ITS Home Edition: Car Seat Headrest

small Brooklyn club. If you check out a video or any of the articles that have been written about the band's excellent new album Making a Door Less Open, you'll probably see an image of the singer Will Toledo in a gas mask with like floppy, plushy ears. And that's a concept he thought up months and months ago before the pandemic made masks and music a very different experience.

That different experience, that's the reason we put together this home edition of Inside the Studio and to let you know how artists are coping with lockdown and how it's impacting their lives in the way they make music. If you enjoyed this episode, be sure to check out the I Heart Radio podcast that Jordan's hosts, which is called Rivals Music's Greatest Feuds, and which, as the saying goes, is available wherever you listen to your favorite shows. Hello everybody,

my name is Jordan runt Hog. But enough about me today, I'm joined by an artist who started making music as a high school or in the back of his parents Medivan. He named the project after his early audience, a pair of car seat headrests. In the first four years of his career, he released the flood of songs on the online music platform some seven albums, four EPs, and two compilations.

These are into a deal with the iconic indie label Metador Records and inspired an untold number of digital d I Y musicians and may He released Making the Door Less Open, his first album of new material in four years. It's an incredibly varied collection, with each song serving as a world of its own. In fact, he describes the album of less like a novel, more of a collection of poems. His sonic scope includes elements of E d M, hip hop, doo wop, soul, and of course some good

old fashioned rock and roll. I'm thrilled the welcome will Toledo carcat headrest. Thank you so much for taking the time today. It's such a pleasure and honor. Yeah. Hello, thanks for having me. I guess first and foremost, have you been? The last four months have been crazy for so many reasons and tough on all of us. What's been keeping you feeling grounded and hopeful? Um? Trying to keep my daily business here, daily routine going. You know.

I was working on this record mainly at home for a while, and I finished that up around the beginning of April, and that was just when Quarantine was starting, so I kind of just stayed at home. You know. We were expecting to to get out on the road start touring and promoting the record, but I kept doing basically what I had been doing. I just kind of switched gears and worked on some other music for a while.

My roommates got a record that I was helping him record, and I'm still finishing that up, making some new demos of my own, and putting some stuff together with another act might be coming down in August and recording with them. So yeah, I just I just kind of jumped into what's next. You know, if we have this time off, what other kind of music can I get into. What's a typical writing day like for you? Or it's just every day different. I kind of sneak into writing. I

don't usually sit down to to write. I just, um, I start reading, or if there's a mix to work on, I'll work on that, just kind of do grunt work or get exposed myself to other creative stuff until I come across an idea that I have or that I

find interesting, and then I'll I'll work on that. I'll shut that down, and then after a while, I'll kind of end up with a lot of kind of bullet notes, a few lines of lyrics, or I'll get on and just make a demo of a chord progression or something, and then um, I'll spend a while just kind of generating that material, and then when it comes time to you know, show stuff to the band or have some more finished work, then I'll start flashing stuff out. At that point, What do you do when like the song

is just not coming and you feel stuck? How do you do a reset? Is there a distraction that works, or do you just try to plow through it? Well? With with my method, it's kind of like it it's it's definitely hardest when I'm at the point where I'm supposed to be finishing it up. Um, but I kind of work pretty slowly where it is just you know, create a piece of it if you can, and if you can't, just work on something else. I always have different stuff that I'm going between producing for other people

are writing my own work. I just kind of switched years. If it's not working, you know, if I can't come up with lyrics, I'll work on the mix. If the mix isn't working, I'll go play guitar and see if anything is happening there, building that up so that by the time I am at a finishing point, you know, the groundwork is already there, and I can only go so wrong from there. I I usually hate reading people's

quotes back to them because it's kind of tedious. But there's a profile in Rolling Stone, Uh you did earlier this year, and you had a quote that really stuck with me. I really really struck a chord with me. You said, if you're not stressed out at any point making a work of art, there's a much higher chance it's not going to be good at the end of it.

