Paste Q&A: Car Seat Headrest’s retcon of Teens of Denial

Today marks the tenth anniversary of Car Seat Headrest’s Teens of Denial, a breakthrough coming-of-age record that elevated Will Toledo and his bandmates from a message board hidden gem to an indie-rock household name. A week ago, Toledo started leaking to fans that he would be releasing Teens of Denial: Joe’s Story, a full re-imagining of the 2016 album focusing this time on the album’s recurring character, Joe. Revisiting old material has been a hallmark of Car Seat Headrest’s work for some time now: in 2018, the band released a re-imagined version of Toledo’s 2011 cult classic Twin Fantasy, and before that, they marked their 2015 signing to Matador Records with Teens of Style, a pseudo-compilation of re-recorded songs from Toledo’s Bandcamp era. 

In an open letter Toledo shared alongside the announcement of Joe’s Story, he wrote that the original Teens of Denial was created during a time in which he was “struggling with a lot of cynicism and misplaced aggression,” and that this updated version “feels more like the album Teens of Denial was meant to be.” He added, “This time, I could pull memories of that darkness, and use the distance and additional perspective of ten years of life to shed a fuller light on the experience. Joe is a character going through some of what I experienced, and some of his own problems. Telling his story, and not just my own impressions of life at the end of the teen years, brought a new level of compassion and wholeness to the album.”

In lieu of a review and/or tenth anniversary retrospective essay, and in the dualistic spirit of this re-recording project and others like it in Car Seat Headrest’s discography, we decided to do something a little different and have two of our staffers discuss the 2016 and 2026 versions of Teens of Denial, walking through the new version song-by-song a few days before the album’s official release, exploring our thoughts in real time. These are two works in conversation with one another, and what follows is a conversation between Casey Epstein-Gross and Grace Robins-Somerville about their personal histories with Car Seat Headrest, the legacy of Teens of Denial, and where we’ve arrived with Joe’s Story. Feel free to press play on Joe’s Story—or, I guess, check out its CD from the library—and listen along with us.

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Grace Robins-Somerville: The first Car Seat Headrest song I ever heard was the Mirror to Mirror version of “Sober to Death”—at the time, the only version. This was in the fall of 2015. But I didn’t really dig into Car Seat Headrest’s albums until years later. When Teens of Denial came out, it kinda passed me by. I didn’t really kind of start getting really into them until 2018, when the Twin Fantasy re-record came out. That was what made me go back to the rest of their discography. They were also just very of that era of Bandcamp success stories. I feel like you can’t overstate the importance of when Bandcamp enabled cross-platform link sharing, because the interaction between Bandcamp and Tumblr and Reddit was huge. Teens of Denial feels like the definitive “Bandcamp darling becomes a household name” record. 

CEG: I think “Fill in the Blank” was the first one I ever listened to—courtesy of my dad back in 2016—and I pretty much dove deep into the rest of the band’s discography the second I heard it. I just found a text that I sent to a friend of mine in June of 2016, where I say, “I love Car Seat Headrest because of how much the lyrics mean to me. Honestly, every song is a punch in the gut. They’re both things that I myself think and things that I know I need to hear. It’s insane. It almost feels like the songs were either written for or by me, to be honest.” So that was me at fourteen.

GRS: They were such a college band to me, I think, not just because of when I found them and when I listened to them most, but because everything pre-Making A Door Less Open feels very young adult, very impulsive, very much about making reckless decisions in a somewhat controlled environment. but still having to face consequences for them. There’s so many of these formative, college-bound experiences that I associate with their music. On Teens of Denial especially, there’s so much about, like, trying to be an adult, trying to be mature, and then realizing in the face of all of these decisions you made that you don’t know shit.

CEG: That’s so interesting, ’cause it’s so associated with high school for me. I wasn’t having a lot of those first experiences at that point—again, I was fifteen and living in the Florida panhandle—but I felt like I should have been, that there was something wrong with me for not doing so. Even just thinking back to “Fill in the Blank”—“You haven’t seen enough of this world yet.” And I was like, “What right do I have to be depressed? I’ve barely lived.” I had the gall to be feeling this miserable when I hadn’t even had enough life experience to justify that misery, and I self-flagellated for that a lot—to the sound of Car Seat Headrest, much of the time. Their music helped me put words to it.

GRS: Something else I recognized in Will Toledo is that he was a fan of stuff in the way that I was. His songs are very wordy, very referential, very literary. I’ve always been drawn to songwriters who are referential in that way. As an artist of any kind, you have the opportunity to build your own canon and be an ambassador to your influences. 

