Car Seat Headrest on Going From Dorm-Room Prodigy to Indie-Rock Sensation
When Will Toledo was 19, he wrote a song called “Fuck Merge Records” after trying and failing to submit his music to the North Carolina label. “The chorus was ‘No unsolicited demos, no unsolicited demos,'” the 23-year-old singer-songwriter, better known as Car Seat Headrest, says with a sheepish grin. “Obviously, I have a greater appreciation of why that’s a policy now, but I was just a kid at the time.”
Toledo (the last name is a pseudonym) is sitting in the downtown New York offices of another indie powerhouse, Matador Records, which signed him earlier this year. The label released his excellent LP Teens of Style in October to rave reviews; a follow-up, Teens of Denial, is already on the books for 2016. To anyone who’s a few years older than him, Toledo might seem like something of a child prodigy — he has a boyish look, with shaggy dark hair falling nearly into his oversized eyeglasses, and he talks like the relatively recent college grad that he is. But of course that’s not quite how it feels for the singer himself, who spent years as an undergrad in Virginia furtively recording songs on a laptop whenever his roommates were out of his dorm room, then uploading the results to Bandcamp and waiting. “It was just sort of explosions in the dark,” he says. “I was always hoping that the stars would align and I would get on board with a label, but nothing really connected.”
Car Seat Headrest started a few years earlier, around the time he graduated high school in Leesburg, Virginia, an hour outside of Washington, D.C. “There was zero music scene locally,” Toledo says. He started his first bands with friends from his high school’s marching band, where he played trombone, and absorbed a steady diet of classic indie rock, from Guided by Voices and Pavement to New Pornographers. Later, he began recording solo material using “super-basic equipment” at his parents’ home or in their car as a way of coping with the stress of leaving high school. “Everyone was drifting off into their own sphere, and I didn’t really have anything I felt I could drift off into,” he says. “I had never really wanted to go to college. It was more something I was expected to do.”
In the end, he matriculated at Virginia Commonwealth University, located in busy Richmond. “I went to college, which I had been nervous about beforehand, and I stayed nervous there,” he says laconically. “I didn’t get out much. That’s what the music reflects — introversion. It was a big deal for me to go away from everything I knew to living with all these strangers.”
His lonely freshman year at VCU coincided with a spurt of creativity. In March 2011, Toledo self-released a strong album on Bandcamp called My Back Is Killing Me Baby, several of whose choicest songs he went back and re-recorded this year for Teens of Style. The anxious anthem “Something Soon,” written while he was in the process of transferring to a new school, is about his desire to get the hell out of town: “I was stressed out,” he says. “I had already done the going-to-a-new-college thing once, and I didn’t want to deal with it again.” (The version of the song on Bandcamp has a sparse electro backing, which he says is because the input cord he used for his guitar was broken at the time.)