The Freeness of Car Seat Headrest
“Trait“ aka Will Toledo of Car Seat Headrest by Carlos Cruz
When I started college back in 2015, I fell in love with Car Seat Headrest. I got to see the band during my first semester with two of my closest friends in a small, 200-capacity venue. I worked at a fast food restaurant and would walk back to my dorm after my shift, headphones in, listening to “Drunk Drivers/Killer Whales” on repeat. About a few years later when I started MMC*, I decided to make the Twin Fantasy cover into action figures. This caught the attention of the band’s rep and now one of my pieces sits on singer-songwriter Will Toledo’s wall. This conversation was a work of fan service granted to me by Toledo and his rep. Thank you to them and hope you enjoy!
As a songwriter, I've read that you take your time with lyrics and will sometimes leave a song half unwritten while you get the inspiration to finish it. With this process as well as having personal situations fuel the music, can you discuss the different head spaces you were in when writing an album like Teens of Denial vs where you were at mentally and physically while making MADLO?
[I was finding this question difficult to answer so I skipped past it to hit the rest of the questions first. Coming back to it now, I think I ended up covering the answer to it in my subsequent answers. I hope that’s all right…]
Although being a fan of the MADLO record, many fans were divided on this new sound that you were going for. What are your thoughts on artists taking a different approach to their craft? You mention a lot of references to listening to pop music while creating the latest album, so did that idea of having pop music and car seat headrest in the same sentence ever make you feel a certain way in which you were second guessing yourself on going through with this sound?
The only consistent way I’ve ever felt about Car Seat Headrest is that it should be as free of a project as possible. When I first started it I didn’t have any plans to associate myself with it - I wanted it to be an anonymous project that just had a lot of releases assigned to it...I wanted to get to a hundred. Obviously my plan changed as I got on with it and realized I wanted to spend more time on each album instead of cranking them out. But as a whole the discography has always been a series of phases which aren’t easily definable.
Pop music can be in a lot of different things; I don’t know if I understand the way people use it a lot of times. My approach was pretty literal, in that I was looking at music on the top of the Spotify charts for inspiration, but it seems like I ended up with a result that a lot of people didn’t consider to be pop. I saw it as a collection of sounds and themes, and the sounds and themes that were showing up in the material that was topping the charts seemed more interesting and more ‘real’ to me that a lot of what was being circulated on a more critical level. I thought if someone could invent a new approach to those sounds structurally and lyrically, that would make a worthwhile album. But you have to fight against all these preconceptions in the meantime. ‘Pop’ doesn’t really mean anything because it used to exist against a backdrop of classical music - music writing and performance that was taking place on an entirely different, ‘elevated’ realm...that got flattened in the past century and there’s nothing that happens now that’s really outside of the realm of ‘pop’, because our way of thinking about music changed, and the way we listened changed, and the industry that supports musicians changed. If you’re working from an ideology that pop music is bad, whether you’re a musician or a listener, at some point you’re going to have to confront the fact that it’s there in your own bedroom. I would much rather write a good pop song than a bad experimental album.
When writing such songs, as a listener you can kind of understand that your music (the older records especially) comes from a place of isolation and genuinity. You have spoken on how you want to remain genuine not only as an artist but as a person too. Are there instances where you find yourself experiencing something that might make for good art but will sort of lock it away and label it as strictly an experience, like it shouldn't be anything more than that? If so, how does that process work for yourself?
I can’t lock anything away because even if I do, it might come back to me later in a different light and make me think, “maybe there’s something to that”. But I’m always working on music and living life at the same time, so with anything that happens, there’s a background process of whether I should be trying to write about it in some way. Lately I’ve been writing poetry more than anything, and I’m hoping that when the time comes that I need to be writing lyrics again, it will help to have material written down in some form, even if I do need to change it.
With many live shows, you've performed covers of songs I'm sure you love such as "Ivy" by Frank Ocean. Have there been any tracks or albums that you've connected with over this year, especially during covid and having to stay home most of the time that you would maybe want to cover once concerts come back?
For covering, I don’t know. I’ve been doing solo live streams all year, and a lot of the stuff I’ve been interested in covering I’ve done there. And because that’s been my only opportunity to play, the kinds of songs that I’ve been looking at doing the ones that I can do solo. I’d like to do more country stuff like George Jones or the Louvin Brothers, but I don’t know how much of that I can get away with.
Speaking of live shows, you have come from playing in small bars and clubs to performing at historic venues and opening in stadiums. Now with an ever-expanding catalogue of records under your belt, will your upcoming performances behind MADLO include a more theatrical approach such as the Trait character? I can imagine an LED grid illuminating the stage and being synced to the eyes on the Trait mask; there are so many ideas that would be cool to experience as one in the audience.
I hope so - we’ll have to work on the eyes. We’re getting a different model of the mask made for performing live that it will be easier to sing in. I’ll have to check in on what’s going on with that, because it was something that got held up along with everything else. I don’t like to plan too big before I know the specifics of when we’ll be able to get on stage, and where we’ll be playing and how much we can bring along. Before our tour got canceled we were starting to plan out the lighting. Once you get past bar shows, most of the venues here and have fancier lights, so my goal was to fully capitalize on what we already had in front of us before expanding further.
With the character of Trait, I thought it was very interesting how you stated that although David Bowie has multiple personas, you only hear David Bowie, you don't hear what character he is playing. Is this what Trait serves as in this point in time for the band? Is it hard to distinguish the character from yourself while going through the process of making the album, or is Trait some sort of aspect of yourself that you're beginning to flush out and understand?
