COVER STORY | Enrolling in Car Seat Headrest University

There is a sequence on the back-half of The Scholars where every song is 11 minutes long or more, including the 19-minute, penultimate “Planet Desperation,” which has officially unseated “The Gun Song” as the longest Car Seat Headrest track to-date. “At the start of [making The Scholars], it was understood that we weren’t going to try and fight that,” Toledo continues. “I think we were just going to allow each song to be what it would be. And, if it’s on the long side, then that’s fine.” Even the “shorter” material, like “CCF (I’m Gonna Stay With You),” feels more pointed than grandiose, likely because its core is verse-chorus-verse-chorus and its intro-outro bookend with enough natural space to blow the whole arrangement to smithereens.

“Planet Desperation” was one of the last tracks completed for The Scholars, formed from straggling bits of unused material and now containing the record’s chilliest moment: “I’m running out of places to bury your body again.” “As we drew towards a conclusion with the rest of the record, it was like, ‘What if we tried just sticking them all in one song?’” Toledo remembers, mentioning that he knew he wanted “Planet Desperation” to end on a callback to “Gethsemane.” For the band, it then became less a question of “Can we push the song to this length?” and more “What are the pieces that are going to work in this sequence?” Once they had a sense of what parts were going to work, the runtime was self-evident. “That song really feels more like a series of short songs than one really long song,” Toledo continues. “It’s got this progression overall, but I think that its strength lies in that it’s section-by-section, and each section has its own flavor and is satisfying in itself.”

While the reception around “CCF (I’m Gonna Stay With You)” has been broadly positive (“People are fucking eating it up,” Katz confirms), there are still people who are not as immediately tolerant of adventurous, rambling songs that require a longer listening investment. In fact, that very reservation has been a barrier to entry into Car Seat Headrest’s music for more than a few listeners since Monomania, including a commenter on one of our recent Best New Song roundups. Even so, Toledo is appreciative of anyone’s willingness to jump into any song of questionable length. “I think, with a lot of people, there’s a sense of commitment there and a potential burn where you enter in deep with a band when you commit for eight minutes or 10 minutes,” he says. “If they’re not taking you to a place that’s enjoyable, then you sink deep into the darkness within that span.” Katz, ever the band’s unfiltered ballast, puts it plainly: “If you listen to a 10-minute song that you don’t like, you’re like, ‘Fuck, that was such a waste.’ It’s a lower risk to listen to radio edits.”

“Maybe it’s my own naiveté,” Ives adds, “but I always feel surprised when I hear people say, ‘Ah, a two-and-a-half-hour movie? Don’t want it.’ When I think of my favorite movies, I’m like, ‘Oh, I can’t wait to watch Stalker for three hours.’ That makes me so happy. The fact that I can settle into it so much is part of why I like it.”

“If [‘Planet Desperation’] felt like 19 minutes playing it, I would definitely speak up and be like, ‘Hey, guys, we gotta shorten this,’” Dalby chimes in, laughing. “But I must be getting lost in the music because, for me, playing ‘Planet Desperation’ only feels like five minutes.”

Ives continues, “I think of that as being one of the poppiest songs on the album. It doesn’t feel like an epic song, because of the way it does have a very accessible structure.”

“That’s why [‘Beach Life-in-Death’] is so popular,” Katz argues, “because it just feels right.”

Making a Door Less Open rarely imposed like The Scholars does, and the former’s indulgence felt disinterested in depth; “There Must Be More Than Blood,” which clocks in at 07:33, was the only track to eclipse the the 6-minute mark five years ago. Dalby remembers how, while preparing to enter the studio, the band made a playlist of songs that took journeys, “where you ended up somewhere else you didn’t expect from the beginning of the song.” “MADLO was a concrete collection of songs,” he says. “We wanted to explore with this album. It takes you on a trip.” Katz jumps in, saying that how The Scholars sounds “reflects the way it was written.”

