SPILL FEATURE: A NEW ERA OF CAR SEAT – A CONVERSATION WITH SETH DALBY, ETHAN IVES & ANDREW KATZ OF CAR SEAT HEADREST

A NEW ERA OF CAR SEAT

A CONVERSATION WITH SETH DALBY, ETHAN IVES & ANDREW KATZ OF CAR SEAT HEADREST

Over the last decade, Car Seat Headrest has set the bar for indie rock with terrific albums like Teens Of Denial and Twin Fantasy (Face to Face). The band continues to ambitiously evolve their sound without losing their immaculate storytelling, catchy hooks, or charm. Their upcoming rock opera concept album, The Scholars, might just be their magnum opus. The new record follows several characters attending a university – “It’s more of like a fantasy world of what a college could be in a certain fantasy and just drawing off inspiration from that,” bassist Seth Dalby comments.

Frontman Will Toledo brought the original concept idea for The Scholars to the band before they started putting the material together for the album. “He came to the group with this kernel of an idea of like, ‘I want to do this album cycle with different characters where every song is kind of a standalone vignette, but then they have this connective meta-narrative between them,’” guitarist Ethan Ives reflects. “It was a little bit of a top-down process of like how do we complete this narrative that does connect everything. Then, the other end of it was a bottom-up process of what material we have kicking around, what material can be generated just from jamming, and how can we make those things meet in the middle of the stuff that we’re just jamming on day to day and the more top-down ideas of the bigger picture stuff.”

“To me, it means a new era; a new era of Car Seat that I’m very excited for, and I think the fans are really going to love it,” drummer Andrew Katz states about The Scholars.

Working with multiple unique characters, often channelling wildly different voices for them, was an enjoyable experience for Car Seat Headrest. “It was nice to know because there is this kind of unifying overarching framework to everything that we can treat every song as its own little sandbox,” exclaims Ives. “Having that connective tissue then gave us the freedom to approach every individual song kind of as a standalone thing where we could go in a different mode for every song. They were very standalone in that way but then there was the satisfaction of knowing they would cohere at the end. Vocally, I don’t think we were consciously thinking, ‘This character has this voice’ necessarily, but according to the mood of the song and the needs of the song and going, ‘What flavour can we bring to this song that’s appropriate for the standalone mode of this piece versus this piece.’”

The Scholars see Car Seat Headrest working more collaboratively than previous albums. “Ethan voiced concerns about wanting to have it be more of a collaborative writing process, and Will was totally down, so he and Ethan took a lot of time to write these songs together,” exclaims Katz. “We jammed a lot more. It really felt like much more of a band album this time.”

The Scholars was influenced by rock operas like The Who’s Tommy and David Bowie’s The Rise And Fall Of Ziggy Stardust And The Spiders From Mars. “I think we gravitate towards concept albums where there is an arch to them and there is an emotional throughline, but the songs are not so rigidly structured where they have to fit this very plot-driven narrative,” says Ives. “The character Ziggy Stardust has an arch. There is a beginning, middle, and end. But all of those songs kind of function as standalone pieces. You can have an interpretation of them that is separate from the storyline.”

Car Seat Headrest also draws more on each band member’s individual skills in The Scholars compared to previous albums. “We’re able to go in the studio and kind of wear any hat that we need to wear for the needs of any particular song where I think we weren’t doing that as much before,” comments Ives. “I think we have the ability to be a little bit more varied just because now that we do have a slightly more collaborative songwriting structure. It’s more about taking the kernel of a song and going, ‘Okay. Here’s what this song needs to do. What skills, instruments, or flavours that we accumulatively have can we then pull on to make this song work?’ I think that just leads to a bigger colour palette than we’ve been able to use in the past – The songs they’ve gotten more ambitious.”

PURCHASE/STREAM THE SCHOLARS VIA BANDCAMP

“Planet Desperation”, “Reality”, and “Gethsemane” are some of Car Seat Headrest’s most ambitious tracks of their discography, especially “Planet Desperation”, which is almost 19 minutes long. Car Seat Headrest never wastes a second on these songs, taking the listener on an exciting journey. “I like how, in longer songs, it takes you on a journey where you end up somewhere totally unexpected,” smiles Dalby. “In shorter songs, somewhere like three minutes, you’re not going to end up somewhere totally different from the first verse. It’s cool to see where a 19-minute song is going to lead you.”

“I think shorter songs are harder because they have to have a much stronger sense of balance, and it’s kind of like poetry where like the fewer components you’re working with, the more perfect they all have to be. With slightly longer material, you’re working on a longer timeframe, so things don’t have to balance out perfectly all the time. You have a little bit more margin for messing around. I find writing somewhat longer material to be more fun, more exploratory, and a little bit less perfectionist.”

Despite featuring multiple fascinatingly complex epic songs, spanning over ten minutes, that go in many unexpected twists and turns, the band thinks it will be easy to translate them to a live setting. “We’ve been practicing quite a bit, and because it was created in this jam setting, it is very easy to translate that to the stage,” says Katz.

“The benefit of jam-based music is even if it’s complex or long compositions because it already existed in that 4-piece band arrangement, you never have to translate it back to a band because it already existed in that form,” notes Ives.

“I think we were surprised how well it flowed front to back,” reflects Dalby. “We’ve played it multiple times as front to back, and it feels so good to do that compared to previous albums where we usually pick just a few songs like, ‘Yeah, this will work live.’”

The main difference between the shorter and longer songs is how they are arranged. “Thematically, they’re not that different to put together because they both start with a kernel of an idea of where the character is going to be at,” states Ives. “The shorter songs tend to be more strictly authored. They tend to be written down more deliberately, whereas the longer songs tend to come more from that bottom-up process of just woodshedding a lot of stuff and passing a lot of little demo pieces around and going, ‘How can we click these different sections together that are maybe Frankensteined together from other songs or songs that didn’t make the cut.’”

Car Seat Headrest is doing something interesting to promote The Scholars. Instead of having a standard album rollout, the band decided to do something special. “Will thought it’d be cool to do some sort of game,” states Katz. “Originally, we talked about making a whole video game, but we realized that would be too much work even if it were simple. Will came up with this idea of a WebQuest, so Matador hooked us up with this coding team, and they helped put together that sort of WebQuest. Will came up with these fun riddles, and then the team and us came up with a bunch of different problems and little puzzles to solve to go with the riddles.”

“It was initially way more ambitious,” adds Ives. “I think we wanted to do like a Kid Pix type thing, but as soon as we actually sat down and looked at that, we were like, ‘This is too complicated.’”

The Scholars is set to drop on May 2nd, marking an exciting new chapter for Car Seat Headrest. “I think it’s important to evolve as a band, so I don’t think it would be similar to our last one, but definitely, concept albums are a thing with Car Seat, so more in the future,” smiles Dalby.

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Photo Credits: Carlos Cruz