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.

I never thought I’d get to have conversations with musicians I considered legends, whose music defines and describes me and my life in a way that non-music fans will never understand — and I never thought I’d find a legend of my generation (indeed, younger than me), prolific enough to add to the lineup of my beloved rock heroes, in an era where vital artistic voices are more crucial than ever. Getting the chance to talk to someone like Will, and write about it, is truly more than I could’ve ever imagined, and mostly makes up for the earlier angst (although I’ll never get over the Lou Reed thing), so thank you Will, and universe.

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. I tried to restrain myself, but as you can see by the length of this piece, I only partially succeeded. I don’t even know if this final version has everything I wanted to say — because I want to say everything. But it’s a start.

Car Seat is Keeping Rock Alive For The Real Ones

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. Even the still-living, legendary rock writer Robert Christgau, who I just saw mentioned in Holly George-Warren’s new Janis Joplin biography for having been front row at the Monterey Pop Festival in 1967, digs Will and Car Seat. What more cross-generational, old-guard, rock n roll validation do you need?

But it’s not just the classic rock dads “with their Beatles and their Stones” who are here for Car Seat, to paraphrase the Bowie-penned, Mott The Hoople classic “All The Young Dudes.” And it’s not just me and my cohort of Millennials, many of us indie rock fan stereotypes with our memories of growing up shopping at Tower Records, and our humanities degrees in introspection, with minors in depression and anxiety. (Although I think I am also a classic rock dad, and from what I understand of Will’s musical tastes, he is too.) It’s also today’s kids — circa middle school, high school, college — the ones who speak fluent meme and post their every feeling on social media, the ones who are deconstructing the boundaries and dichotomies of yesteryear, who find solace and inspiration in Will’s subtly transgressive work as he reframes rock standards into something more honest and inclusive.

Every generation needs someone to tell them it’s okay to be who they are, and Will is now one of those people. Just glancing at comments and posts about Will and Car Seat across social media show fans around the world talking about how his music made them feel better, helped them come out to their family, helped them during mental health challenges and tough times. From lyrical content that resonates with emotional truths to the catharsis of rocking out, Car Seat Headrest is in a league of its own.

Even as conventional wisdom says rock is dead, or kids don’t listen to rock anymore — it couldn’t be further from the truth. It’s not enough to just keep spinning the same records for 50 years, and I’m so grateful for artists like Will, building on the greatness of the past while moving us toward something even better.

As a lifelong fan of rock music, discovering the music of Car Seat Headrest was like finding some friend through space and time that I had always known. 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. As Joni Mitchell once said, “an innovator must change what went before.”

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.

It’s been remarkable to see the shift over the course of just a few years as Will’s performance skills have evolved to meet the demands of international visibility and playing for packed, sold-out crowds across the world. Even just having been a fan since Car Seat started becoming more well-known in the indie rock world with Teens of Denial, it’s easy to see how Will has continued developing over the course of just three short years in the spotlight.

You can see and hear how he experiments, pushes boundaries, assesses his strengths and weaknesses, and tries new strategies to be better each time. He’s molded and shaped his distinctive voice into a highly versatile instrument, a singer in the tradition of Dylan or Neil Young or Leonard Cohen, artists who may not have had Sinatra-smooth voices but whose emotional honesty and relatability is enhanced by their poignantly raw, authentic style.

Stef Chura feat. Will Toledo on “Sweet Sweet Midnight,” which Will produced

From singing in the backseat of a car to singing on late-night TV, from performing with a guitar by default and necessity to becoming a full-fledged frontman supported by a robust rock n roll band, Will is continuing to prove his skills aren’t confined solely to writing and arranging indie rock songs. He’s brought the skills he built as a producer of his own music to bear on projects such as those of Detroit’s Stef Chura, whose 2019 record Midnight is one of my favorite rock albums of the year and features a poignant co-written duet with her and Will, and he’s produced the albums of his friends and touring associates like Virginia’s Gold Connections and fellow Virginia-to-Seattle act Naked Days (project of Degnan “The Ending of Dramamine” Smith). Will would definitely be in demand as a rock producer if he went totally in that direction, and as we discussed in our conversation, he sees it as a good way to keep his skills sharp — but certainly nothing beats being a songwriter and creator yourself.