WHEN CAR SEAT HEADREST BEGAN working on The Scholars in earnest in 2023, they approached the material with a concept-first attitude, and the songs germinated out of full-band jams and group workshopping. Live shows were out of sight and out of the foursome’s minds. “There was a reassurance that it wouldn’t be difficult to translate to the stage, because its original form had been a four-piece setup,” Ives says. “We didn’t have to imagine too hard to think of what that would look like in a live setting, because we had started playing it live in our practice space.” And what the band was coming up with in their practice space in Washington was good enough to be a live show on its own, without the bells, whistles, and obligatory mashups of cover songs and fan favorites.

Toledo recalls slowly embracing the songs for their post-release potential, rather than relishing the building phase only, saying, “I remember, as the songs were coming together, getting these flashes where, suddenly, I’m thinking, ‘Oh, this is going to be cool live. I can’t wait to see this on stage.’” And that seemed like a good sign to him, because there was definitely a while where, whenever he thought about touring or playing shows, he couldn’t focus on the music. “It was a mess, worrying about my health and whether we would be able to do shows or not,” he continues. “[The Scholars] was a sign that we were on the right path, where I was getting excited about the music and what that could be on stage, rather than worrying about the logistics side of it.”

The best concert I’ve ever been to was on the Car Seat Headrest/Naked Giants tour in 2018-19. I loved those shows, because we got incredibly dense, expanded versions of songs—notably the 7-minute “Sober to Death” interpolated with an Ives-sung cover of Neil Young & Crazy Horse’s “Powderfinger,” a cover of Lou Reed’s “Waves of Fear” introduced by “The Ending of Dramamine,” and a mashup of “Something Soon” and Dexys Midnight Runners’ “Tell Me When My Light Turns Green.” It was like a reward for loving the standard versions of those songs so much. But you don’t need a strong imagination this time around: The Scholars sounds like Car Seat Headrest doing all of that expanse work first, going for broke with an everything-but-the-kitchen-sink dump of tones and textures, which Toledo and Ives both contend will always be a natural maneuver for the band.

Mozart’s Magic Flute was a point of influence on The Scholars, as was the glammy and glossy rock brilliance of Bowie’s Ziggy Stardust & the Spiders From Mars. On “CCF (I’m Gonna Stay With You),” Toledo’s harmonies channel Sparks’ Russell Mael à la “This Town Ain’t Big Enough for the Both of Us.” “Gethsemane”’s electronics might conjure flashes of Neu! for some listeners. During one suite in “Planet Desperation,” he sounds like Ian Curtis dressed in Roxy Music’s clothing. But Toledo argues that narrowing abstract concepts down into specific songs was his and the band’s greatest reference, because it helped them “develop a basic vocabulary” about the music they wanted to make. “At the start of this process, we were having these sessions where we’d go in and listen to songs together and have prompts, like, ‘What’s a warm song to you?’” he recalls.

And The Scholars finds Toledo settling into a more production-forward role. He leafs through other artists’ problem-solving techniques. “I try to figure out what solutions that other artists have come up with that can make a second chorus pop and make it different from the next,” he says of his “magpie process.” There’s a percussion break in “Planet Desperation” that connects a slow-burn piano melody to up-tempo rock hysterics. While looking for guidance on how to bridge the elements, Toledo picked up Al Schmitt’s autobiography, The Magic Behind the Music, and read about his work with Henry Mancini on the Hatari! soundtrack. “He said it was the most difficult mix they’d ever done, because they had 25 African percussionists in the studio and it’s all live,” Toledo recalls. “He had to figure out, from eight channels or 16 channels, how to mike all this stuff and make it work. But the resulting track is great, and I listened to it and was like, ‘That’s one way to do that. We certainly don’t have anything else like that on the record, so that would be a cool bridge to put in there.’ I think one of my basic tenets is, looking at a record as a whole, if you can do something that’s new at any point, that’s the way to go.”