I followed his Tumblr too. He’d post about what he was listening to or reading or watching, and I’d take notes. And with the re-recording stuff, he would quote himself, he would reference his own work, and you kind of see his own interests and tastes change over time. I liked seeing a songwriter do that kind of archival work in their discography.

CEG: That’s one of the reasons I was so drawn to Twin Fantasy. I loved seeing the changes between them. Especially the ending of the closer on Face to Face, where he’s like, “These are only lyrics now.” This is a single photograph of a moment in time, and it will always remain in that moment in time, and that no matter what happens, this moment will stay intact. It’s all trapped inside this one moment, but things can still change within it when you look back. 

GRS: A lot of times on the Face to Face re-recording there’s levels to how far back into the past Will’s narration goes. There’s parts where he’s back in that nervous energy, almost cosplaying as his younger self for a minute. 

CEG: The joint project of those two albums is so fascinating in a way that neither of them would be individually for me, as great as they both are. I love the meta-textuality, I love the self-referentiality. It is just such a fascinating look into growing up. I’m very interested going into this new re-recording to see if it can recreate that magic—if it does for Teens of Denial what the addition of Face to Face did for Mirror to Mirror.

GRS: The new Teens of Denial is more about the character of Joe, who Will has kind of said is inspired by Joe from a series of Daniel Johnston songs. Daniel Johnston—specifically Hi, How Are You—is a huge influence for Will. 

CEG: I think Will saying in the letter that Joe’s Story is what Teens of Denial was meant to be—because now he could “use the distance and additional perspective of ten years of life to shed a fuller light on the experience”—is interesting, because the thing that initially drew me to the record back in 2016 was how enmeshed it was in those darker feelings. It wasn’t distant, and I didn’t want it to be. It was the immediacy and intimacy that resonated with me. But, then again, we’re both ten years older now, too. So maybe we’ll resonate more with this updated version because we’re also looking back at that version of ourselves, just like Will was when writing this. Or maybe that’s not the point anymore; it’s Joe’s story, now. In that case, I hope Joe’s story is a compelling one.

“Fill in the Blank”

GRS: According to drummer Andrew Katz, the lack of swearing on Joe’s Story has something to do with Will’s religious practices. There’s always been some kind of religious throughline in his work. I believe he was a religious studies major in college.

CEG: Oh, one hundred percent. Hell, this song originally included a line about a sign from God anyways. But it felt significantly less positively charged then: “Stay the fuck down.” Those religious throughlines were more explorations than affirmations—he didn’t shy away from questioning or subverting them. 

GRS: Or using explicit language, or talking about explicit things.

CEG: I don’t really know how I feel about the whole “no swearing” aspect of this, yet. I’m not angry in a censorship sense or anything. It’s his music, he can do what he wants. The whole “Will Toledo is homophobic now because he’s taking out curse words” narrative on social media is ridiculous, undoubtedly, but it’s a little curious if he’s doing all of this to get rid of some curse words? I’m skeptical of the change as a music critic since I don’t know if those changes actually benefit the record yet, but I think being offended by it is just silly. I’m mostly interested in seeing what the project of this new version is and how that plays into it.

GRS: I think it’s funny. 

CEG: Oh, it’s fucking hilarious to go back to your work from ten years ago and be like, “I’m remaking this because I don’t like that I cursed.” It’s particularly funny because I feel like the shift to new vocals for the non-curse lines is a little audible, too.

GRS: Will Toledo should be allowed to say “fuck.”

CEG: I think he should allow himself to say “fuck.” 

GRS: Lyrically, the change from “Stay the fuck down” to “We know what you are” is really interesting. It could be read two ways: as in, “there’s something about me that is visible to other people about me that I’ve been trying to hide,” or “I want someone to tell me who I am and what I’m supposed to do. I need identity. I need direction.” 

CEG: It could either be paranoia or affirmation. It’s like, “Oh, God, they know I’m a terrible person, they know my deepest darkest secrets.” Or it’s “I know what you are” as in “you see me and I’m being understood. I’m being perceived correctly.”

GRS: Otherwise, the song sounded pretty similar. The vocals sounded a bit cleaner. I really do love Steve Fisk’s production on the original Teens of Denial—he worked on this version, too. I know that among the oldheads, Teens of Denial was a bit contentious because it was the most hi-fi Car Seat Headrest record at the time. But I don’t think that the crispness and clarity of the original Teens of Denial sacrificed anything. 