Why do you think that is? I totally by the way, Yeah, well I think that you know, you know, if um, if you feel like a lot is at stake when you're working on something that's automatically going to be stressful. And I think if if you're a musician and you're working on something that is your main project, it it

should feel like there's a lot at stake. You know, it doesn't have to be life or death, but it should be something that you're taking seriously that you know you would feel you wouldn't feel good about it if you came to the end of it and it wasn't really a record that you wanted to listen to. In terms of financial success or popular success. You know, those are things that you can't control. But one thing that you can work towards is making a record that that

lasts on your own stereo. You know, that that you want to listen to again and again. Um. And that's what I always work towards making my own records, and it can be really stressful because I have high standards. You know, if if I'm making it and it's just okay, you know, that's not a record that I'm going to be wanting to come back to. So I have to really push myself to to get rid of what's not

good and replace it with something better. A lot of critics and fans have been calling making the door less open like this, I will reinvention. It's a total creative overhaul. It's your it's your kid a. Do you agree with that assessment or do you see this as just like an obvious next step for your work. Um, it's hard to see it as an overhaul because car Set Headress

has already been through a lot of different phases. And you know, it started off as a solo project and I was just recording on my computer in my bedroom or in my car and just trying to put stuff together in that environment. And then after about five years of that, I moved to Seattle, got a band together, and got on Matador, and things really shifted in terms of, you know, how we were playing, how it sounded. That was an adjustment, you know, that was different songs we

were working on, and we were working in a studio. Suddenly, you know, some people might have just called it a new band at that point, I remember Mattador asking, you know, do you want to keep the name or or should we change it? But to me, the the appeal of of having a weird and nondescript name like car Set head Dress is that it can kind of be anything.

You know, you can go anywhere with it, and I like the idea of just having this one discography where there's a lot of different stuff on it, so mad Low. You know, making a doorless open was definitely a shift, um, you know, away from that studio environment. But you know, it just wasn't the only shift that we've done. And I associate car Seat Head Dressed with these sort of shifts, So I think it's it's nothing new to to change

change up the sound from album to album. It's just a question of you know what we're going for with that particular album. And you've also been working with Andrew Kats on the One Trade Danger project. What did that allow you to do that? Carseat Head Dressed didn't, Well, it was an outlet for him at the time because he was making music. He's he's always kind of made his his own music on the side, and it's a lot more E d M, you know, computer driven stuff.

When he first joined car Seat Headdressed, you know, he was there as a drummer and we were doing a lot of live based recording, so there wasn't much room for that mode of music to exist in the car seat world. So this side project of One Trade Danger, you know, allowed us to have that experience where it wasn't under the car Seat name and we could kind of redefine, you know, start from the ground up as far as what it could be. And you know, what

we wanted it to be was fun. You know, it was stuff that we were coming up with on tour and you know, we just we wanted to laugh and relieve some tension and One Trade was a good outlet for that. Um. Working on the car Seat Headress record, you know, that ended up being mad low. Um. I wanted to take that energy, you know, that sense of fun and of building stuff from the ground up and

apply it to a car Seat record. You know. So it ended up being sort of this crossroads between what we were doing with One Trade and what we had

been doing with Car Seat. It reminded me a little bit of the famous sort of McCartney when the Beatles were at Across Roads in in late sixty six, when they stopped touring and Paul McCartney developed the the alter ego of Sergeant Pepper as this way of kind of blowing apart what a Beatles album could be and kind of freeing themselves to any preconceived notion did that factor into it at all to like just kind of like I guess, like you just said, starting from the ground up,

I wasn't really thinking of the Beatles specifically in terms of narrative. I always go and listen to Beatles records when I'm recording, just because I think that they've got some of the best produced records that are available. Um, you know, I think that George Martin was the fifth Beatle and they just made a lot of great stuff together, and sort of Sergeant Pepper was kind of accompanied by you know, in the Revolver era, they stopped touring and

they started focusing solely on studio stuff. And I think it makes sense to sort of, once you're away from that that grind of the tour, to start thinking of your identity in a different way, you know, start playing with it more. And um, so I think that Sergeant Pepper really rose out of that sort of being um submerged in the studio environment and being able to do whatever you want. And that was definitely something that we

were doing in Madlow. Uh, not in the studio so much, but in our in our bedrooms on the computer, um, just taking these modern sounds and doing whatever we wanted with it. And I think there is a parallel, you know, the the idea of a new identity that is really just comprised of these new sounds that you're making. Can you tell me a little about the character of trade, like,

how is it different than you? It's kind of a way for me to be more free live on on a stage, and it kind of comes with the idea that you know, for me, music has always been about music, you know, it's been about the sound. Um it's something that you can just close your eyes and experience, and the vision rules just I don't I never know exactly how they relate. And so playing live it's always been weird, you know, feeling like it becomes a visual spectacle as

well as something that you're listening to. And um, I wanted to play with that in a way for there to be something happening on stage, but it was sort of driving you back to to the music side of it, to the creative side of it. So treat to me.

