Six years ago, in the depths of the pandemic, I wrote about Car Seat Headrest’s then-new record Making a Door Less Open. It had first struck me as a deep disappointment, though I came around to appreciating the way Will Toledo’s confusing, anxiety-ridden song fragments resonated during that incredibly confusing, anxiety-ridden time. I still like MADLO, though I confess I don’t find myself going back to it often.
While trying to make sense of MADLO in a broader context, I wrote:
Toledo’s oeuvre is also increasingly full of songs that are re-recorded, sometimes re-re-recorded. And it’s all just out there; the new canon coexists with the old. The band’s last wholly new LP, Teens of Denial, is the only one in their entire catalog that functions as a traditional, static rock artifact. And even that comes with an asterisk, since the first pressing had to be destroyed after Ric Ocasek withdrew permission to reference “Just What I Needed,” forcing a second version of the album to exist before it even hit shelves.
Today, as Teens of Denial turns 10, we can completely throw out any notion of that album being the band’s lone “traditional, static rock artifact,” because Car Seat Headrest has just released Teen of Denial (Joe’s Story).
ToD(JS) is ostensibly Toledo’s reworking of ToD into something approaching a cohesive story. This continues Will’s recent shift away from writing in a personal, confessional style and toward more character-based narratives, a form most thoroughly explored in last year’s excellent double-LP The Scholars.
While this represents an evolution of Toledo’s approach, it’s not as dramatic as it might sound. The animal characters in The Scholars’ libretto frequently present themselves as barely-concealed avatars for Will himself, including explicit references to his own past songs. Similarly, though this new take on Teens of Denial is presented as “Joe’s Story,” the majority of lyrics are unchanged from 2016 (I’ll get to the ones that are changed in a minute). As Toledo explains: “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.”
The manner in which ToD(JS) revisits ToD is very different from the way Car Seat Headrest has revisited their work previously. Where Teens of Style and Twin Fantasy (Face to Face) represented entirely new-from-scratch performances of songs from Toledo’s home recording era, ToD(JS) retains the bones of the original album. I haven’t done a deep one-to-one comparison (and I don’t plan to), but to my ears most of the instrumental tracks sound largely identical; some notable mix tweaks, some more polished drum fills, but overall the same base tracks we’ve known for the past decade. The vocals are a different story – more obviously a mix of old with quite a bit of new, though impressively produced by Steve Fisk in such a way that Toledo rarely sounds out-of-place alongside his younger self.
Two songs have been completely removed from ToD(JS), apparently for narrative reasons (though, while they’re both great, they’re also pretty clearly the most musically expendable tracks on the album). In their place are two brand new songs, “Optimistic Son” and “Joe Drives Again.” Both are written in an uptempo, power-pop style Toledo has rarely returned to since ToD, and they’re both phenomenal (even if “Joe Drives Again” starts to sound a little like Rusted Root at the end).
The most jarring changes on ToD(JS), though, are to the lyrics. First, the most striking (and, I gather from Stereogum, controversial) update: all curse words have been inexplicably swapped out for new language. Some of the time it works (“I get signs from the cops / Saying, ‘We know what you are’” is evocative); more often, it’s Die Hard-on-cable-level cringe (“I laid on my friend’s bedroom floor for an hour / And tried not to wet my pants”). Why it’s apparently still okay for Will to sing “drugs are better with friends are better with drugs” but not “piss” is baffling – and I’ll leave it to the subreddit to debate what that’s all about – but ultimately it serves as a massive distraction from whatever it is the band is hoping to achieve here.
The other major lyric change is equally significant: “The Ballad of the Costa Concordia,” ToD’s central epic (and my favorite Car Seat Headrest song) has been wholly rewritten into a new song called “The Ravenous House.” Delivered over the original backing track, Toledo transforms “Concordia” from a youthful rant about personal responsibility into more mature, narrative verse that’s rich in biblical allegory, describing the character of Joe confronting trauma around his brother’s death.
Will Toledo seems to have experienced a religious awakening in the aftermath of his extreme struggles with long COVID. This was apparent during the rollout of The Scholars, but I guess it’s only striking a raw nerve with some in the CSH fandom now. I don’t personally see Toledo’s Christianity as implying any kind of worrisome change in his politics; The Scholars is an undeniably queer-positive record, and the only damage I’ve seen that one might pin on his newfound piety is the aforementioned de-curse-ification of ToD.
In any case, “The Ravenous House” is the most powerful lyric from Toledo’s Christian period to date. Joe sees his brother’s absence as a wound on the wall of his family home, and he wrestles with demonic voices until he finally hears his dead brother’s offer of love. It’s even more operatic than “Costa Concordia,” effectively replacing the earlier composition’s bitter snark with something more profound.
Okay, but does it work? I don’t know. “The Ballad of the Costa Concordia” is a perfect song; regardless of how beautifully written “The Ravenous House” is, it still feels like a home invasion (though maybe that’s apropos?). Ten years is long enough for a masterpiece like Teens of Denial to become canon, which makes this taxidermying of “Concordia” something close to sacrilege.
Though Will has said “I didn’t make [ToD(JS)] for anyone who already knows the album,” it’s really hard to figure out who he did make it for. Who, in 2026, is the audience that’s open to listening to Guided by Voices-style indie rock as long as the singer doesn’t say “fuck”? What’s the point of delivering a new lyric as compelling as “The Ravenous House” as karaoke on top of “The Ballad of the Costa Concordia”? Why not just release the fun new stuff as an EP instead of doing this whole George Lucas thing to one of your most beloved albums?
While there’s a lot I don’t yet understand about this project – and plenty about it that makes it an uncomfortable listen – it’s nonetheless a fascinating continuation of the artistic approach I described with MADLO in 2020:
Unlike other contemporary artists who obsess over the shape of their legacy while they’re still creating it – say, James Murphy, or Quentin Tarantino – Toledo makes sure his catalog is anything but static, or able to be easily numbered (he actually did start out numbering his albums, but gave up after four). To cleanly quantify his canon wouldn’t suit the nature of his art. Allowing it to spill out, unimpeded by old models, every seam exposed, an insurmountable challenge for even the most dedicated fan to organize – that’s Car Seat Headrest.
Or, as Will put it more recently (and pithily): “I believe music is an ongoing story, and albums don’t always do justice to its dynamic, ongoing nature.”
“The Ballad of the Costa Concordia” still exists, of course, and the original Teens of Denial isn’t going anywhere. Joe’s Story is something else, something additional. I suspect it deserves to be reckoned with further.