THE SCHOLARS IS LIKE TOMMY or The Wall but only in ambition. The platitudes Toledo and his bandmates reach for still rest fully, and logically, within the Car Seat Headrest vernacular. It’s an album that is more of a potluck than an outlier or theatrical homage, and that was intentional. “My perspective was that it was more character study than rock opera,” Toledo says. “The idea of having each song be a character was the solution to a problem—which is, if you’re working on an album that is more conceptual and narrative in some way: ‘How do you balance that with making each song strong on its own?’ When you’re in the process of creating, you don’t want to be distracted by thinking about, ‘How does this fit into the story?’ Or: ‘The story needs to have X-Y-Z happen. How can we shoehorn this music into that?’”

That method opened the band up to a much deeper dive into their bag of influences. The approach was more utilitarian; everyone wore multiple hats. “I think we got a better sense of each other’s skills, not just on our main instruments but as multi-talented people,” Ives says. “I enjoy designing sounds a lot, and I enjoy going through the Rolodex of ‘What bands do I like?’ and ‘What guitar styles or textures do I know?’ and being able to thumb through those and go, ‘Would a Killing Joke-style guitar sound fit for this bridge?’ and design things in a workman-like way.”

The jam-minded structure is where Katz feels most comfortable, because of the constant movement. Going long with each other wasn’t just an antidote for boredom, but an opportunity to let their energy organically change every song’s alchemy. Just like The Scholars’ characters, Toledo, Katz, Dalby, and Ives are torn between tradition and progress, but the result is an album in marquee lettering, one that delights in its decade-spanning smorgasbord of Car Seat Headrest’s greatest hits, from the misanthropic, classic-rock overtures of Teens of Denial and trenched reverb of Teens of Style to How to Leave Town’s podium of cross-country parables and the non-linear, satirical, American Songbook tangents of Making a Door Less Open. The Scholars sounds like it was made by the same guy who put an uncleared sample of the Cars’ “Just What I Needed” into a song and inadvertently cost his record label $50,000 over it. What I mean is: You don’t have to miss the “old Car Seat Headrest” anymore.

Lyrically, Toledo was able to open natural pathways for his characters by imagining them in the room with him and having conversations with the music as it was forming, often internally asking himself: “If a character was coming out on stage and singing this, what would their path or struggle be?” Take a look at “The Catastrophe (Good Luck With That, Man)” and its Marc Bolan-evoking bombast purged by college-rock malaise, as Toledo paces the “one more time to reach perfection” chorus with cleverly-placed mentions of the Edsels’ “Rama Lama Ding Dong” and “dry bones in American towns.” The Scholars is a revolving door of sonics surging in Biblical measures but kicking and hallucinating in far more interlocked ways than MADLO had previously. These songs are dreams, chapters, folk tales, and explosions, as Car Seat Headrest embody Chaucer, Kerouac, Queen, and David Lynch all at once. The music is always sweeping but never chaotic, and Will Toledo’s characters, who once played God on Twin Fantasy, are now searching for Him on The Scholars.

There’s a Richard Bausch short story collection titled Rare & Endangered Species, and it’s a thorough, entangled interrogation of relationships spanning generations. We listen in on a telephone call between a young daughter and her father, as she informs him that not only is she marrying a 63-year-old man, but she is pregnant, too. In Blue Velvet fashion, a man finds a single high-heeled shoe in a field and fantasizes about having an affair. A birthday party clown discovers that the woman he’s in love with is rendezvousing with an old flame. A woman swallows an entire bottle of pills before she and her husband are forced off their farm and into a motel. Wires cross, homes overlap, and there’s a language of humanity spoken albeit coincidentally. The Scholars has a similar purpose, taking place at the fictional Parnassus University and charting the lives of faceless students and teachers like Rosa, Devereaux, and Beolco. They are healers, playwrights, clown troubadours, and troubled, tortured searchers born into religious, conservative homes. Their worlds intersect and interject but never feel anything but bizarre and fortuitous.