“Vincent”

CEG: Most of the song seems to be the same. But that early verse—“I’m just in it for the beating / It’s almost a point of pride / They say it doesn’t happen that often / Pure sadism”—was changed pretty thoroughly. I liked the original “pure sadism” refrain a lot, and I haven’t made up my mind on him changing it to “and the sequel” yet. It just sounds so clunky.

GRS: The “and the sequel” refrain feels like a meta-narrative thing where he’s commenting on revisiting older work. 

CEG: The horns coming in way earlier is interesting. There’s more trumpet overall.

GRS: The vocals were a bit muddier in this mix. They’re so crisp and clear in the original, which I kind of miss. 

CEG: I like that they kept the “They’ll send in Matt / CAPtain Trash!” line. That seemed like something that was maybe going to be changed, and I’m happy it wasn’t.

“Destroyed By Hippie Powers”

GRS: This is such a college-ass song. This feels like every party I ever went to in college. 

CEG: Funnily enough, this was one of the songs that I didn’t identify with very much. 

GRS: The recording of this feels weirdly distant.

CEG: Yeah, this version sounds muddier, at least production-wise. The original felt more defined.

GRS: I liked how live and in-the-moment the original recording felt. 

CEG: Also, wait, Will’s still allowed to talk about doing DMT? Jesus is fine with DMT but not the word “piss”? 

GRS: The change from “I killed that fucker” to “I killed his brother” is interesting, kind of. Maybe it has to do with the theme of doubling or bifurcating of the self throughout Car Seat Headrest’s discography?

CEG: Look at Twin Fantasy.

GRS: “And you will take him home to your mother / And say, ‘Ma, this is my brother.’” Or “those two lovers / those two brothers,” et cetera. For Joe, maybe it means something different. 

CEG: There has to be a reason, if you’re going to remake the album. I want it to feel like there’s enough justification for the changes—not just “I’m gonna tweak one lyric of a song so I don’t say ‘fuck’ anymore.” I know it’s supposed to tell “Joe’s story” instead, but so far, Joe’s story seems pretty identical. Just… with fewer expletives.

“(Joe Gets Kicked Out of School for Using) Drugs With Friends (But Says This Isn’t a Problem)”

CEG: I feel like the best guitar parts on here are quieter now.

GRS: The drums sound weird and mechanical—kind of muffled. It sucks because of how clear the original mix was, but also because Andrew Katz is a very expressive drummer. I’m sorry to keep talking about how clear the original mix was, but…

CEG: Yeah, I agree. It’s weird to hear him so compressed. At the same time, though, the drums have felt overly loud this whole album. The mix is just weird.

GRS: It’s just very stiff. These are all kind of lacking a messiness, an immediacy.

CEG: And based on the framing Will gave in that accompanying essay, that’s kind of what he was going for here. Which is such a shame, at least to me, because the thing that worked so uniquely well about the original Teens of Denial was that very raw immediacy—that’s what drew me to it in the first place. I’m still not convinced that any mission to make the album less immediate isn’t just shooting itself in the foot.

GRS: What’s so great about Teens of Denial was that there are so many songs where you feel like you’re having a panic attack in the bathroom with him. Or you feel like you’re sitting with him on the couch at the house party that you didn’t really want to go to. This album doesn’t have the same immersive quality.

CEG: That’s the reason I think so many young people like us were so drawn to it—it didn’t just feel like it was about or for us, but like it was of us. And now the added distance just makes it feel more generic. It’s writing about a life rather than living within it.

GRS: Which feels counterintuitive, because it is specifically about this character of Joe, who was sort of an author stand-in at the time that Will wrote the original Teens of Denial.

CEG: On some level it does make sense for the album to feel more distant, if it’s focusing so thoroughly on a more omniscient third-person perspective, looking in at the life of Joe from outside of it. But also, the best stories still make you feel immersed in the life of the character. The speakers in the original Teens of Denial tracks were all still characters—whether they were explicitly Joe-related or just persons Will took on—and that didn’t make them feel any less intimate.

“Optimistic Son”

GRS: This is replacing “Not What I Needed” entirely. I used to actually listen to the illegal version of “Not What I Needed”—I still will sometimes—with the uncleared Cars sample, and also the Pavement sample that was cleared. That story is crazy—just Matador Records having to destroy all those CDs and records just days before the album came out, and Will having to just record a whole new thing. Ric [Ocasek], you should’ve cleared the samples.

