toledo’s early solo album Twin Fantasy, they mushroomed onstage into a muscular seven-piece live act. After their studio sessions concluded in October, Toledo and his bandmates kept tweaking, leading to substantial differences between the vinyl, CD, and streaming releases of Making a Door Less Open. A fantastic listen. I think that’s what so great about your longer songs, is that they really keep the energy and the interest there, cause otherwise folks would be bored. Indie Rock Alternative/Indie Rock Alternative Singer/Songwriter Power Pop Lo-Fi. And in thinking about that, I ended up thinking a lot about that sort of shorter song structure, and how people do more with less, essentially. Will Toledo. “I really like going out and playing music. I don’t think any of us wanted to keep making records like Teens of Denial.”. Everything Indie Music related; from the newest releases and news, to discussion … 277. Maybe we’re not quite at that stage yet, but sort of coming from a different place from the rest of the tracks on the album, which makes it a bit of a challenge to make it fit and feel coherent. Send us a tip using our anonymous form. report. Yeah, I am too, cause I listen to your music like every day. I came up in the era directly before streaming, and I understand that what streaming replaced is music piracy. Stream My Boy (Twin Fantasy) by Will Toledo from desktop or your mobile device I truly can’t wait to see how this next album comes together, and to be on this journey as a fan, and now documentarian of sorts, of the work and evolution of Will Toledo and Car Seat Headrest. I really liked the kind of Car Seat-esque vibes that were brought to bear, albeit on her music. But Will is great because while in various ways he is a new Paul McCartney for the 21st century — a stunningly innovative songwriter, an artist who put their time in to hone their craft, an enigmatic and charismatic figure on stage, an emotional artist who can effortlessly switch between cathartically rocking out and making you cry with devastating lyrics — as an individual, he could just be another low-key student from my humanities classes over the years. 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