Influences, Innovation, and Interpolation

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. I see this idea embodied in the covers Will does, and the remnants of his work over the years that exist across YouTube and Tumblr, how devoted fans can trace the development of the songs we love so much. 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 just about any musician gets their start in both playing and songwriting by covering artists they admire, there’s something special to me about the covers Will has done, on his own or with the larger band. Given the DIY origins of Car Seat Headrest, which has morphed into the high costs of song sampling (the infamous situation with The Cars and Teens of Denial), most of these covers live online, rather than being enshrined in the Car Seat Headrest recording catalogue.

My personal favorite cover is probably his updated, interpolated version of Leonard Cohen’s grandiose nostalgia romp “Memories,” found on Car Seat’s “out of print” 2013 album Disjecta Membra, where Will turns Cohen’s original plea to seduce the tallest blonde girl at the dance into something sexy and sinister for the social media generation. I can’t get enough of it. (By the way, it took me only like 10 years of being a Cohen fan to discover “Memories,” and 2 years of being a Car Seat fan to find Will’s cover. I’m not always great at whatever it is I do here.)

A fantastic, more recent cover featured the full band, including Naked Giants, doing DEVO’s “Uncontrollable Urge” at KEXP in Seattle, where they and DJ Cheryl Waters (clearly a fellow Car Seat fan) seem to be having a great time. My other favorite covers of Will’s and his bandmates include The Smiths and Pink Floyd. 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.

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 saw him perform it in Chicago that September, and it absolutely blew me away. Watching fan-made videos of the performances over the past few years show how he’s made it his own, culminating in the April 2018 video above, which visually documents the version of “Ivy” that made it onto Commit Yourself Completely.

It’s not exactly a cover as much as a remix, with Will interpolating his own lyrics, including a snippet from “Beach Life-in-Death” (“in the mall in the nighttime / you came back alone with a flashlight”) — while he had also interpolated in a lyric of Frank’s, recorded backwards (“it was the start of nothing”) in the 2018 version of BLiD. 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 can only hope copyright and licensing laws don’t squash the next phases of artistic innovation. 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?

New Music On The Horizon

Will and the band are currently working on what will be Car Seat Headrest’s first collection of new material since Teens of Denial (1 Trait Danger albums notwithstanding), and I know that I, along with thousands of other Car Seat fans are eager to hear how Will’s songwriting and musical vision has continued to evolve in tandem with the skills of his consummately talented band.

We’ve gotten a few glimpses of where they’re going via the TIDAL documentary, which showcases the development of new track “Stop Lying To Me,” and via fan-made videos from overzealous concert-goers such as myself — I snagged a video from the official live debut of “Can’t Cool Me Down,” the first song of their 2019 opening tour date on Valentine’s Day in Boston. (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.)

During the winter 2019 tour (the continuation of their Twin Fantasy touring), the band also debuted a track called “Weightlifters.”

So that’s three new tracks on hand as of late 2019. I’m assuming these three songs will make it onto the album, but who can really say, besides Will of course. Although these first few tracks remain heavily in Car Seat’s signature indie rock realm, from what he and Andrew have been hinting at in conversations, and checking out his extensive Spotify lists, it wouldn’t surprise me at all if they start working more electronic music, or soul, or pop, into what they’re doing. I hope we’ll find out in 2020, if the album’s all set by then!

So, My Conversation With Mr. Toledo…

It’s a pretty fascinating experience to formulate a conversation with an artist whose music you consume just about every day — it’s shockingly normal (it’s just a conversation with a fellow human) and yet so surreal. There are pretty much a billion things you want to ask them, most of which you can’t because they’re a stranger, even though you feel like you know the depths of their soul or whatever (and that they know yours, which obviously they don’t), so you keep it light and high-level and try not to sound like an idiot — which I think I can say I somewhat succeeded at, although sometimes I only had “cool!” to say in response to Will’s comments, which is goofy for my supposedly having years of experience in this. Yes, I am Chris Farley, and Will is Paul McCartney.

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.

Whereas the success of many rock gods of the past hinged on their ability to be highly flamboyant, the hard-living ids of their audiences, Will being the frontman of Car Seat Headrest is like the fulfillment of the fantasy of being a rock star for every quiet or unconventional kid who ever picked up a rock record and dreamed of being on stage. 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. You don’t have to party, or trash hotel rooms, or be an obnoxious egomaniac to be a figure that entertains, inspires, and brings comfort to thousands around the world through your art and performances.

While I wanted to include the transcript of our whole conversation in this article, I tried to select more of what hasn’t been covered before in pieces about Will and Car Seat. We discussed, among other subjects, our feelings as music fans (and in Will’s case, as a professional musician) about Spotify’s offerings, the influences behind his work, and how he and the guys are working on the next album. 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.