CEG: Seriously. Okay, I’m just looking back at the lyrics of “Not What I Needed” to see what I’m especially going to miss from it—oh, “I’d like to make my shame count for something,” definitely. And the part that goes “Let go of the pain, let go of the fear / But if I let go of that, what will still be here?” is actually really interesting in the context of this remake, since it’s purposefully distancing itself from the immediacy of those feelings and instead stepping back to get a “fuller picture.” But maybe it does beg the question: what will still be here?

GRS: I really like the guitar in this song. I don’t love how smudgy his vocal mix is, though.

CEG: Sonically, the song doesn’t really fit the album? 

GRS: I’m glad that he’s not doing a Taylor Swift thing and pretending that these are bonus tracks taken from the vault or anything. This is obviously written recently, for this project. This sounds like stuff that was on The Scholars last year, which isn’t necessarily bad, it just doesn’t feel like Teens of Denial. 

CEG: Agreed. I know he said in the statement that they got back into the Teens sound for the re-recordings, but this just does not feel like it’s from that era at all. Even just the melody and arrangements. And also, tonally, it feels out of place, particularly considering what it was replacing. It’s not a bad song, but it’s a weird replacement for “Not What I Needed.” 

GRS: I also think that, with The Scholars, Will said that he gained more of an interest in writing about familial relationships in recent years—specifically parent/child relationships. He’s kind of lost interest in and moved away from writing about romantic relationships.

CEG: And that’s fine by me.

GRS: Yeah. Even though Will has written some really great love songs and breakup songs, it’s not as if Teens of Denial ever had much of that explicitly. But it also makes sense that this version of Teens of Denial has even more of that familial focus. There were bits of that in the original—references to the fear of disappointing your parents and all of that.

CEG: “Destroyed by Hippie Powers,” “Drugs With Friends,” etc.

GRS: Right, so whether it’s literally parents or God-as-a-parental-figure, there was a lot of that from the beginning—of viewing your own self-identity through the prism of being someone’s child. But this feels like, with Joe’s Story, he’s trying to address some of that more explicitly. 

“Drunk Drivers/Killer Whales”

CEG: Right off the bat, the vocals in the opening sound different—somehow a bit stronger, or healthier. More about accurately sustaining the falsetto than an outpouring of feeling. I don’t know. That’s probably a good thing, but I like the rawness of the original more, personally.

GRS: This sounds almost like a demo. I kind of enjoy it. The vocal is so much more forward in this mix.

CEG: Possibly, yeah. But they were still pretty forward in the original mix, at least in the first half. It’s still the tone of the falsetto that’s getting me, I don’t know.

GRS: Well, he does sound older.

CEG: Yeah. Not much you can do about that, I guess. But it doesn’t sound older to me so much as it does neater. Hard to explain. There are a couple of small melody changes throughout, too—probably only noticeable because I know the original so well, though. It’s just very clearly a new vocal track.

GRS: Oh, another curse-related lyric change: “giving you shit again” becomes “playing that song again”—again, kinda meta, since he’s been playing these songs for a decade, this one probably more than any other. 

CEG: What do you think overall? 

GRS: I honestly like how it’s mixed, but the clarity in the production makes it stand out from the rest of the album where stuff feels so blurry.

“1937 State Park”

GRS: “1937 State Park” is a big one for me. When I was in college, a friend of mine died by suicide, and to this day, I always think about her when I listen to it. It really captures what it’s like to be a young person grieving another young person. The death that’s implied in the song is just that: implied; you never know how the person dies. But I think, because of the content of the album, you’re meant to assume that it is either an overdose or suicide. And if you’re someone who struggled with suicidal ideation and you lose someone to suicide, there’s a lot of guilt that comes with it. It’s this combination of survivor’s guilt and this other layer of it, too—thinking, “Oh, why are you making it about yourself?”; Why does my train of thought jump to “It could have been me, how come it wasn’t me? How come I got to survive and get older and this person didn’t?”

And I really love the Beach Boys interpolation at the end of the song—we know that Will Toledo is a big Beach Boys guy, for one thing. But the “Don’t Worry Baby” inclusion—that song is really about two people who are young and naive and overwhelmed by the world they’re growing up in. They’re ill-equipped for it, and ill-equipped to protect one another from it. There’s so much of that in Car Seat Headrest: seeing someone in pain, seeing someone you love suffering and seeing them ill-equipped for the world that they’re in, and being like, “Oh, I’m also ill-equipped.” Trying to get them through it, but knowing that you’re not able to. 

