So we spoke to Will Toledo from ‘Car Seat Headrest’ about his songs for ‘The Song That…’
Got me into music…
The Beatles – “Baby, You’re A Rich Man”. One of the first albums I ever received was the Yellow Submarine Songtrack. I was already a fan of the movie, and I remember trying to match up all the songs on the album to their appearance in the film. This song in particular had an ethereal, mythical quality to me because it only showed up in the film as a brief snatch of melody before drifting away. Hearing the full track felt like getting private access into some secret heart. It still feels mysterious to me – I can’t think of another track from the 60s that sounds remotely like this. It’s almost pre-disco, but I was into this before I knew what disco was.
Reminds me of my favourite festival…
Rapture – “Out of the Races and Onto the Tracks”. Well, I’ve only really been to one big festival, and that was SXSW a couple weeks ago, so I suppose it’d be a song I listened to a lot while I was there, like “Out of the Races and Onto the Tracks” by the Rapture. We rented out a little shack by the highway about 10 minutes away from the festival, and I’d go out to the porch in the mornings and play this song on my laptop over the noise of traffic and breeze.
I love this year so far…
Kanye West 0 “30 Hours”. This album came at the perfect time for me; I needed to hear that messy, vulnerable collection of fragments from an artist I trusted. 30 Hours is where the album really comes together for me, as a conceptual “bonus track”; it’s about the limitless potential of the artistic process, and of the artistic persona, as represented by artistic indecision. I’ve heard some people dismissing the extended outro as weak, but its half-finished nature is the perfect metonym for the idea behind the album – an ego-statement that is comfortable enough with its own humanity to let its loose ends show, to make the loose ends themselves serve as the statement. I love the new Kanye.
I want played at my funeral…
Sufjan Stevens – “All Delighted People”. Funeral picks are always a bit loaded, aren’t they? Sufjan seems like he’s cut out for this sort of thing, and I’ve always loved this song deeply. Preferably it would be performed live, with a 30-piece ensemble, and doves being released.
I would play in a set to impress…
The Gershwins – “Summertime”, chiefly going off the Billy Stewart version. I just heard that the other month and it’s proved highly infectious. His energy and scat-powers would be hard to match, but it would be very fun to try.
Always gets me up and dancing…
David Bowie – “Modern Love”. I have a friend who is a big Leos Carax fan and thanks to him, I’ve seen a clip from Mauvais Sang of Denis Lavant running furiously down a Parisian street to “Modern Love” about 30 times despite having no idea what the rest of the film is about. It ended up being an effective argument for the song, though, as I’m always driven to running down the street myself whenever the song comes on now.
Sums me up…
Radiohead – “Karma Police”. This is a song I only recently “got”; I’d always just heard it as a cool song with weird, impressionistic lyrics. But it feels fairly direct to me now – it’s the same character as in The Wall, the sensitive, tormented fascist who can’t get off the payroll. Sometimes you get so negative in your thinking, when you step back for a minute it’s like seeing you were toeing the brink of something deep and dark that it would be very difficult to climb back from. Phew!