“We’ve always had an omnivorous process”: Car Seat Headrest’s Ethan Ives on the power of movies and literature in creating a rock opera
Cutting your teeth into a rock opera is an almighty ask for many listeners, especially in an age where entertainment barely holds our attention spans for more than 30 seconds before moving on to the next soundbite. But that notion of delivering an all-round show is not something that Car Seat Headrest have ever been put off by. Indeed, perhaps more than most, they have revelled in the challenge of creating their magnum opus record, The Scholars, in a way only true musicians can appreciate, especially when, at times, the world seemed to be conspiring against them.
With the band having been borne out of frontman Will Toledo’s nascent ambitions some 15 years ago, in many ways, the journey leading up to conquering a rock opera has only been possible thanks to a solid grounding in musical education. “I was a huge fan of The Wall and Ziggy Stardust as a teenager, both of those had a really big impact on me,” the band’s guitarist, Ethan Ives, tells me over Zoom. A hardly surprising answer since references, particularly to the latter, are littered everywhere across the latest record.
However, considering the context of everything that Car Seat Headrest have endured in the last five years since their previous album, 2020’s Making a Door Less Open, a complete pivot of their sonic horizons was almost a natural decision. Both Toledo and drummer Andrew Katz suffered from the long-term effects of Covid-19 after contracting the virus in 2022, forcing the band into a period of inactivity for over two years.
During this time, Ives reflects resolutely, it forced the four piece to take a “blank slate, where we could approach the album from a different kind of process than we had done before, and so as dread-inducing and nerve-wracking as it was to be away for that long, it was kind of lucky that it coincided with that album cycle where we were able to have that window to change the way that we were doing things.”
The result was The Scholars, released May 2nd, a nine-track odyssey charting the trials and rebellions of the students at the fictional Parnassus University. It’s a mystical, fantastical coming-of-age all set to the soundtrack of the last 25 years of indie sonics channelled into one. But this, according to Ives and the band’s much-vaunted fresh perspective, also involved taking inspiration from a multi-faceted world of fiction, movies, and literature, branching far beyond purely the sonics.
“Will and I are both kind of big movie heads,” Ives explains, “and so sometimes if we’re collaborating on lyrics, often that will be the language that we will reference things in. We definitely talked about Jane Schoenbrun movies that we were both big fans of, that we’ve seen recently.”
“When we were working on the song ‘Reality’, we were talking about I Saw the TV Glow, which we both loved,” he continues. “There was a whole angle in that song, actually, where we talked a little bit about ’60s counterculture movies, or biker movies, like Easy Rider, and that was an angle we were kind of toying with.”
How exactly do these filmic touchpoints integrate with the music? “I think Car Seat has always kind of had an omnivorous process. There’s definitely a lot of cinephile references and tendencies in the lyrics and the construction of the songs.”
Not only this, but literature also played a pivotal role—naturally for an album titled The Scholars—in the process of creating the record. Having a penchant for books myself, this was certainly one of the most interesting aspects of this current effort, personally, and I asked Ives what his reading recommendations permeating the album were.
“I had definitely been reading The Death of Arthur around that time,” he recalls. “I was reading the Tolkien translation of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight recently, as we were finishing up the album. Those were definitely things that I think resonate. At the start of the process I was reading a lot of Philip K Dick. I feel like Car Seat material is kind of a two-part thing, there’s a lot of cinematic references, and there’s also a lot of literature and book references.”
These are natural touchpoints for many creatives, but what is perhaps most striking about Ives’ process is his admission that, “When I am writing, I am almost thinking of those things more than I’m thinking about music, especially for lyrics and things. I feel like I think about books and movies more than I think about other lyricists.” More than most, it’s this clever coalescing of art forms that is bound to propel Car Seat Headrest to the next chapter of their journey, with the fans firmly still in their grasp; the guitarist is confident.
“Our fans have certain qualities that I think are different from maybe a lot of other rock fandoms or indie fandoms,” he muses, “Where they really enjoy that kind of detective work of parcelling out small clues or references to other things or songs. I think they really, really enjoy making those kinds of really granular connections.”
“So, you know, I don’t think that a general audience is really clamouring to read booklets anymore,” Ives concedes, “But I do think that for people in our particular fan base, that seems to be in the wheelhouse of stuff that they really like doing.”
He mentions the booklet that comes with The Scholars, and I jump at the chance to ask about it, as it’s undeniably the missing piece of the puzzle to the album. Written in a script form, akin to a play or musical, it provides the unique experience where reading along with the record is far more insightful than merely listening to it alone, with the characters of Parnassus and their trials, tribulations, and quests so viscerally brought to life.
But this leads to the natural question of whether The Scholars will eventually find itself on the stage. After all, the script is basically written, and it wouldn’t be without precedent. Musicals like We Will Rock You have already converted huge electric epics into tales of fantasy and magical realism, not dissimilar to Car Seat Headrest’s latest efforts. When I ask Ives if there ever was a possibility of a Scholars musical, he certainly doesn’t seem to blast the idea.
“Someone actually asked about this a few days ago,” he laughs. “We’ve never talked about doing anything like that, but it is like a very interesting thought where, to a certain degree, it does feel like a lot of that work has already been done of establishing those things, and all it would take was just kind of imagining like logistically how that would work. It is something that I enjoy thinking about, especially with there being precedent for [it]—going back to like The Wall or something like that, an example of an album coming out and then post-release getting this kind of realisation visually.”
It may not definitively be in the pipeline, but at least a seed may have been planted for whatever form The Scholars could assume in its future life, and if that musical ever does come to life, I’ll be looking for a cut. But, for now, after five turbulent years for Car Seat Headrest, the album is almost a sigh of relief that their creativity never went on hiatus, despite the people having to take a backseat. A rock opera is a massive comeback feat, but if Ives makes one thing evident, it’s only the first chapter in their onward journey.
