‘Beach Life-In-Death’: Car Seat Headrest’s most defining achievement to date
Car Seat Headrest frontman Will Toledo was only 18 when he first wrote what would eventually become the 13-minute, three-act rock epic ‘Beach Life-In-Death’. The all-encompassing life-or-death feeling that comes with being a teenager is exemplified expertly sonically and lyrically with its jittery, rugged guitar parts and the immense detail in Toldeo’s anxious ramblings.
In a career retrospective interview with Steven Hyden of Uproxx, Toledo recalled, “I can remember just walking around Williamsburg, [Virginia] sort of completing how all of the parts [of ‘Beach Life-in-Death’] were going to go together. That was already a long shot off from how Car Seat Headrest started—I wasn’t thinking about music unless I was literally working on it. Planning out ‘Beach Life-in-Death’ and working on it was definitely where the palette of the album took place, where it was going to be this sort of carefully crafted thing that reflected a larger plan, not just a collection of songs.” Despite being the album’s second track, it was always the thematic and emotional centrepiece that Twin Fantasy was built around.
Toledo was able to flesh out ‘Beach Life’ into a fully formed masterpiece while re-recording Twin Fantasy for a proper release with Matador Records. The once-fuzzy guitars recorded in his dorm room are now crisp and easier to parse. The drums hit harder, too, with Andrew Katz’s tight playing and a punchy snare front and centre.
Like some of the other songs on the album, Toledo made slight changes to the lyrics for the 2018 recording. The second verse of the second act was changed to “In the mall in the night time / You came back alone with a flashlight / Ooh, it’s a not that odd to some / And it was my favourite scene / I couldn’t tell you what it means / But it meant something to me”. Those final two lyrics so succinctly capture being emotionally impacted by art but unable to articulate why.
The stream-of-consciousness storytelling that Toledo uses on ‘Beach Life’ (among many other Car Seat Headrest songs) is consistently effective and compelling as he continues to divulge details of what’s happening to him and how he feels about it, down to recalling individual parts of conversations.
“I pretended I was drunk when I came out to my friends / I never came out to my friends / We were all on Skype / And I laughed and I changed the subject / She said ‘What’s with this dog motif?’ / I said ‘Do you have something against dogs?'” is an emotional climax of the song’s first act, as Toledo transforms what is a mildly awkward moment in hindsight into how it felt in the moment—embarrassing and earth-shattering.
The lyrical motifs communicate that maintaining the habits that allow you to keep living feels just as much a life-or-death situation as the harrowing experience of navigating queerness as an adolescent. Toledo’s psychosomatic fantasies hold just as much weight as his asides about metaphorical fish businessmen. The song, compositionally, puts the listener into constant oscillations of tension and release, begging to be paid attention to. There’s not a moment where ‘Beach Life’ feels as long as it actually is, and that is nothing but a testament to its excellence and once-in-a-lifetime creativity from Toledo.