You know, it's there's a level of metafiction to it, I guess where you know, you're supposed to derive some pleasure from the fact that it's not a real character, you know, it's more like a cartoon or something that, to me is what he embodies, you know, just sort of this cartoonish energy. When you first started making music, was being a you know in quotes frontman a goal for you? Or is that just did that just become a necessary part of what you do to get the

music out there? It was definitely just necessary. You know. The first one of the first bands I was in was in high school and I was the drummer, and um, that was just because no one else could play drums, and um, I was interested in it, so I got I got a real cheap drum kit and we started playing. But then I also ended up being the lead singer just because no one else really wanted to be the lead singer, and um, we were all kind of writing stuff and and tossing stuff around. It didn't really feel

like a frontman thing at all. It just felt like those are the things that I've got to do in this in this band to make the music work. You know, when I'm making my music, I want to keep it in my zone. But I don't really think about that in terms of being a frontman. I guess UM. I just think about it in terms of giving myself things that I like in my own records, and so the live performance of it, you know, it always feels like

a reinterpretation to me. One of the one of the singles off the record, Hollywood Uh, has the incredibly memorable refrain that those who haven't heard it, Hollywood makes me want a puke. Uh. It reminds me of the Pavement song Range Life a little bit. They both seemed to be written from this perspective of a guy on the outside of contemporary culture and not really sure where he fits into it. How much of that song was satire or a character and how much of that is your

own feeling and experience. I mean, to me, like the best satire or the best comedy song, novelty song, whatever you want to call it, UM is the one that that has this serious underside to it. UM. There are definitely parts that that just seemed funny to me. You know, I kept them in because they made me laugh. And there are parts that I kept in because I felt,

you know, I felt like they meant something. I felt like it was actually communicating something to to leave that in, And I just kept both of those into this one song because I kind of wanted it to be a challenge and to you know, open up people's ears and shocked them a little bit and then make them sort of approach the song as if they'd never heard music before. Um. I think that's that's the goal when you make any sort of music, is too challenge people into coming into

it fresh. You don't want them to be on autopilot when they're listening. One of my favorite songs on the album, and I've read one of yours too, is a Martin and I think you've said that that has the power to move you to tears sometimes. I was wondering, what

is it about that track that affects you so deeply? Um. For me, it was really rewarding to work on it because I started off with this demo that was just musical, you know, just had that basic chord progression and the beat and um, you know, it just had this this feeling to it. You know, it was melancholy, um, but but it was positive at the same time. And when you have music like that, you know, it can be really hard to execute it and and turn it into

a full song. Um. And you're really afraid of losing that feeling as you go along. So with Martin, it was a really slow process of putting that song together because I didn't want to lose that feeling. And for me, you know, that's why it's so rewarding and one of my favorites to listen to now is that, you know, piece by piece it got put together, and to me it felt like it it did still convey that feeling

at the end that it had at the beginning. And you know, it's not really describable, you know, in any sort of way other than the song itself. You know, it just it captures the emotion that I felt like it it could capture when I first heard that melody I was making. Do you write better in like the heat of the moment, in the midst of an emotional crisis or in a static high or do you write better from a period of reflection kind of later on down the road. It's usually more about reflection to me.

You know, it'll be like I'll have a period where there's some sort of emotional crisis, um or you know, just feeling that that cloud of negativity over me and UM when I'm really in the middle of that, it's

it's hard to write anything. Or I'll try to write and nothing will sound good, nothing will nothing will work right, and I'll just get more and more deeper into it, angrier, and then maybe I'll hear something, here's some song that knocks me out of that a little bit, so I start climbing my way out, and then at that point I can start writing, and I can start developing that emotion into something more, into transcending it. You know, I really have to be working my way out of that

emotion by the time I start writing about it. Otherwise it kind of goes in circles and I don't get don't get good stuff out of it. The songwriting on this album, and I mean, this is the best way, is the best compliment I can offer. It feels a lot more just concise. There's not a lot of like, you know, a battle of the constant Concordia length songs. Was there a conscious effort to get simpler in a way.

