Car Seat Headrest
I remember seeing Car Seat Headrest play "Drunk Drivers/Killer Whales" on The Tonight Show a couple years ago. I couldn't help but notice the song had been tweaked and truncated for television purposes. It was still a jam, but it felt a little off. Will Toledo brought his musical outfit back to Jimmy Fallon's late night show, and maybe he had that performance in his mind as well, as he decided to hang a lampshade on the proceedings this time.
Car Seat Headrest
Car Seat Headrest performed the song "Bodys" from Toledo's re-imagining of his 2011 album Twin Fantasy. Back then, he was a young man making bedroom rock for Bandcamp. Now, he has a full band on tap. He also had a seven-minute song at his disposal, and you just can't do that on late night TV. There isn't enough time, unless you're Billy Joel, who performed "Scenes from an Italian Restaurant" on Fallon once in full, a performance I watched but also baffled me in some ways, though I admired the audacity.
He also had a seven-minute song at his disposal, and you just can't do that on late night TV.
Early in the performance, Toledo straight up took a moment during the performance to say, "Is it the chorus yet? Yes! It’s the chorus! Cuz we’re on live TV. And we have four minutes to play this song. So we’re going to go to the second verse." Later, he added, "Normally, we do a bit of a breakdown here, but we only have 50 seconds left, so we’re just going to go right to the final chorus."
It's probably awkward to have to take a song that came from your heart and chop it down into something else entirely. They tell writers to kill their darlings, but as a writer I know how difficult that can be. Toledo, though, was able to handle the task with aplomb and humor. He turned it into a bit of performance art, also. Plus, the song still works, so there's that.