“Don’t Worry Baby” in this context also takes on the weight of knowing someone in this song has died. And now it’s like, “Did their worries die with them, or are those inherited by all of the people who cared about them?” I think grief has this effect of making you sort of take on what was troubling the person that you lost, knowing that you’ll never understand it. You’re like, “Well, what do I do? I can’t make sense of this, they couldn’t make sense of this, no one else can make sense of this.” The pain that they were feeling is just kind of dispersed among the people who knew them and loved them.

CEG: Right. It doesn’t just dissipate. Also, with what you were saying about seeing someone you love struggling and being ill-equipped to deal with that, I think—especially with Twin Fantasy—the songs often switch back and forth constantly between the speaker being the one trying to help and the speaker being the one struggling as an ill-equipped loved one tries to deal with their pain. So much of Car Seat Headrest’s 2010s discography revolves around the oscillation of youth, of being at once the person that needs help and the person that can’t provide it.

GRS: And a lot of times you are in both of those situations. I think that’s why I associate Car Seat Headrest with these intense, often unhealthy relationships that I had when I was in college.

CEG: Yeah, that was me in high school.

GRS: I look back on certain friendships or certain romantic relationships that were mutually destructive, or enabled each other’s bad behaviors, and in a weird way, we did need each other at the time. I have friends now who I was friends with then, and there’s almost this tacit understanding of, like, “Oh, we survived this because we learned how to be better friends to each other.” I’m curious to see how this new version will fit in with all of that. There are so many beautiful lyrics in this. I love when he says “death is playing his xylophone ribs for me,” and then you can hear the xylophone in the background. 

CEG: The line that always destroys me is definitely “we were in one photograph and we don’t even look happy.”

GRS: That’s the lyric that makes me think of my dead friend the most. I hear that line, and I picture this one specific photo of the two of us so clearly in my mind. It’s crazy to hear a song and be like, “Oh, my God, how do you know this about me?”

CEG: Which, again, is such a huge part of why I fell in love with the band in the first place—me and every other depressed kid. God, I was just looking at the original lyrics again, and “I can’t commit a crime to commit / I need to get one done for the biography” was such a huge thing for me back in the day.

GRS: I think something that really sticks with me about this record in particular is how it captures what it’s like to be someone young who can’t really imagine themselves getting old, but is also weirdly concerned with their own legacy and how they’re going to be remembered? Legacy is, in a weird way, one of the things keeping you alive. ‘Cause you’re like, “Oh my God, am I gonna die in a way that’s noteworthy? If I couldn’t live a worthwhile life, will I at least leave something worthwhile behind?”

CEG: That is exactly the reason I could never go through with suicide or anything in high school even at my lowest point, but also the very reason I wanted to. It was a weird Schrodinger’s cat situation for me, where cutting off my life prematurely felt like a preventative measure to protect the potential of my own legacy. If I kept living—which would open the box, so to speak—then I’d have to confront the possibility of not living up to the potential of what I thought I should be. There was a real appeal to that, to the idea of dying young in order to ensure the potential I had as a kid would never be ruined by the way I grew up and lived my life. But, at the same time, if I died then, that would guarantee I wouldn’t have any legacy at all beyond the abstract concept of my own potential. And God, did this song speak to that.

GRS: I think when I was that age, it was such a “break glass in case of emergency” thing, the idea of killing myself. Most of the time I was not actively suicidal, but it was always like, “Well, this is always available if I have a string of really bad days and all other options have disappeared.” I think that’s something that people don’t want to think about. It’s the same thing where people don’t like to think about the fact that the average American is closer to being homeless than being a billionaire. I’m not saying most people walk around wanting to kill themselves all the time, but it’s a lot easier to think of it as this unfathomable thing and say, “How could anyone do that?” when, in reality, it can be pretty banal. I also think there’s this feeling that the quickest way to get everyone to love you is to die, specifically to die young, because we hate aging. We love youth and we love the story of what could have been. 

CEG: When you die young, your potential remains intact and you’re absolved in death.

GRS: I think that’s why we romanticize celebrities who die young and tragically. And I think the way Will depicts this hometown hero type character who died young really reflects that.

CEG: Well, as far as the Joe’s Story version of the song goes, this one felt pretty similar.

GRS: Yeah… Other than that one riff feeling more muted here than on the original, did he change anything?

CEG: I don’t think so—at least not lyrically, which, you know, I think was a good move, since the original song is so strong. Production was still more muted, a little dirtier, but still felt pretty similar.

GRS: Yeah. This is also, of course, the end of Side One on the original album—it’s split up into two sides: “Hometown Hero” and “Cosmic Hero.” 

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