I think that the core of Cars Addressed has always been pop music, you know, from different eras, but always that sort of core of simplicity of shortness. So I really focused on that with this record and tried to dig into what made a good pop song good? You know, what made a short song work. In a way, it's easier to write a long song because you can kind of spread out and articulate every idea that you're working through. It's hard to write a short song because you have

to condense stuff so much. You know, you have to really make every word count and every second count of the song to put as much into it as as you would a longer song. And so that was kind of the challenge with this record was to make songs, you know, three and a half minutes or less, and a lot of songs we didn't succeed in that barrier. There's still a lot of you know, four minute, five minutes,

six minute songs there. But just to kind capture that condensation where you know, you can't go into a whole different part, you have to just condense it into one different chord. You know what that what is that chord going to be? Stuff like that is what interested me just making that really condensed record because you really, you sat down and listen to you know, that week's most stream songs on on digital platforms, right, and really very like a student approach to it. What did you learn

from that exactly. I mean, just was it song structure? Was it melody? Was it production? Was it all the above? I really just wanted to hear mostly the production on what those songs were doing. You know, I'm a producer as much as I am a songwriter, and it's important to me to see what is going on, you know, in the contemporary scene, because the tools that pop artists are pop producers use, you know, that is the cutting

edge of production technology. And if you're ignoring that, you know, it kind of creeps up on you until, um, you know, you're using equipment that isn't working right, and you don't know how to upgrade, and you don't know how to use the sounds that are most prevalent in music. You know, you don't know how to make them work for you. So I was looking at pop music for that. I was also looking at it just to sort of have some sort of grounding in what people were listening to.

You know, I spend a lot of time just digging through completely random stuff. So I feel like, you know, if I don't have that grounding of, well, what's super popular at the moment, then I just go off into my own world completely it's just a little less satisfying, I guess, to be completely off in my own world and feeling like I'm just I have no I have nothing in common with what people are listening to. So I like to to have that, as you know, sort of a seesaw that I'm working in the middle of.

And you've got, you know, touches of post Malone in there, but touches of Diann and the Belmonts and stuff like that, which is amazing. The album has been released in a number of different formats with substantial differences between them. In some places they're totally different versions of like songs like Him for example. What was the motivation behind that? How

did that come about? Well, it really started just, um looking at the vinyl and wanting to do something that worked on vinyl, you know, because ever since we joined Matador, you know, it's always been vinyl, CD streaming, you know, you put every record out on those three different formats, and um, you know, it's it's a challenge to make something that works on all three formats, um, you know, especially vinyl, because you have these sides of music that

have certain prescribed links to them, and you want to have an experience that feel satisfying when you go side to side. You know, it bugs me when I see a modern album come out and it's a double vinyl but there's only you know, ten to twelve minutes aside because they just kind of split it up, UM to make it fit, but they didn't really think about how it was going to be sequenced. UM. And so you know, selling a physical product, I wanted it to feel, you know,

like it was worth owning the physical product. UM. So this album especially, UM, you know, I went into mind thinking just one disc this time, because Twin Fantasy and Teens of Denial we're both double double vinyl, and I think they filled it out well enough. But I was interested in in the single disc format UM. And so we really worked and worked UM mainly with that in mind. And because that's that's the first thing that you have to do, UM when you're delivering the record is delivered

the vinyl version, because that needs to be printed. That takes the longest to to get from start to finish once it's delivered. UM. So we delivered it and got it onto vinyl. UM. But then once we did that, it felt like where can we go from here? You know, it's sort of an open door again. Um, and what works on vinyl doesn't necessarily work best for the other formats. You know, what what works for streaming? Um, you know

it's it's two different environments, or it's several different environments. Um. So we started looking at each track and the track list and just what's gonna go on, what's going to change, what's gonna drop out, what's gonna come in? And um, it was just a way of keeping the album fresh right up to the last minute for us, so that I could feel like I was listening to the record in the same way that other people would be listening

to the record. But to me, they are just kind of different ways of experiencing the same core record, you know, and it's kind of like, um, two different memories of the same event. That's a beautiful way to put that. Wow. I mean, you're right, there are so many different environments platforms to listen to music. Now. I think of producers like Phil Specter and Brian Wilson, who you know, preferred to work in mono because they could control every bit

of the sound and how you would hear it. And now that's blown apart with stereo and now that's really blown apart with all the different manners that we consume music, Is it frustrating to you as a producer and an artist to not have total control over our listeners experience? Yeah, I mean, I think it's probably a myth at any point in history to assume that a producer could have control. But I think that it is at a particularly disjointed

