Car Seat Headrest’s Will Toledo Takes Off the Mask

In the fall of 2016, Car Seat Headrest saved my life. I get that making such a declaration could be perceived as hyperbolic or unnecessary, but it’s true; finding Teens of Denial that October was a revelation. I still maintain that it’s the only 10/10 rock album of the last decade. It felt so crucial to be fresh out of high school and discover an album that tackled coming-of-age and mental illness in ways that made allusions to sexuality and complicated imagery of crumbling out of different shapes and lifetimes. After being on hormone therapy for nearly four years at that point, suffering through chronic illness just as long and quietly coming out in college, a lyric like “I was given a body that is falling apart, my house is falling apart” felt insurmountably familiar. Will Toledo’s songwriting has never ceased to poke and prod at the uncomfortable but necessary realities of being alive and being queer and being imperfect. It’s no wonder why the Car Seat Headrest fanbase has as many 17-year-olds as it does 60-year-olds; survival is a timeless act.

And now, Car Seat Headrest’s latest offering, a concert album called Faces From the Masquerade, is another mark of longevity—if only by establishing one last gasp of live brilliance before everything went off the rails for the band soon after. The record takes place across a three-night stand at Brooklyn Steel from March 29th through March 31st, 2022. It’s a bittersweet performance as, just a few months later, Toledo, Andrew Katz, Ethan Ives and Seth Dalby were forced to cancel the rest of the tour. Toledo came down with a rough bout with COVID that, eventually, led to him discovering that he has a histamine imbalance. The Brooklyn Steel shows remain a moment in a now-bygone time for Car Seat Headrest, and Faces From the Masquerade serves as part of their goodbye coda to Making a Door Less Open.

Making a Door Less Open came out in May 2020 and found Toledo embracing his brand new persona, Trait—his character from his electronica side-project with Katz. It was experimental, though Toledo once called it a “folk album.” You could sense that this direction was imminent as, between Teens of Denial and Twin Fantasy (Face to Face), Car Seat Headrest released the one-off single “War Is Coming (If You Want It),” and it paired the band’s lo-fi indie leanings with some of the digital pop attitudes found on MADLO. On the promotional tour, Toledo donned his Trait getup, which featured a gas mask (with digitally programmed LED eyes), black gloves and a bright orange jumpsuit. Imagine the dogs from the Twin Fantasy album cover working someplace in-between a crossing guard and a nuclear plant employee and you’ll get the gist. It was a timely introduction of Trait, especially as lockdowns were starting and Toledo’s mask seemed to provide some kind of commentary on a pandemic world. He told The New York Times that it was “intended to be an exotic alternative to reality.”

Toledo was inspired by Post Malone and the realm of pop music theatricality when he was sketching the final blueprint of Making a Door Less Open. Those aesthetics wormed their way into his understanding of performance, too—and it was something that Toledo had been thinking about ever since Car Seat Headrest found some success and started playing festivals. “You are sharing a stage with these big pop acts, and that just feels like a more freeing situation to me than the strict genre, play it to your demographic sort of thing,” he says. “It’s just been instinctive that I pick up from whatever is in front of me. It might not be an act that I’m intuitively interested in or is making the same sort of music as me. But if I’m listening to it, I make an effort to engage in it.”

Even just the bright orange palette of the Trait costume or the hyperactive lights show that he and the band configured for the Making a Door Less Open tour germinated from the intense, high-definition presentation of pop that is uber prevalent right now, while also combining it with the cold minimalism in the music. “When I was listening in 2018 or 2019, acts like Post Malone had tracks that just felt so minimal that, the first time I’m hearing it, I’m like ‘There’s almost nothing here,’” Toledo explains. “But then, I just would play it over and over and hear these little details that really made it rich and finely detailed. Musically, there’s not a lot of movement. But it’s this very carefully produced, highly textured ambiance going on. MADLO was a tribute to that, it was a more lo-fi version of it, I suppose.”

