Sunday Songs: 5/11/25

Happy Sunday, bibliophiles! First off, a very happy Mother’s Day to my wonderful mom. She inspires me to be a better and more creative person every day, and I don’t think I’d be putting pen to paper (in the drawing and writing sense) nearly as much without her guidance and creative inspiration. So thank you for all your support, hard work, and love. I am so, so lucky. 🩵

School’s out, and it should be back to our scheduled programming soon enough. Of course, every time I take a break, I end up rambling tenfold to make up for the absence…apologies in advance. This is what happens when you let me get ahold of a new Car Seat Headrest album.

Since I’ve been in the finals doldrums for a bit, here are my graphics from the past few weeks:

4/27/25:

• “Souvlaki Space Station” – Slowdive
• “Help Me Out” – Tyler Ballgame
• “Seven Deadly Finns” – Brian Eno
• “Ping Pong Time Tennis” – Jim Noir
• “Love on a Farmboy’s Wages” – XTC

5/4/25:

• “Just the Same But Brand New” – St. Vincent
• “The Only Marble I’ve Got Left” – Julien Baker & TORRES
• “Messages from Sophia” – Lisa Germano
• “Raising the Skate” – Speedy Ortiz
• “Like Real People Do” – Hozier

This week: BRO DOESN’T EVEN REALIZE THIS IS RESPECTABLE STREET! 🫵😂

Enjoy this week’s songs!

SUNDAY SONGS: 5/11/25

“Reality” – Car Seat Headrest

The more I think about The Scholars, the more I realize that this is the extreme of Car Seat Headrest’s qualities. Will Toledo has always been a scholar, and a deeply self-indulgent one. I don’t mean that derogatorily at all—his songs are just packed to the gills with references: often Biblical and also encompassing musical and literary greats. Although his life is still interwoven within the narrative (“Is it you or the sickness that’s talking?” on “The Catastrophe [Good Luck With That, Man]”), The Scholars is a veritable library in and of itself.

Not only are the usual suspects of Biblical references and allusions to music and literature, and Toledo’s past work are there, but The Scholars is Car Seat Headrest’s furry rock opera, an omniscient epic taking place at the fictional Parnassus University. There’s a full summary of it in a libretto that’s only available if you buy the vinyl, but thanks to the saints at Genius who, I’ve been able to piece together some of the narrative; it consists of vibrant characters coming out of the closet to their parents, participating in various subcultures around the college, a rival clown college, and a band of punk troubadours. All this culminates in [checks notes] the Dean of Parnassus University getting poisoned after the students from the rival clown college invade. It’s a trip…but I wish it was more readily available! When I say that The Scholars is self-indulgent, I love it in the sense that Will Toledo has created such an inventive, sprawling world between the notes of this album, and that he’s let his ambition run wild, in terms of the scale of the story and the prog sensibilities of the album. He clearly appreciates the value of letting people solve riddles and puzzles, but he’s left hardly any clues to piece together the narrative if we don’t have the libretto. I’d just like it to be more accessible—not in the sense of being more “listener friendly,” but in the sense that I want to actually be able to access the story. There’s clearly so many layers to The Scholars, and I’m dying to know more of the nuance.

That being said, even if you don’t know the story of the Rise and Fall of CCF and the Clowns from Parnassus University, The Scholars is a treat. For the first half, I was almost duped into thinking that the band had almost dipped back into Teens of Denial territory, which was twofold. On the one hand, Teens of Denial has a deeply special place in my heart, a staple of my fourteen-year-old girlhood and one of my favorite albums of all time. After the missteps of Making a Door Less Open, The Scholars is a return to form in some ways. As good as the first half was, I was afraid that it was too much so—even with the rock opera behind it, songs like “Equals” did rather feel like the same stories of drugs and regret that populating Teens of Denial. Yet after “Gethsemane,” “Reality” takes a turn into the more sprawling—and always fascinating. Trading off vocals between Toledo and Ethan Ives, it plunges into pure, 21st-century rock opera, complete with the avalanche of drama and pounding guitars that comes in at around the five-minute mark. I swear that some of the chord progressions remind me of “Cosmic Hero,” another one of my favorite epics from the band, but it’s painted into an unending landscape. Through all eleven minutes, I get the feeling of the culmination of all of the story’s events before the climax—it’s a drawn-out feeling, but one of certainty: they can’t escape what they’ve made, and they must move forward with acceptance of their fate; the whispered utterance of “no stage left” feels like an admittance that they can’t see what they’ve done, but there’s no escape from the consequences: they can’t see the audience. I’m circling back to self-indulgence, but the term sounds so negative: this just feels like Toledo unleashing the multitude of narratives within him. Is it easy to sit down and listen to songs that are nearly 20 minutes long? No, even for me. Yet as esoteric as it is, “Reality,” and this album, is worth your while, if you’ve got the time to set aside. Bottom line: be self-indulgent with your art. It doesn’t matter if there’s a small audience or no audience—you create what you think the world is missing, and the right people will find it.