place right now. And I think that a lot of people are listening on setups that just aren't very good, you know, on phone speakers, on laptop speakers, and I mean I do that too, um, but these devices just aren't really designed for sound. They're just designed to have super good visuals, but the speakers are just kind of an afterthought. And it is frustrating because you feel like you're working in a culture where the odds are stacked

against you. You know, you're making music and you know you're making audio in a in a visual world, or you know you're you're you're the radio star in the video music world. Um, so you know that it's been the case since I guess, but it's um you know, you kind of hope that there will be some reaction against that, that you know, maybe there will be some

cheaper alternatives, because you know, it is about costs. It costs money to have a nice audio set up, and a lot of people don't have the money for that. So I'm kind of hoping, you know, there are some alternatives provided and people can get better systems into their homes that they listen to music on THEO Young's Triumph. Yeah, what do you feel when you finish an album? Is it thrilling? Is it nerve wracking? Is it sad? Is

it all the above? It's usually kind of a letdown because I bank so much emotionally on on it, and then by the time it's it's delivered, I pretty much feel drained, and you know, I feel overprotective of it, and if anything doesn't go to plan, I get um, I get upset about it. And that's that's just how it is. I guess, you know, I think, um, I think it's for me. It's about making it and the process of making it, and then once I put it out, it's you know, it's kind of like ripping a band

aid off. You just have to do it and then move on to the the next thing, the next record, And that's that's what I'm doing for this one, you know, already at square one for the next thing. Yeah, what are you working on now? Are you able to say? Um, I've been working on just some demos again, just little bits, um. But I've been listening a lot to classical music and that's something that kind of reinvigorated my interest for longer

form music. Um, you know, just the totally different culture in classical music and an opera of um, telling a story through you know, a certain length of time and music, you know, an hour or two hours or three hours sometimes, and I like, you know, that is a totally different mode, I think. And I'm interested in seeing what I can do with that, you know, seeing if I can put that energy into Carci head Dress songs. You know, I don't.

I don't think I can make a classical record as yet, but I'd like to play with the idea of something that is connected throughout, you know, throughout the entire record. I haven't really done anything like that, you know. I've had more conceptual records, but I've never written anything that was really start to finish, considered to be just one single piece. I'm interested in that. Oh wow, that's incredible.

I can't wait to hear that. I mean, are you are you still able to to be collaborative with your bandmates in this setting and this is strange quarantine world we're living now or is it very much uh? Solo at this stage, it's all solo. Um. You know, I just felt like, you know, Andrew's been trying to work on one trade stuff, but for me, I feel like while we're in quarantine, you know, it's it's the time to do the solo stuff. It's not the time to collaborate.

And so the ideas I'm going to be brewing up demos once quarantine is over, once we can get out and start practicing again, we'll start working on that, um, you know, having the basic structures there and figuring it out as a band. And then once we figured it out as a band, maybe we played on the road some if we're able to tour, and then we take it into the studio and you know that that's kind

of a route that makes sense to me. Mad Low was pretty different where it was kind of take a piece, play with the band, maybe going to the studio recorded version of it, then take it out, play with it on the computer, play with it solo just kind of constantly going back to the start and reworking stuff. Um, I think this time it's going to be more you know, the traditional way demo. Then the band gets ahold of it,

then we go in and record it. One of my my favorite songs of yours as a strangers from Teams of Style, and he had a great line and it always stuck with me. When I was a kid, I fell in love with Michael Stipe. I took lyrics out of context and thought he must be speaking to me. How does it feel to be the one now doing the speaking? Um? I guess it's interesting. I don't think I'm working on the level that Michael Stipe is, but um, yeah, it just feels like a continuum to me. And it

it makes sense. You know, if you're someone who cares a lot about music when you're young, and you start making a lot of it, um, eventually you're not young anymore and hopefully people are listening to it, um, and then that you know, that's the way it continues. People interest in music gets passed down from one person next, and I think that will just continue for as long as we're around. My last question, I always ask, what's the first thing you want to do when this pandemic

is over. If you can snap your fingers, what would you do? People you want to hug, trips you want to take. UM, I'd probably go on tour. Honestly, UM, I feel like we're overdue. I missed the band and I miss being on the road, you know, I miss seeing fans in different cities, and it's it. It feels like high time for it. So let's snap those fingers and make it happen. Well, thank you so much for your time today. I really appreciate it. Oh yeah, thank you.

Jordan's We hope you enjoyed this episode of Inside the Studio home edition of production of I Heart Radio. For more episodes of Inside the Studio and other shows from I heart Radio, check out the I heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.