At nearly every checkpoint in my life, Car Seat Headrest has been there—in some way or another, for better or for worse. Toledo’s illness last year struck a chord within me particularly, largely because I’ve struggled with autoimmune complications for the better part of my adult life and seeing a hero of mine putting such a focus on his own self-care just felt so vital to me. After coming down with a month-long virus during my freshman year of college, no doctor could seem to diagnose it and I lost 40 pounds and developed—what would probably be catalogued now as—an eating disorder that folks around me certainly noticed. And I’m still feeling the side-effects of it. Not being able to go out with friends because I can’t stand for long periods of time—or not being able to eat anything on a restaurant’s menu—puts me under a lot of emotional duress, because it never feels socially acceptable to avoid it. But Toledo cancelling the rest of the 2022 Car Seat Headrest tour on the grounds of him prioritizing his own well-being, it has made it so much easier to say “No, I can’t do this today.” I’m grateful for that.

But, Toledo is doing better these days. In fact, he tells me he’s at peak health for himself. “I climbed out very slowly, starting last year,” he says. “And rather than settle for where I was before, I felt like I should just, maybe, continue adding healthy habits to my daily life—rather than just going back to where I was.” Toledo has been exercising more, and he pairs that with a limited diet that consists of mostly fresh food and cooking at home instead of eating out. “I feel very normal, I feel very capable of living life, which is great,” he adds. He and the band have been slowly getting back to normal. They’re recording a new album right now, and Toledo has been doing monthly solo performance streams on Patreon from his apartment and keeping in touch with fans he would normally sing for on tours around the world.

There are no immediate plans for another Car Seat Headrest tour, nor are there any shows on the books, though Toledo believes that he could potentially hit the road again—as long as it’s slow and steady and the city itinerary isn’t as daunting as it would’ve been pre-COVID. “In the past month or so is the first time where I’ve really started to feel like I could see doing that,” he says. “That’s a nice feeling, to be able to think about things that once were part of the background.” When the band’s next record is finished, the conversation around gigs will kick back up again. “The cycle will continue,” Toledo assures me.

The decision to put out a live album didn’t get on Toledo’s radar until after the tour. The band had recorded every show and remembered which ones were good and which ones were a struggle. Once they got to the East Coast, everything began to click, and it became more and more obvious that the performances were connecting with crowds. “We were all coming out of lockdown, and none of us remembered what it was like to be human,” Toledo says. “So we had to deal with that and being in a car with eight other people all the time. Then, at the same time, getting in front of audiences for the first time in over two years, it was a shift.” There were a lot of young fans at every show who’d never seen Car Seat Headrest live, but the band had been expecting the same cohort of people every night—the seasoned listeners who were massively familiar with the catalog and not just the Teens of Denial and Twin Fantasy (Face to Face) material.

“We had a different sort of set lined up, not so much of our classic songs—but more focusing on Making a Door Less Open, stuff that had not been in our live catalog before,” Toledo explains. “And we shifted once we were really playing night-to-night and realized this was a lot of people’s first Car Seat show—and I think it was a lot of people’s first show period. So, we had to shift gears, but it also did take a bit of pressure off eventually, because we went back to songs that we’d been playing a lot. We knew how to do them, and the East Coast is where everything started to click. New York was the three-night peak and then, right after that, I got COVID and things went off the rails again.”

Toledo has always had a penchant for pulling the less commercial, non-Matador-era album songs out of the bag at shows. The first time I saw Car Seat Headrest play in Cleveland, they did a rendition of “Beast Monster Thing (Love Isn’t Love Enough)”; the last time I saw them live in Columbus, Toledo led a movement of delightful fanfare while singing “America (Never Been).” On Faces From the Masquerade, the deep cut in question is “Crows (Rest in Bigger Pieces Mix)” from Nervous Young Man.

The choice for what pre-Teens of Style tunes make each setlist is not such a deliberate effort from Toledo, as he mostly follows vibes, but playing “Crows” was something that he’d been thinking about for a while. “It was a track that I had always wanted to play live, I always felt like it would be a great energy to bring to the stage,” he says. “But, in 2013, when I wrote it, Car Seat Headrest was not a touring act. It was just me. And then, by the time we were taking off in the configuration that we have been in since 2016, we were mainly doing Teens of Denial, et cetera. ‘Crows’ never really got a chance to shine. Going in with the MADLO material, which has this darker and dancier feel, that really felt like it was a good opportunity to stick ‘Crows’ back into it.” And, in turn, “Crows” became a foundational building block to the set altogether.

