Will Toledo picked a convenient time to start wearing a mask.
To me, that was one of the most depressed phases of my life.
Because it wasnt something that I wanted.
Although Car Seat Headrest hasn’t been a bonafide solo project for many years, ‘Making A Door Less Open’ is Toledo’s first explicitly collaborative record with his band.Carlos Cruz Sol
Tell me about that.
WILL TOLEDO:You have to deliver the vinyl x amount of months before the album comes out.
Yeah, thats kind of what happens already.
Toledo in mask.Carlos Cruz Sol
Its a different experience when you stream something versus listening to it on vinyl.
Youve gotta flip it over, it sounds different because its mastered in a different way.
Were there any specific circumstances or experiences that you were directly singing about on this album?
Well, I was getting sick a lot last year.
So I guess that was another way that I was prescient.
You lose the capacity to enjoy life.
But I tried to look at it from a perspective that could gain some artistic value.
I looked at literature.
So that was something that I wanted to tap into with this song.
Being on the borderline between life and death, and being in that extreme state.
Which is an exaggeration of what I was going through.
I was never on my deathbed.
But [I was] not 100 percent physically.
I think a lot of this album is different physical states.
And then the rest of the album is a counter against that.
It really goes back and forth.
The song Hollywood feels like an outlier, musically.
Its a little bit of a story song.
And to me that song is a paranoid monologue thats triggered by these things.
Was that something you wanted to achieve?
Ive never really liked English as a language.
I think its kind of ugly and awkward.
So that was the stylistic shift: wanting to learn how to use language better and more precisely.
Reading a lot of Robert Frost, E.E.
Cummings, and guidebooks on how to write and trying to fall in love with the English language.
Yeah thats what it is.
I liked it, it was awkward and a strange way to express it.
It kind of turned the thing on its shoulders.
Making A Door Less Open is out 5/1.