…AND A BOOK TO GO WITH IT:

The Scholars 28-page libretto, only available when you purchase the vinyl – not trying to be snarky about it, genuinely. But heck, it’s pretty much a play in and of itself, complete with stage directions in the liner notes.

“Respectable Street” – XTC

This has to be the first Britpop song.

It’s long been accepted that XTC helped mold the Britpop movement as we know it—in fact, he almost had a direct hand in it, as he was Blur’s first choice to produce Modern Life is Rubbish; he produced a handful of the original mixes before departing from the project. But XTC made Britpop 12 years earlier. As much as I adore Blur’s sound and lyrical style from Modern Life up until about The Great Escape, hearing “Respectable Street” makes me realize exactly where they were coming in. I wouldn’t go so far to call some of it a rip-off…well, I almost would. I love Blur too much for that. Blur did develop their own style within this method, but at first, their claim to fame was largely due to songs like these. Not only does this song take a microscope to the arbitrary hypocrisies littering an uptight, quintessentially British neighborhood, but Andy Partridge has the vocal swagger to carry it all. Damon Albarn had the looks, but the line delivery is all Partridge, full of snark and with a cheeky wink as he lays out all of the double standards and not-so-well-kept secrets: “Sunday church and they look fetching/Saturday night saw him retching over our fence.” Of course, almost half of the jabs got butchered by the radio edit (“Now they talk about abortion” was replaced with “absorption,” which makes no sense, but…not a whole lot sounds like abortion, I guess?), but no amount of censorship would dull Partridge’s signature, acerbic style. Piled on with in-your-face production and the quick strikes of guitars, and you’ve got a song that inspired a generation—and hasn’t gotten the least bit old.

Also, about the promo above: I just know that set sounded heinous…I’m gonna go out on a limb and say, however talented all these guys are, that most of them did not know how to play cellos or violins. Definitely the point. Still, it must’ve sounded like middle school band practice in there…

…AND A BOOK TO GO WITH IT:

“Puerto Rico Way” – The 6ths

Stephin Merritt’s writing continues to be something to behold. Even though Mark Robinson (of Unrest fame) is at the vocal helm here, this is one of the 6th’s songs that’s most indicative of Merritt’s ability to not just set a scene, but make something so objectively seedy and nasty-sounding into the most cheerful, sun-bleached indie pop you’ve ever heard. Take the first few lines:

“The sun pissing in the streets/Of some hungover place/Dances with two left feet upon her face/But soft! She is fast asleep/Beneath her mosquitoes/You would never want to know what she knows…”

First off, the imagery of the sun “pissing in the street” is a stroke of genius, evoking the lazy way that sunlight bends and dapples along the subject’s face—something so objectively beautiful turned wayward and gross, an effect that’s stacked once the drunkenness is emphasized by it “dancing with two left feet.” The environment in “Puerto Rico Way” is so bloated with alcohol and oppressive heat, but it carries itself like all of Merritt’s indie pop songs—with more confidence than it should have, given the disappointing, warmed-over love he often writes about. On the track list, it rides the high of “Here in My Heart,” which could add to the cheeriness, but this track carves out a slice of hope, even if Martina doesn’t accept the narrator’s dance, in this “hungover place.” (The drunk, free-spirited, redheaded Martina does read like a manic pixie dream girl, so maybe it wasn’t meant to be after all. Martina’s so crazzzzzzzy! Love her!!!) The admission that “Oh love, it would’ve been ideal” implies that no, she didn’t, but that indie pop-timism (I’ll see myself out) creates a wrapped towel of sunburnt nostalgia, a photograph bleached in the sun, of a fleeting dance and a fleeting girl.

…AND A BOOK GO WITH IT:

“Sheela-Na-Gig” – PJ Harvey

It’s always fascinating to look at songs that seem ostensibly quite feminist, but had none of that intention behind them. Take “Army of Me,” a song that I’ve always interpreted as being about feminine resistance, but was more about Björk trying to get her lazy brother to get up and do something with his life. The lyrics are quite self-empowered, easily interpreted as women breaking free from male-ordered subservience. The feminist leanings are there, but it’s only a sliver of the truth. Do I still feel empowered when I listen to it? Of course. But it’s not the whole story.