I ask Toledo if there is another track in the Car Seat Headrest canon that, like “Crows,” he’s wanted to dust off for the first time in a while. “A lot of stuff on Nervous Young Man,” he replies. Since starting the Patreon account, he’s been doing full-album streams. To prepare, he re-learns all of the songs the week beforehand, because he’s forgotten a lot of the instrumentation on them. “Usually, during the stream, I’m like, ‘These are some good songs, I wish we could pull them out more,’” Toledo adds. The most recent stream—at the time of our phone call in November—was How to Leave Town, and it made him want to throw “Hey Space Cadet” out to the rest of the band and see if they can make playing it on-stage a reality on a future tour. If you’re a Car Seat Headrest fan like me, that information likely floors you, too.

Faces From the Masquerade is a unique release, as it arrives on a much grander, more polished scale—and it sounds lightyears different from Car Seat Headrest’s 2019 live album Commit Yourself Completely, which was a collection of songs recorded at various venues across the country, from Columbus to Olympia. When I listen to Faces From the Masquerade, I hear flashes of Neil Young’s Live Rust or Rust Never Sleeps, because the quality is so good that it could stand alone as a studio album if it wanted to. But, even then, this project also extends the lifespan of the songs it gives to us, showing what different shapes each rendition can take and how those renditions might continue to endure in the band’s catalog altogether. It’s exactly what Toledo had imagined and hoped a Car Seat Headrest live record could be.

“When you look at [Young’s] discography, you have to count the live albums, too, because it’s all a co-existence—with what the original studio track is and what the live incarnation is on a certain night,” he says. “And that really is always how Car Seat has been, and especially since we formed into a consistent live band. There is the song that’s on the album, but, then, there is also the song as it happens night-to-night. And it can really sound quite different from one tour to the next, or from one night to the next. You miss that if you’re only looking at the album, so I was really happy that we were able to record shows on this tour and that we had these nights that we could look back at and preserve that ephemeral side to what we have been doing for a long while now.”

While he’s never written an album that is strictly narrative-based, Toledo is always pulling resources from his time writing short stories and making films with his friends when it comes to considering the full body of the music. On Faces From the Masquerade, he takes inspiration especially from David Byrne in Stop Making Sense, particularly when it comes to the momentum of a setlist and what kind of energy he and the band are trying to harness from the moment they all walk out on stage. Byrne ran with the progression of coming out—just him—and then, one at a time, the band members would come on for songs until the entire ensemble was present. “We stuck with those simple visual cues that can help a show feel like a flow from beginning to start,” Toledo says. “We start with this dark ambience on ‘Crows,’ with Ben [Roth] just holding a chord on the keyboard. And then, slowly, we all advance out and I’m mumbling something cryptic as Trait, and there’s a sequence that flows from there. We planned out the lights so that each song would give more character to the show and open up more. It is a visual story that we were telling.”

During the tour, opening act Bartees Strange had to drop out of a few shows because his crew caught COVID. The touring industry is built up into a specific, taxing structure—where the opening act plays, they leave, a certain amount of time passes and, then, the main act comes on. It’s largely designed, at least spiritually, to divorce the bands from the process itself, the flow that the audience is experiencing. And that system feels alien to Toledo, who likes small shows where the artists are sitting at tables amongst the audience until it’s time to go on. “Those are the shows where you really are comfortable, because it’s the same room, you’re in the room and then you play in the room—versus hiding away in some green room and feeling like you’re in a completely different place until you come out.” In turn, upon Strange’s camp bowing out of the gigs, Car Seat Headrest had to think on their feet and fill out the hour before their main set. They elected to open for themselves, so Katz painted pictures while Toledo and Ives performed songs solo.

“I think those moments are where we really thrive,” Toledo admits. “We had this set all carefully planned out, with a corresponding lights show. And, honestly, that was not our comfort zone. We had to struggle night-to-night to figure out where we could fit into that. And we did figure it out, through these last-minute changes. We get the news the day of the show that [Bartees] can’t do the show, and our manager is trying to find other openers, and I just say, ‘Forget another opener, let’s just go out on stage and do shit for an hour.’ We were all feeling that built-up pressure, where we had high standards for ourselves for our main set. So, it seemed like a good outlet to just fuck around on stage and not worry about what we were doing so much and get a chance to read the audience before we really had to go on and do our own set. I think we’re going to continue doing our shows, engaging as directly as we can and not hiding away more than is necessary day-to-day.”

