Twin Fantasy is by favourite album ever!!!

To celebrate it turning 13 on the 2nd of November, I wanted to share my love for Car Seat Headrest's most famous album, Twin Fantasy. I recently relistened to it for about the umpteenth time, and was given a reassuring reminder of why I call it my favourite album ever. Every aspect of it seems perfectly suited to my personality, my lyrical sensibilities, my preferences for song structures, and my taste for sound. I'll be referencing and talking about both versions, as I see them as one piece of art in a sense. 

Firstly, Will Toledo is probably my favourite lyricist in the entire world. As someone with autism, I like directness and clarity, and one thing that often frustrates me in music is when a lyricist seemingly has no central idea behind the lyrics of their song. I'm okay with abstract and vague lyrics, but at a certain point it can often feel like the writer is just babbling jibberish with no continuity from one lyric to the next. This has never been an issue with Will's lyrics, which are most often straightforward, honest, and open expressions of extremely passionate and intense emotions. Take Beach Life-in-Death, wherein he belts out "I DON'T WANT TO GO INSANE, I DON'T WANT TO HAVE SCHIZOPHRENIA," (yes it is spelled in all-caps on the lyric sheet) or "We said we hated humans, we wanted to be humans." Of course, being so blunt can leave you open to your lyrics lacking personality or flavour, but Will makes up for this by either putting so much force behind his words that you have to believe him, or adding a sort of awkward or unusual phrasing that catches your ear and makes you think, for example, expressing his fear of death as worrying "Our bodies could fall apart at any second," or how he details his ideal relationship as two boys "Connected at the back of the head... [with] a conduit." On top of being emotionally direct, Will is very vivid and descriptive in his imagery, like how descriptive he is of the road he's driving on at the start of Beach Life-in-Death, saying "There were signs on the road that warned me of stop signs, the speed limit kept decreasing by ten." These may seem like rather benign details, but I beg to differ, since they clearly signify something - that Will is about to enter a busy area, likely a town, and the slower speed and stop signs gives way to a reflection on his past, perhaps one that took place near the town he's driving through. He uses the imagery again to close off his flashback again, abruptly interrupting it by saying "Ran into the decreasing speed limits again." I know of few writers who are able to describe something like this in so much detail, to pull so much imagery out of what must have been a rather brief moment, when he was driving and got distracted by the memory of his lover. Furthermore, Will takes a page out of the book of romantic era writers, and grounds his emotions in the forces of nature, like how he describes his resurfacing feelings for this boy as "The ocean washed over your grave," or how he describes his boyfriend's deep-seeded issues as hiding "Out from the forest adjacent to your garage," or him describing his retreat into a fantasy world as a shunning of sunlight, "I said hell is the sun, burning forever at the centre of things... a brain on fire at the centre of things." It's all of these sensibilities that lend Will's lyrics on this album, and many of his others, to being extremely descriptive, imaginative, emotive, and moving; there is never a word wasted with Car Seat Headrest lyrics. 

Secondly, the composition of the album and its songs is fascinating; no two songs share the same structure, which makes the album feel constantly fresh with new ideas. And despite Will's clear pop sensibilities, he never makes the songs feel samey or boring; every song on the album has a unique quality to it, that makes it stick with you for ages, be it the cathartic belting on Beach Life-in-Death, the mixed-meter outro of Sober to Death, the hypnotic psychedelia of High to Death, or the rapturous climaxes throughout Famous Prophets. Not only this, but Will makes constant recalls to lines and themes from earlier in the album, encouraging the listener to see the album as a narrative, and he does these recalls in fascinating and extremely evocative ways. For example, the rather hopeful pathos of My Boy is brought back during Sober to Death, when Will chants, "Don't worry, you and me won't be alone no more," set to an instrumental alternating between 4/4 and 6/8, making the message feel not just romantic, but bittersweet and tragic, as if Will is saying that the only solace in his chaotic relationship is that neither of them will be alone. Or, take how in Beach Life-in-Death, Will detached himself from humanity, portraying him and his lover both as anthropomorphic dogs, lamenting, "We said we hated humans, we wanted to be humans." A few songs later in Cute Thing, Will exuberantly tells his lover, "Dog, give me one little chance, I can make you a man," before barking after a few more lines. But perhaps the most gut-wrenching and shocking example of this is when, in the middle of the first half of the album, Will has a song solely consisting of him with a guitar, repeating "Stop smoking, we love you, and we don't want you to die," but then in the middle of the second half of the album, he interpolates it, changing it to "Keep smoking, I love you, but I don't wanna die." Things like this make the album so rewarding to engage with, because you pick up on new parallels between each of the songs almost every time you listen to the album. On top of the songs being structurally fascinating, the production quality is fantastic, on both versions. Despite it being by far the biggest difference between 2011's "Mirror to Mirror" and 2018's "Face to Face," both versions do their best with their resources. MTM's discordant and screechy lo-fi sound makes for an intimate and strange atmosphere, as if you're listening to someone recording something from within their closet. The loud, grating instrumentals almost act as outlets for anxiety and worry, both for Will and for the listener, perhaps similar to the catharsis of many harsh noise songs. Meanwhile, FTF made sure not to just recreate the album 1-1 with better sounding instruments, but took full advantage of the band's resources to make the instrumentals as fleshed out as possible. While MTM sounds intimate and shy, FTF is wide, atmospheric, and grandiose, with there being so many different textures blended into every part of the mix, it ends up feeling like a beautiful yet tortured mess. One need only listen to the different versions of Beach Life-in-Death to hear the difference - 2011's version feels like one is sitting far back on a beach, shy to even approach the sand because it reminds him of his lover, while 2018's version sounds like he is swimming out to sea, fighting the crashing tides that seek to destroy him, determined to find his lover, and to reach "The impossible." Either image adds so much to the meaning of the song, evidencing how Will is not only a fantastic songwriter, but a wonderful producer, whose layered, chaotic soundscapes add so much to both his lyrics and personality. 