A turning point in the album’s writing stage was the Giver-like story of Rosa in “Gethsemane”—the garden outside Jerusalem where Jesus was arrested—which Toledo based off of his sickness. “To have this character who has a very different perception of life, where they’re able to heal people supernaturally but they take on their pains and their suffering at night, after having that physical experience of my own body breaking down lit a candle for [the album],” he says. The anchoring perspective of the sugary “Devereaux,” in which the titular character navigates a dogmatic upbringing and yearns for guidance from higher powers, is far from the first theological motif in the Car Seat Headrest canon. “Cosmic Hero,” “Times to Die,” “Kid War,” and “Sinner” immediately spring to mind, and “Famous Prophets (Stars)” climaxes with verses that allude to passages in the books of Corinthians, Matthew, Acts, and Psalm. “I remember, the second time we finished Twin Fantasy, I was like, ‘This really is more of a Christian record than a romantic record,’” Toledo says. He was raised Presbyterian and studied the history of the Christian Church in college—which he says is “always constantly breaking open and shattering and giving rise to new forms”—but “never saw the institution of church as being the place that holds God” and no longer follows any one denomination of faith (though, while ill two years ago, Toledo began practicing Chan mediation).

Toledo says that his religious inspirations “become a little stronger and more direct” in his writing on every record—noting that The Scholars is the most distinct distillation so far of what he calls a “continual progress.” “My own encounter with sickness and being in the pandemic the past five years, it creates that more essential contrast of life and death and what’s beyond it,” he continues. “I think my progress as a writer has been trying to write about important things with more and more clarity. A part of that is moving past smaller frameworks of college woes or romantic woes and trying to dig deeper into the basic problems of life, which naturally leads a spiritual language into it.”

In a recent interview with Rolling Stone, Toledo noted that writing an album like an opera was his “exercise in empathy.” But Car Seat Headrest’s catalog is not without empathy, especially in the “But if we learn how to live like this, maybe we can learn how to start again” pre-chorus of “Drunk Drivers/Killer Whales” and during Twin Fantasy, a deeply considerate record even at its most self-focused. But for The Scholars, Toledo’s writing for different characters allowed him to be selective with memoir. “My experiences and emotions might help in writing the song, but only in so much that it has to match the character and the song,” he says. “I’m not going to try and shoehorn it into something that’s specific to me. I’m going to try and keep my eye on the larger truth of this character who is not me and who can represent a wider net of people. So, every now and then, I might have an experience that works to put in there, or I might hear something from somebody else that works to put in there.” These songs loosen the binds on Toledo’s own autobiographical expectations and affirm their absence. “That’s what I’m working on, both in life and writing,” he continues. “It’s helpful when the two can intertwine, but [The Scholars] was me trying to step into more of a listening role than a ‘How am I feeling?’ role.”

IN 2017, ETHAN IVES SANG lead on a cover of Pixies’ “Motorway to Roswell” during a KEXP session. Ever since, he’s been slowly integrating his vocals into the band, performing his Toy Bastard song “It’s My Child (I’ll Do What I Like)” on their 2022 tour and singing the counter-vocal in “Bodys.” On The Scholars, he became a co-writer and sound designer alongside Toledo, even singing lead on the face-melting “Reality,” the best non-re-recorded Car Seat Headrest track since Teens of Denial. It’s a promotion he’d been unconsciously working up to. “It was also intimidating, because I think Will has a lot more miles under his belt as a singer than I do,” he argues. “I’ve always sung as a matter of convenience so, sometimes, I’ll be working on something and I’ll just suddenly get the feeling of, ‘Oh, I don’t even know what my voice is.’” But contributing more lyrics energized Ives, and collaborating with Toledo, which meant tossing moods and themes back and forth during lawn hangs and questioning lyrical provocations, helped him better understand the core elements of his own direction and identity.

One of the things I can appreciate the most about Car Seat Headrest is that I know the style and motif of Toledo’s writing like the back of my hand. I can probably correctly identify a lyric without any context at this point—I mean, who else could conjure a couplet like “Here is a demo of my latest sentence, I’ll fill in the good parts later,” a line as meta as the “Gethsemane” punch “A series of simple patterns slowly build themselves into another song”? I say this to the band and he chimes in, “I try to write so that I can defeat the Will Toledo A.I. bot and write something that maybe isn’t recognized.”