On Faces From the Masquerade, we hear Katz do his thing on “Hollywood” and Ives sings “It’s My Child (I’ll Do What I Like)” from his solo project Toy Bastard (he also played “Snake Song” at a few gigs on the tour). It feels like the strongest iteration of Car Seat Headrest yet, where it’s not so obvious that it’s Toledo’s band and they are perfecting their roots, back when they were still a three-piece during the Teens of Style-era (before Dalby joined as full-time bassist). “Ethan’s song, that’s a song I really like and it’s good, because a lot of the stuff we were doing [on tour] was more synth-driven, not so much traditional guitar rock music,” Toledo says. “And that song has that rock drive to it, and we have more practice with that—so that’s an energy that we can capture fairly easily.” “1937 State Park” and “Something Soon,” two other Car Seat songs that rip equally as volcanically, were not on the initial setlist (they were done via online request, and Toledo cheekily accuses the “Something Soon” votes being cast by bots on the live recording). Late in the tour, the band started pulling them out—and they each capture the more spontaneous energy that Toledo and the guys have, which is not necessarily spontaneous (because it comes with years of practice) but it feels alive. There’s a certain messiness or rawness that, for Car Seat Headrest, keeps gigging interesting every night.

And this is the kind of sonic, spiritual and emotional perfection they’ve been working towards since Teens of Denial. When the band signed with Matador Records, Toledo had Teens of Style, Teens of Denial and Twin Fantasy (Face to Face) already in place as the next three projects he wanted to make—it was Making a Door Less Open that signaled, for the first time, that Car Seat Headrest was a four-person unit (rounded out with Roth on keyboards on the Masquerade tour) instead of one person writing, arranging and recording all of the work.

“MADLO was, really, the first opportunity where we were working together more collaboratively,” Toledo says. “But that was also a project with specific boundaries, where it was more of a build it up on the computer situation versus jamming it out as a band. So, even though we were collaborating more, we weren’t so much getting to collaborate in this natural rock band way. Once that album was in the rearview mirror, I wanted to build up these arrangements and build up this tour on, the sound of those four musicians working to all of their strengths and then adding me in—so that I could be the least-talented member of the band and everyone else could shine as much as possible. Once we went on tour, it was a combination of the power of the combo, rather than the power of the solo act.”

Faces From the Masquerade showcases the prolific construction genius of Car Seat Headrest. When they were touring as a seven-piece pre-pandemic—a time when Naked Giants were a part of the band—Toledo and company were capitalizing on their inclinations to interpolate songs within songs. During the Teens of Denial-era, they were notoriously playing the Velvet Underground’s “Sweet Jane” in the middle of “Cosmic Hero” or, in the Twin Fantasy-era, combining Dexy’s Midnight Runners’ “Tell Me When My Light Turns Green” with “Something Soon.” After years of performing a colossal version of “Sober to Death”—an arrangement where, in the middle, Ives would perform Neil Young’s “Powderfinger” and Toledo would tack on a Stevie Wonder, “Don’t You Worry ‘Bout a Thing” outro onto the end—Car Seat Headrest elected to return to the sparseness of the original Twin Fantasy recording on Faces From the Masquerade, mainly because it’s easy to play if they haven’t prepared it and the only coordination needed is Katz’s drumming at the song’s end. A full-band version of “Sober to Death” will likely return once they go back on tour, but there will still be a continued inclusion of the stripped-back arrangement—because that’s the version of it Toledo and the guys have been playing since there was any sort of lineup iteration eight years ago.

On the physical release of Faces From the Masquerade, listeners will be treated to a rendition of “Can’t Cool Me Down” that features Bartees Strange shredding on the guitar during “Vincent,” which was transposed into the former’s arrangement breakdown. Toledo threw the idea at Strange last minute, asking him if he’d like to solo during one of their songs. “Can’t Cool Me Down” has always been a peculiar installment in Car Seat Headrest’s catalog, as it was a song that—for many months—was being performed live before there was ever an official studio recording of it, and then it wound up being the lead single from Making a Door Less Open. But that release surprised a lot of people, because it was more digital and featured a drum machine that was never present in the live performances. And, on top of that, those early renditions were done back when Naked Giants were a part of the touring unit and could help make every Car Seat Headrest track massive and filled-out. This time, Toledo and the band were arranging “Can’t Cool Me Down” into a mini-epic, where Ives is the only guitarist and there’s just keys on top of that.