Thirdly, the album's subject matter and subtext seem almost specifically tailored to people like me. Not only is Will Toledo himself a gay furry, but the manners in which he speaks about, idealises, and expresses his love for his desired boyfriend feels so familiar to me. Never have I seen what I desire out of a relationship with another boy so eloquently put into music. When I imagine what life with a boyfriend would be like, I imagine us doing things like running around in a field together, jumping on stone walls and walking across them, bathing in a river, or going to some hidden corner of a forest to be intimate with each other. Will doesn't name any of these things, but what he does name evokes a similar kind of boyish, mischievous charm, e.g. "We threw rocks into the river, the river underneath the traintracks," "Do you have any crimes that we can use to pass the time?" "We can stay up all night, we can stay under the covers and play with flashlights."  If I had to guess, I'd say the reason for these fantasies involving these very juvenile pastimes is a desire for that which we, as queer people, were denied as children. Never would a parent encourage their child to seek romance with someone of the same sex, so we often just didn't ever explore those parts of ourselves as children. But now that we're not children, we regret not pursuing our romantic interests, and so yearn to turn back time and do all the silly and adventurous things that children do, with the person we love. At least, that's my experience and my rationalisation.

To add more, I think that Twin Fantasy is not just a breakup album, but an album about being gay. More specifically, a "Quiet gay," a group of people who can't fit in with heterosexuals, but feel alienated by the very extroverted nature of pride. Perhaps this is what Will meant when he sang "I am incapable of being human, I am incapable of being inhuman," on Beach Life-in-Death. Themes which characterise the "Quiet gay" experience are present all throughout the album; social isolation - "I pretended I was drunk when I came out to my friends," - mental health issues - "We were wrecks before we crashed into each other," - substance abuse - "Stop smoking, we love you," - religious trauma - "For three transgressions of Will, and for four I will not revoke the punishment," and, of course, retreat into fantasy - "I haven't looked at the sun for so long." Of course, none of these things are exclusive, even to the LGBT experience, but they are much more common in queer people, and as a "Quiet gay" myself, it's very heartening to have an album that speaks to my familiarities in manners that I've never seen put to song beforehand. There's a great sense of shame and fear that pulsates throughout this album, as if the foundation of the relationship here is built upon some sort of great risk, and could come falling down at any moment. It's shown how both parties suffer from a great deal of issues, Will's depression and feeling of unbelonging, - "I am inseparable from the impossible," - and his boyfriend's substance abuse and mental instability - "Every conversation just ends with you screaming." But that isn't the only reason that Will's seemingly ideal relationship is still so anxious; for many gay people, all relationships are built upon that shaky foundations, because there's a sense of disobedience that comes with having a relationship with someone of the same sex. This is likely why Will asks on Beach Life-in-Death, "Do you have any crimes that we can use to pass the time?" Suggesting that no matter how they are spending their time, they're inherently doing something wrong, because in many people's eyes, they are. This may also be why Will invokes the image of beaches and oceans so much - just as they are the fringe of the land, he feels like he is living on the fringe of society. This sense of guilt is also why Will seems so bizarrely deathconscious throughout this album; three of its song titles feature the word, he refers to his resurfacing feeling about his boyfriend as "The ocean washed over your grave," and a whole song, "Bodys," is dedicated to partying while apprehended by a panicked sense of impending doom. Historically, queer people have always had to fear the worst, because the worst was often what happened - if they were ever found out, their lives would be ruined, or even if they weren't, they had to live their lives as two different people, not to mention how many gay people in history lost their lives for it, either at the hands of hateful fanatics, or terrible diseases. Will likely had it in his head that, because he was pursuing a gay romance, he was putting his own life at risk, something he likely got from his (at least, at the time) homophobic father; "You are a cog in the machines, screaming 'Death to them and their kind,'" he begrudged on Who Even Knows, a song from an earlier album. This homophobia itself may have been some sort of result of generational trauma, or internalised hatred, as Will would later describe on Napoleon (March into Russia), "My dad called me 'f*g' even though he had slept with men." Twin Fantasy not only portrays heartbreak and loneliness in an incredibly unique way, but couples it along with extremely powerful expressions of how past generations' treatment of LGBT people deeply affects queer people to this day, perfectly encapsulating how widespread hatred towards us causes the relationships we form to be built on shaky and unstable grounds. It's a sobering reminder of how far queer rights have come, and how we are still affected by our past.  

Twin Fantasy is probably the most important album I have ever listened to. It has comforted me so many times when I felt lonely and misunderstood, it's bursting at the seams with intelligent lyricism and explosive production, and there is no doubt in my mind that it will continue to be, one of, if not my favourite, album ever made. 

Thank you so much for reading :]