Car Seat Headrest have remade Teens of Denials, fashioning the breakout LP into something resembling a concept album. Out today for the record’s 10th anniversary, Teen of Denial: Joe’s Story adjusts the original lyrics and threads into new recordings to better tell the titular character’s story. “The resulting work,” Will Toledo says in press materials, “feels more like the album Teens of Denial was meant to be.” The band reunited with original producer Steve Fisk for the record. Listen to it below ahead of a physical release on October 16.
The character of Joe, Toledo explains, was an homage to Daniel Johnston, who used the name in several songs “as a sort of joke, a stand-in for himself.” He goes on, “I started thinking—who is Joe? And how do the songs, in the way they’re sequenced on the album, reflect what he’s going through? As I started asking this question, a story emerged with startling wholeness and clarity, like finding the foundations of an ancient city while digging in my backyard. As I kept digging, certain songs from the original album fell by the wayside, as they seemed misplaced in this new context; others asked for new lyrics, to fully give birth to the story contained in the music.”
While the original emerged from a college life filled with “cynicism and misplaced aggression,” he adds, the intervening years allowed him to “pull from memories of that darkness, and use the distance and additional perspective of ten years of life to shed a fuller light on the experience.” The original, of course, remains untouched on streaming services.
Toledo concludes, “For anyone familiar with Teens, comparisons with the original will be inevitable, but I do hope that as much as possible, people can come to this album on its own terms, approaching it as a teen, hearing the music and story for the first time. I believe music is an ongoing story, and albums don’t always do justice to its dynamic, ongoing nature. What gives it life is the new ears that hear it, and the new hearts that engage with it.”
Among those changes to the original lyrics, however, are reworded lines to omit swear words. For example, “(Joe Gets Kicked Out of School For Using) Drugs With Friends (But Says This Isn’t a Problem)” swapped out “I felt like a walking piece of shit” for the new lyric “I felt like a dying alien.” In a since-deleted Bluesky post, Car Seat Headrest drummer Andrew Katz claimed that Toledo removed the curses throughout Teen of Denial: Joe’s Story due to a “deep-dive into his religion.”
An individual purporting to be a representative of Toledo shared a message allegedly from the singer, which was then posted in a Discord server: “When I was making this my only concern was making something for people who had never encountered the album and were hearing it for the first time, I didn’t make it for anyone who already knows the album.” Toledo allegedly added that removing profanity from the album was so “it could be checked out from the library.” Afterwards, Car Seat Headrest guitarist Ethan Ives posted a long statement in an Instagram story, beginning with “Apropos of nothing… I am not, will never be, a christian.” Pitchfork has reached out to representatives for Car Seat Headrest for comment.