“It just flowed into the version that it was, and we were all really excited when it came up,” Toledo says. “And when we stuck ‘Vincent’ on the end of it, it felt like a very surprising and engaging track. But when we actually started playing it live, people didn’t really respond to it. It kind of puzzled people, I think, to have ‘Vincent’ stuck on to the end. I think people didn’t necessarily recognize it in time to catch wind of it, so we originally did not have Bartees playing on it. But, it occurred to us that this would be a good chance to feature him again and get everybody on stage together and actually make it more of a party. I think people liked it a little better at that point.”

On Faces From the Masquerade, Toledo’s voice sounds clearer than it ever has, especially on “Something Soon” (backed by Ives’ falsetto). I’ve seen him make the transition, over the years, from being the type of frontman who stands stoically at the mic with a guitar in hand for 90 minutes to getting rid of the axe, assuming the role of a chameleonic, Bowie-like bandleader and letting himself become animated and affectionate towards the way he positions himself on-stage (and the movements he allows his body to make during each song). There’s a massive confidence at play that you can hear across the album, but Toledo is quick to admit that it’s much harder to keep that energy up when he’s wearing his Trait getup. The choreography on “Weightlifters,” in particular, was always a difficult one to keep up with, because he’d have to dance around in a heavy jacket in a hot venue and, at the same time, sing the song. Though Faces From the Masquerade marks the end (for now) of Toledo’s tenure in the Trait costume, it guided him into a new place with his vocal performances.

“It’s just been a constant progression of learning how to sing and be in my own voice,” he says. “When we come back out again, it will be another shift. I don’t plan on wearing anything special this time around, I think I’m in my sweatpants and sweatshirt phase. It’s funny, because I can get so into singing that I am just totally still. And I think, for a lot of people, it seems like I’m more nervous or I’m not comfortable on stage and, really, it’s just about focusing. With Trait, it was intentionally reminding myself to be physically engaged—bodily engaged—as well as singing, and I think that was good practice. I think I’m going to approach more of a harmony in the future, as far as if I wish to just stand still, I can. And if the spirit takes me to move, I can move.”

Toledo has had a complicated relationship with rock journalists in the past. They try to report on his personal life or pinpoint anecdotes in your songwriting as a means of mining for headlines. Before I was a music journalist, I was a fan of Car Seat Headrest—and, as a fan, I read any kind of writing on the band that I could. When Corbin Reiff wrote about the re-recording of Twin Fantasy (Face to Face) in 2018 for Rolling Stone, he attempted to write about Toledo’s sexuality as a means of trying to make a statement about what the narrative of that record was supposed to be. “The reason why I am hesitant to talk about personal stuff to journalists is more about not wanting to feel like I’m selling out something that’s important to me to the extent that it’s promotional,” Toledo says. “When I go out and talk about an album or about Car Seat Headrest, it might feel sleazy if there was a big announcement about me being a furry or me being gay. I’m not opposed to people knowing about that or talking about it, but it feels weirder to calculate it to be a headline, or something. I just never really wanted to cross that line.”

He’s always let pieces of himself go in his art, whether it’s the Michael Stipe line in “Strangers” or even the interpretations of being closeted on “Dreams Fall Hard,” but the Rolling Stone piece felt forced for the sake of mining for buzzwordy, agenda-pushing fodder out of someone who has, largely, remained private about that part of his life—for the sake of not letting his love for his community become intertwined with the clutches of the music industry and its vulturous, capitalistic undercurrents. Reiff’s article was publicly criticized by Toledo online, who pointed out the lack of interviewing done in the studio and the lack of interest from Reiff during their time spent together. In since deleted tweets, Toledo wrote: “Clearly you walked into the studio with 95% of your article written. This method of journalism is why I declined every other offer for a feature or blog interview around [Twin Fantasy (Face to Face)]. I made an exception for this because I was told it would be a making-of feature, and I hoped that actually being in the studio would result in a more balanced, less gossipy article. I was mistaken.”