I see him mostly as a mascot. When we did a home shoot for Jimmy Fallon playing Can’t Cool Me Down, I had a friend wear the suit instead of me, and I liked that. He just feels generally representative of MADLO and of what we’re doing around this time. It’s me in the way that the album is me or that the live show is me; kind-of, but separate.
With an extensive musical background and over 10 projects out, do you ever find yourself wanting to take a step back from creating music at any point? Do you feel as though it is a good idea to not oversaturate the catalogue of Car Seat Headrest? I think of the Beatles and how they had so many albums and then remastered works and reworks of albums and whatnot and this created a sort of rift where they had a specific sound that garnered them fame then went in multiple directions and now you have fans saying "oh I hate this era or this album, I like the previous sound." Can you see something similar happening with yourself or do you not care about that idea?
That’s hard to answer because it’s already happened to us many times. It happens every time we put an album out, and everybody forgets that it happened last time. It happened with Teens of Denial, and before that it happened with Nervous Young Man where people felt I’d lost it after Twin Fantasy and Monomania. And of course when we re-recorded Twin Fantasy, the main thing to do was debate which version sucked. It’s been harder with MADLO because real life vanished and only online remains, where these sort of things hold ground more. There’s nothing to be said for having any regard to that sort of thing as an artist. In the last month, It’s Only Sex suddenly went to the top of our Spotify page because it got picked up by Tiktok users. That’s a song from an EP I posted on Bandcamp in 2013 when Tiktok didn’t exist. You make songs because you think you can do it good, and where it lands, or what qualities get recognized, or how it ends up getting you any sort of success is completely random.
In this day and age where we are literally in isolation most of the time for safety purposes, does it bring you back to those moments where creating music was a more hidden and isolated activity for yourself? Can you apply the same question to working on MADLO and trying to get everything possible out of a computer, similar to how you approached making the numbered records and the earlier releases?
Quarantine hasn’t brought me back into any earlier mindset because I’ve never been isolated before in that way; making music used to be my private time between school and family life and all that. It was easy to feel it out in a similar way when we were touring, where you get breaks to hide away and write. Now I have nothing but private time, and I have to find a way to structure my days so I can feel motivated to create. MADLO to me definitely felt more like the early days of CSH, having these song pieces that were somewhat beyond my understanding, and being intrigued by the mystery of it. A lot of making that album was just trying to push the songs and see where it would go without changing it into a more standard structure.
I myself am a huge fan of your music and have been following it for awhile now, going to various shows and meeting the band and whatnot, but I also make action figures of different things such as bands and movies that wouldn't traditionally get the "toy" process you could say. How do you feel about fans going that extra mile to commemorate your art such as what I do or the idea of having fans fashion their own Trait masks and wearing them at live shows? Did you think you would get to a place where fans would be this connected to you and your music?
I think it’s great, and I figure most musicians treasure it. I’ve still got your figurines out on the display case, so thank you so much for that! I never really thought about succeeding in music in those terms, it was just about making the songs and the records and hoping that they could get some recognition.
As you can see, this world seems to get harder and harder with the passing of time, so I ask of you, is there any sort of advice you would give to someone wanting to create art or just having goals that they would like to pursue but ultimately find too many obstacles to leap over to accomplish?
Well, what do you want to accomplish? Most things get too complicated when you try to see all the steps at once, but most of the things that we want to do are pretty simple when you break it down into what you can do. Art is just a re-constitution of the pieces of our lives, and you can do that freely, or you can take a studied approach to it, by which I mean learning how to play an instrument or use oil paints or something like that. if you’re struggling for an outlet then you should study more to develop a taste for a particular outlet, and if you’re struggling for inspiration then you should live more, that you have more life to put back into your work. And by living more I mean trying to live the good and decent life, which will provide more than enough hardships and inspiration for any artist.
"The Ballad of Costa Concordia" and "Cosmic Hero" have done a lot for me in terms of connecting to my emotions in a difficult time. If you felt comfortable discussing, how did those songs come about in terms of songwriting? You've stated if you could get your message across in 3.5 minutes then do it but these longer songs get them across in 8 and 11 roughly. Is it a stylistic choice to have these songs more fleshed out or were they absolutely integral to the narrative, therefore, lengthier.
I don’t remember exactly how the Ballad started, but I’m sure that for both of them the basic idea was that it was supposed to be longer. I know for Cosmic Hero, it was having that basic groove in place and feeling like it needed to go on a while and develop, and I think with the Ballad I wanted to put something together like a traditional ballad that went on and on in a ponderous way. That was how I was thinking of them in the context of Teens of Denial, which I saw as a sort of overview of rock music. Beyond that they were sort of opposites, in that the Ballad was very slowly and carefully pieced together - laboriously so - while Cosmic Hero was put together very quickly in a stream of consciousness style. Most of the period in which I was writing Denial was marked by the sort of negativity that the Ballad is a more studied portrait of. I struggled to try and depict it, and ended up with a lot of lyrics and music that didn’t make it onto the album. Some rejected tracks ended up on How to Leave Town, and when I added Cosmic Hero during the recording sessions, a lot of it came from lyrics I had abandoned in earlier drafts.
"What's With You Lately" was a stand out track on MADLO for me, and I was curious as to how you chose Ethan to perform and record it. I love the idea of wanting to have each member get a spotlight moment, thus providing a new perspective for listeners, but why did he serve ultimately as the best suited singer for that song?
I wrote that song for him, to have that moment where he could sing. A lot of the sounds from that album came from working with Andrew and I wanted to balance it out a bit.
Thanks for the conversation Car Seat Headrest.
Jacob Alvarez