About Car Seat Headrest
Car Seat Headrest is an American indie rock band formed in Leesburg, Virginia, and currently located in Seattle, Washington. The band consists of Will Toledo , Ethan Ives , Seth Dalby , and Andrew Katz .
Beginning as a solo recording project by Toledo in 2010, Car Seat Headrest self-released 12 projects on the music platform Bandcamp between 2010 and 2014 before signing to Matador Records in 2015. They began touring as a full band the following year.
Car Seat Headrest began as the solo project of singer/songwriter and multi-instrumentalist Will Toledo shortly after he graduated high school. Toledo had previously released music under other aliases, including The 63rd Fret and Nervous Young Men, and been a member of the band Mr. Yay Ok, but after struggling to establish an audience, he decided to change tactics, choosing to try and release more experimental songs anonymously. Toledo chose the name "Car Seat Headrest" as he would often record the vocals to his early albums in the back seat of his family's car for privacy.
Throughout the summer of 2010, Toledo released his first four albums under the Car Seat Headrest name: 1, 2, 3, and 4. 1 and 2 incorporated less traditional song structures, with stream-of-consciousness lyrics, whereas 3 and 4 would begin to cement his lo-fi indie rock style. Following the numbered albums, Toledo began attending classes at Virginia Commonwealth University, releasing the Sunburned Shirts EP during his first semester. The Sunburned Shirts EP would later be semi-combined with his fifth LP, 5 , to create his first titled album, My Back Is Killing Me Baby, released in March 2011. Songs culled from 5 would later appear on the B-sides compilation album Little Pieces of Paper with "No" Written on Them.
After a difficult and lonely semester at VCU, Toledo transferred to the College of William & Mary, where he would release his next project, Twin Fantasy, a concept album centering around a relationship he was in at the time. Twin Fantasy would later be followed up by 2012's Monomania and Living While Starving ) EP.
Around this time, Toledo began performing live shows with fellow students Katie Wood, Austin Ruhf, and Christian Northover, recording and releasing a short live album in July 2013 entitled Live at WCWM: Car Seat Headrest at the university's studio. Toledo would release his next project the following month, a two-hour-long double album entitled Nervous Young Man, described on its Bandcamp page as "a collection of songs written between ages 17 and 21". Three of the songs, and the title of the album, were taken from his original project, Nervous Young Men, but had been heavily reworked and re-recorded. Released alongside Nervous Young Man, for those who paid $5 or more, was the outtakes compilation album Disjecta Membra.
Toledo's final solo release was 2014's How to Leave Town, an hour-long EP with heavy electronic instrumentation and more ambitious song structures.
Map & Directions To Venue