I bring this up because, on the last night of the Brooklyn Steel performances, Toledo unveiled part of his fursuit, Mortis, and, while it was nauseating to watch music news outlets rush to their keyboards to write something about it as a means of mining for traffic (and this is not a new trend online by any means)—cribbing footage from concert-goers and turning Toledo’s identity as a furry into a clickable headline—the moment itself, on-stage, was a liberating experience for him. “It was nice to do this show without it being a headline, it was a more practical and fun way to get loose and wild and personal with the crowd,” he explains. “My friend Scurrow had brought over Mortis, because it had been sitting in his house for six months. I originally wanted someone else to wear it, just to spread further confusion about who Mortis was, but no one else volunteered—so I decided to wear it instead.”

Mortis was another pressure-point moment for Car Seat Headrest on tour, where Toledo and the guys were looking for another way to shake things up and say “Fuck it, what’s going to happen if we do this?” When he did it, it was spur-of-the-moment—and he wasn’t even certain that anyone was going to figure out that it was a fursuit or that it was a part of Mortis, but internet detectives did the hard work and everything went public from there. Toledo wore Mortis for a handful of songs at Brooklyn Steel, before returning to his Trait getup to avoid heat exhaustion the rest of the gig. (If you’d like to see him as Mortis, he’s featured in the “Bodys” video.) When it was all said and done, Toledo was glad and relieved he could have that experience with the fans, some of whom arrived at the show dressed in their own fursuits and some of whom crowd-surfed during “Can’t Cool Me Down.”

“For me, the priority is, is it furry first or is it publicity first? And it felt like a really natural community thing where a lot of furries were excited that this thing had happened,” he says. “And it felt uncalculated, and it was a good way to bring it into the larger sphere of communication without dishonoring my integrity.” Toledo is aware of the fact that, now that he’s a public-facing artist, there will always be conversations around who he is—that listeners will always be decoding his lyrics or his quotes. And he’s fine with that, giving his blessing to people who want to debate and speculate his art and life.

Toledo and I talk at length about the performance of coming out, how it’s more for everyone else than it is for us. I tell him I’ve never publicly come out, that I just started writing about it or changing the pronouns in my bios and opted to let people pick up the pieces along the way. He concurs. “I would feel bad making it a spectacle, or anything like that—because, at a certain point, it’s deviating from who you actually are. I wake up every day and I feel pretty normal, so it can be weird to hold up any aspect of myself and say ‘This is worth shining a spotlight on.’ I think I’ve relaxed a little bit about it, as far as, if a lot of people want to talk about it, I’m not gonna completely turn my back on it,” Toledo adds. “There’s a limited amount of stuff that I publicly address, just because publicly addressing anything is a bit of a fiction. In the gay community, there’s an understanding: There are coming out of the closet moments, but you’re always coming out of the closet. There’s people who don’t know and there’s communities who don’t know. Even if you’re in your smaller community or your smaller family, maybe you’re open about things. But I’ve always been very person to person on it, where I can just have a wonderful, meaningful interaction with somebody who doesn’t know any of my personal stuff—or we might connect on a very personal thing and talk about that instead.”

Faces From the Masquerade—from the setlist changes to Mortis to what it means for the future of Car Seat Headrest altogether—is a 13-song conversation that fans will surely hold extra close. Not only is it a celebratory mark of Making a Door Less Open and the band’s last seven years of playing, but it’s a document of true, unabashed personal joy. Like Toledo taking to the stage on March 31st in a fursuit he had custom-made and not giving a fuck about anything but making sure his people had a space to feel welcomed, heard and sung for, I see a world where hundreds, maybe thousands, of fans take a leap of coming out on their own terms after hearing this record and sharing the music with Car Seat Headrest and each other. Even the title, Faces From the Masquerade, is a source of spiritual togetherness that is built to last.

“When I thought of this album name, I was thinking of the faces that we saw night to night. It’s like a trip, where what you end up with is photographs, you end up with these memories of faces that were there that night,” Toledo says. “When we first were coming up with the idea of this tour being called The Masquerade, it was an homage to needing everyone to wear masks, seeing if we could transform that requirement a little bit into an invitation to step outside of your normal boundaries and be different for a night, be part of a crowd where something special is happening. There’s a paradox between that and the idea of the faces in the crowd. Each individual identity is retained, because we’re all seeing each other, but, at the same time, there is the communal energy that is vibrating through the theater.”

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Matt Mitchell reports as Paste‘s music editor from their home in Columbus, Ohio.