But Ives wasn’t expected to homogenize with Toledo’s writing style, saying that he appreciated how, if there was anything that seemed like it was good, the band could—and would—try to find a way to make it work. Nothing was off-limits, which led to an Irish sea shanty that got abandoned, as well as a Zydeco-flavored track that didn’t make the cut. A crooner, greaser-style song was nearly finished before hitting the cutting-room floor because Ives couldn’t find an ending for it. “I was already writing for the Toy Bastard record [The War], so I was in that groove of generating stuff,” he says. “It was very freeing to be able to just squeeze the rag and have anything come out and not feel like I have to cherry-pick stuff too much or fit into a stylistic box.”

“What’s the element that you really wanted to bring to a high-concept record like The Scholars?” I ask Ives. “I probably listen to the heaviest music of anyone in the band, at least the most consistently,” he replies. “I was listening to a lot of Black Sabbath at the time, and a lot of Sun O))), and I was consciously noticing, during the guitar tracking, ‘Oh, wow, these are some of the heaviest guitar tones that I’ve done on a Car Seat record before.’ It was a new flavor for me.” All of Ives’ post-hardcore, Slint-adjacent guitar parts are appropriate to the material; his Sabbath worship doesn’t mean a metal lick suddenly cuts through the Bob Dylan-referencing, Brit-folk-citing “Lady Gay Approximately,” but you can hear how him playing a Les Paul through a giant amp stack in a big, open live room produced a lot of thicker, heavier tones, especially during “The Catastrophe (Good Luck With That, Man)” and “Equals.”

With Ives shouldering more responsibilities on The Scholars, that opened the door for Toledo to hone his arranging strengths. “I don’t particularly enjoy trying to come up with stuff from scratch, but if I’ve got some stuff on the table and I can guide it in the direction, I feel like I’m better and more comfortable there, being just a player in this album and being one of the moving parts on it,” he says. “For this record, we wanted that more expansive feel—where it’s not a Will Toledo album or a Will Toledo idea, it’s about this concept and we can be more anonymous within our role representing that story. It was ideal to have different voices. For me, that’s a more preferable flavor of album than a personal-to-me album.”

Toledo focused on the process and organization. “It’s easy, once you start making stuff—and especially once stuff starts clicking—to go off and project about what it’s going to do, who’s going to hear it, how successful it’s going to be.” He began every session similarly, asking his bandmates, “Where are we at in the process? Are we communicating? Are we unified in what we’re working on and what we’re thinking about it?” The idea was to celebrate themselves and the work they were doing. “Everybody naturally gets ground down and communication gets harder,” he says, “because it’s long hours and you’re trying to nail down parts which you know are important to you. I think that the end process of this record was a lot more rewarding than previous records, where I think we had all dragged a record through the door. This one, I think we had good energy at the end of it, so that was a success in my book.”

It was a paradox, how everyone pitched in more individually on The Scholars but felt less pressure doing so. First hinted at during the Faces From the Masquerade shows three years ago, the band has reincarnated into a brighter, more complex version of itself. It’s not about who lights the torch and who carries it anymore. “Will, I’m sure that it is probably a relief to know that you don’t have to generate everything yourself,” Ives says, turning to his bandmate. “The ability to write stuff with somebody, compared to my own stuff, where I was having to write everything, felt like a huge relief off my back. No one person was taking on everything.” Toledo agrees, saying, “That level of trust, and granting it between us, makes it enjoyable to go in and work rather than fearing because there’s that sense of pressure, which is really just imagined pressure. Allowing for that trust, of us catching each other, was a very welcome change.” If Making a Door Less Open felt like Car Seat Headrest’s restless, obtuse dismissal of being “the band who made ‘Drunk Drivers/Killer Whales’” forever, then The Scholars is their libretto of communal, career-spanning acceptance. This is what it sounds like to finally commit yourself completely.

The Scholars is out May 2 via Matador Records. 

Matt Mitchell is Paste’s music editor, reporting from their home in Northeast Ohio.