{"id":35560,"date":"2016-09-02T12:00:06","date_gmt":"2016-09-02T17:00:06","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.thelocalvoice.net\/oxford\/?p=35560"},"modified":"2016-09-01T13:00:47","modified_gmt":"2016-09-01T18:00:47","slug":"35560-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.thelocalvoice.net\/oxford\/35560-2\/","title":{"rendered":"Car Seat Headrest North American Tour Stops at Proud Larrys’"},"content":{"rendered":"

Sitting in a parking lot, singing into a laptop. This is how Will Toledo<\/strong> began Car Seat Headrest<\/strong> and launched his music career.<\/span><\/p>\n

Toldeo\u2019s First Release under Car Seat Headrest, 1, <\/em>came out six years ago on May 1, 2010. Since then, he has released 13 more albums.<\/span><\/p>\n

Toledo\u2019s sound is rooted in lo-fi indie rock, drifting between garage noise and modern indie. His work has earned attention from Festivals, Noisey<\/strong>, and even The Late Show with Stephen Colbert<\/em>.<\/span><\/p>\n

Car Seat\u2019s Headrest most recent release, Teens of Denial<\/em>, is one of aging and cynicism and the reason for launching a tour across the country. Toledo carved out time on his birthday to talk with us about how he handles going from life as a bedroom producer to being on the front page of Pitchfork and preparing for a North American tour.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cI haven\u2019t not been tired this month,\u201d said Toledo.<\/span><\/p>\n

The frontman of Car Seat Headrest has been running the festival circuit as well as getting a North American tour in order.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cWhen it\u2019s just touring it\u2019s easier I think because you can get into a rhythm with things,\u201d said Toledo. \u201cIt\u2019s kind of hard when you\u2019re flying out to different spots every week. Once we embark on the road I think it\u2019ll start getting nicer again.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

This attitude towards to the road is polarizing to where Toledo started. For many years, Car Seat Headrest was exclusively a solo, recording artist project.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cAt the time I didn\u2019t have a lot of experience performing or seeing a lot of other artists so I didn\u2019t really understand the appeal of it,\u201d said Toledo. \u201cI hadn\u2019t seen artists who really did something special live. They were just playing songs, that were on the record, in front of you.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

It wasn\u2019t until Toledo attended a Swans<\/strong> show that it all clicked for him.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cI started seeing some acts that did different things live and really expanded the songs that way,\u201d said Toledo. \u201cSeeing Swans play was a big deal for me. They\u2019d do something a little different every night and explore songs in different ways from night to night.<\/span><\/p>\n

Since then Toledo has incorporated the same ideas into his own performance.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cThat was a couple years ago and that really made me understand more what the potential of a playing live was. You didn\u2019t have to just play the song on the record. You could do whatever you wanted with it.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

After 14 releases, Toledo has refined how he approaches songwriting.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cI\u2019m sort of going back to the way I did it,\u201d said Toledo. \u201cI\u2019ll start building music on the computer until I find something cool and expand on that. In the meantime I\u2019ll be writing lyrics, just building up stuff on the page from life experience\u2026I\u2019ll keep working on it until the last minute basically.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

The life experiences in Toledo\u2019s lyrics are more than just songwriting. He\u2019s referred to each albums as emotional weather patterns.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cThat\u2019s how I look at them,\u201d said Toledo. \u201cWhen taken together they create sort of a map of where I\u2019ve been so far, just in life with my own personal progress.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

The albums act as Will\u2019s only form of journaling.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cThat\u2019s one of the reasons why I try to keep recording and writing, it\u2019s the only document I keep about my own life,\u201d said Toledo. \u201cI don\u2019t write a journal or anything. What ends up on the record is what I remember most about that time in my life, so I always try to make it something meaningful.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

With the band spending an increasing amount of time on the road, Toledo tries to work in as much writing as he can.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cI\u2019ve written a lot of lyrics on the road, it\u2019s harder to build music,\u201d said Toledo. \u201cI\u2019ve actually got some band demos we were just jamming during sound check and a few tracks I built up on logic, but for the most part it\u2019s difficult to build anything significant. There\u2019s not a lot of quiet space on the road.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

Recently Car Seat Headrest released \u201cDoes It Feel Good (To Say Goodbye)\u201d on Soundcloud<\/strong> for a deal made with an indie short film.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cIt was a song, and it was going to L.A. to shoot\u2026it seemed like a good opportunity,\u201d said Toledo. \u201cI like one offs like that where I\u2019m pushed to make one song and do something different. The day before shooting I came to a completely new idea which is what that song was\u2026so I went and shot it then recorded it pretty much right away.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

In general, growing attention from the media and the public has been something Toledo\u2019s worked on acclimating to.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cThis month I\u2019ve been feeling a little negatively about it, I think just out of exhaustion,\u201d said Toledo. \u201cI think it\u2019s something I always sort of considered even when there wasn\u2019t much attention. Once you get at\u2026understanding the different ways people feel\u2026you can at least not be taken by surprise when people react a certain way to your music.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

Car Seat Headrest will perform at Proud Larrys\u2019 on September 6. Tickets are available now online at Proudlarrys.com or at the door the day of the show.\u00a0\"The<\/a><\/em><\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Sitting in a parking lot, singing into a laptop. This is how Will Toledo began Car Seat Headrest<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":253,"featured_media":35561,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-35560","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.thelocalvoice.net\/oxford\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/09\/2016-08-23-car-seat-headrest.jpg?fit=620%2C349&ssl=1","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thelocalvoice.net\/oxford\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/35560","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thelocalvoice.net\/oxford\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thelocalvoice.net\/oxford\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thelocalvoice.net\/oxford\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/253"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thelocalvoice.net\/oxford\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=35560"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.thelocalvoice.net\/oxford\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/35560\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thelocalvoice.net\/oxford\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/35561"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thelocalvoice.net\/oxford\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=35560"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thelocalvoice.net\/oxford\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=35560"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thelocalvoice.net\/oxford\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=35560"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}