The same is true of “Sheela-Na-Gig.” The title references a type of Celtic fertility figure, an image of a laughing woman posing with her genitalia bared outwards. As such, the narrator goes through a sort of comedy of errors as she gets rejected over and over after flaunting her sexual qualities to no avail (“Look at these/my childbearing hips”). It’s easy to take it as a kind of internalizing what men want in women, exhibiting it, and then being turned away when it’s not to their standards; there’s an element of slut-shaming in the male figures not wanting the narrator because she’s “unclean.” The chorus of “Gonna wash that man right outta my hair” (interpolated from South Pacific) is empowered, especially after being kicked to the curb so many times by judgmental men. But PJ Harvey never intended it to be feminist song: as she told Melody Maker in 1992, “I wanted that sense of humour in the song…being able to laugh at yourself in relationships. There’s some anger there but, for me, it’s a funny song. I wasn’t intending it to be a feminist song or anything. I wanted it to have several sides.” And there is something funny about that—if you’ve been rejected with all of the repetition and swiftness of Wile E. Coyote falling off a cliff, all you can do is look back and laugh.

It is a sort of death of the author situation; “Sheela-Na-Gig” hasn’t necessarily been lauded as some feminist anthem (and Harvey said in the same interview above that she didn’t want to be “lumped in” with more forwardly feminist bands), but even a quick glance at any reviews of the song shows that’s how many people tend to take it. In the context of PJ Harvey’s other songs, which are incontestably about misogyny and her struggles as a woman in a male-dominated industry (and world) (see: “50ft Queenie”), “Sheela-Na-Gig” seems to fit into that puzzle. I don’t want to wave that over people’s heads like they interpreted it incorrectly, either—it’s not like I got the aspect on my first listen. (I credit that to Trash Theory.) Personally, I didn’t think all of it was necessarily funny at first, although being as Gen Z as I am, I’ve only heard the phrase “childbearing hips” used sarcastically, so I took that as such. After going through literary theory, I’ve definitely been on the fence-sitting side as far as whether or not to go full death-of-the-author on any given song; the reader’s interpretation does shape the work, but I find it foolish to take it without considering the author’s intent. With “Sheela-Na-Gig,” I think there’s a lot that can be empowering, but what may be most empowering to me is finding the humor in being a woman. The semi-autobiographical narrator swings and misses repeatedly, but doesn’t let any judgement get under her skin. All of the ferocious power chords signal that she’s ready to dust herself off and try again. In the present moment, the narrator hasn’t yet learned, but the fact that PJ Harvey has looked back and learned herself seems more the point to me: having the self-awareness to feel bad for your past self, but be able to laugh at their mistakes. There’s power in being able to look back and laugh instead of wallow in sorrow—when you’re a woman, it’s all you can do sometimes. It may not necessarily be feminist, but it sure is a part of life.

…AND A BOOK TO GO WITH IT:

“Ate the Moon” – Tunde Adebimpe

It’s been almost a month since Thee Black Boltz came out, and the question remains: is this enough to sate us through the dreaded TV on the Radio drought? For the most part, I’d say yes—but it’s a separate, branching effort. Though it proves that Tunde Adebimpe was the beating heart of the band, he’s more than formidable on his own, minus Dave Sitek’s production and piled on with more synths. Though it’s not without its misses, Thee Black Boltz feels like Adebimpe stretching his fingers out in all different directions, but never stretching them beyond what makes me come back to TV on the Radio so often.

With a central theme of overwhelm during times of crisis and searching for light—creativity—amidst the choking smog, Adebimpe turns to synths and more danceable beats (see: “Somebody New,” a bolder, dancier gamble that mostly paid off in spite of the autotune) in order to pull through. “Ate the Moon” is about that overwhelm, if the title doesn’t already clue you in. Swallowed by anxious spiraling and visions of horror, the narrator scrambles for answers, but finds only regret: an echoing, childlike voice proclaims after the “the man who ate the moon” chorus that “and he choked, of course, because he bit off more than he could chew. Such a dummy!” “Dummy” echoes and is pitched down as it fades out, distorted into a trickster baring a triumphant, toothy grin as it disappears into the darkness like the Cheshire Cat. “Ate the Moon” certainly has some of what I think the albums pitfalls are: the lyricism is on the simpler, more obvious side. Not inherently a drawback, but after something as rawly and artfully written as “Tonight,” it feels cheap for him to rhyme “fire” and “desire” for the millionth time. It’s like Jeff Tweedy using someone being “cool enough to be ice cream” as a metaphor after being such an unparalleled poet otherwise. But like “Ice Cream,” it’s easy to love “Ate the Moon.” With the instant hit of Adebimpe’s boxing gloved punch of a voice and the synths and guitars that have been sewn into an electronic gestalt, it’s one of the most unique songs on the album, an adrenaline-pumped trip into the downward spiral of autonomy-less fear.

…AND A BOOK TO GO WITH IT:

Since this post consists entirely of songs, consider all of them to be today’s song.