Ethan Ives - Car Seat Headrest / Toy Bastard Interview
Are you originally from Seattle, WA? What was growing up like for you? When did you first begin playing music and more specifically the guitar? I understand you also play the bass and the organ. Was music something that was relevant in your household growing up? Do you have any siblings?
Yes! I’ve lived all over Washington my whole life. Spent a lot of early childhood way up by the Canadian border. I have two siblings, a brother and a sister, of which I’m the oldest. I started playing around age 10 when my parents brought home an acoustic guitar they’d found in a dumpster somewhere, with just the two lowest strings on it, which is actually perfect when you’re 10 and only care about playing Iron Man. A few months later my folks got me a real Strat and I really got going in earnest after that. I was super lucky in that my folks are both giant music heads with really good taste, so Dino Jr., Ministry, Soul Coughing, Fugazi, etc. are all in my primordial memory. Likewise my folks have always been super supportive of me never getting a real job. I was a very exhausting, high-energy, loquacious, super lonely child; we moved around lots and I’ve always seemed to lose my friend circles and start over every few years. I’ve always been very adamant that getting into music was just about finding a way to engage with people (and yes, meet girls) in a way that didn’t require direct confrontation or normal social skills; art in general I think is not so much a craft or a science as it is a form of language covering the huge blind spots between traditional modes of communication. In a lot of cases it seems less scary to write something painful or inflammatory and perform it in front of people than it is to walk up to someone and start talking the normal way. Art makes you vulnerable in a different way, but it’s more abstracted.
Who were some of your influences early on? Where would you go to see shows in your community and what groups/performances stood out to you the most during that time? What would you and your friends do for fun back in the day?
One of the first writers, period, I remember really clicking with artistically was Shel Silverstein. I think there’s something actually transgressive about stubbornly choosing to write silly nonsense. Once I started playing, Metallica was the first band I really dove hard into as far as learning songs, copying parts, poring over tab books etc. As a teen it was Bowie, Pink Floyd, and a huge obsession with Neil Young. I started caring more about album concepts, recording techniques, the idea of records as literal records that were full of quirks and mistakes. I sort of became that guy who proselytized to his friends about room ambiance and “audio verite” (I still kind of am that guy). I was never social enough to go out to many shows, but there was a DIY space outside of Seattle called “Ground Zero” I used to do acoustic gigs at, which is actually where I first met Car Seat Headrest (they were next on the bill as a trio; I did a jazz standard that grabbed their attention) Other formative live experiences include seeing Tim And Eric show with my dad, before they were famous, and Tim Heidecker nailing me in the eye with a slice of pizza.
Did you participate in any groups, or projects prior to CSHR? How did you initially meet Toledo and the other guys? What led to the decision to join the band and was this during the “Teens Of Denial” era in 2016? Can you tell me about writing and recording that record and the songs that are featured on it? How did the deal with Matador Records come about?
Before Car Seat it was just a string of bar bands doing covers for money. We’d play 3-hour sets with intermissions and I was the only minor in the building, so I legally had to vacate the area the moment we stopped playing. It was a good formative experience, but very weird to be 17 and getting hit on by slightly drunk older ladies. I first saw Car Seat at that DIY space, “Ground Zero”, in October 2015, right as they were releasing Teens Of Style (not Denial). We just liked each others’ performances, and they were only a trio at the time so I joined as second guitarist. We played about one show before losing our bassist (who I think is a doctor now), and I actually went on bass for about a full year. Shortly after joining, we started recording Denial, which Will had basically written entirely by the time I came onto the scene, so I only know the recording side of it.
When and where did recording begin with that project? What was it like to work with the mighty Steve Fisk on this project? After that record was released through Matador, what kind of trajectory, or impact if you would, did this make on your personal life as well as your artistic/professional life?
It was a huge deal for me to be suddenly working on a professional record with the famous Steve, who I clicked really well with and consider my friend. Generally I just remember good times working on that record, eating good Cuban food, Steve showing us bizarre obscure and David Lynch projects and hipping me to Unwound and Steven Jesse Bernstein. Once it was out, it kind of felt like we went from 0 to 60 as this was the first album of entirely new material we did for Matador, and we promoted the everloving hell out of it for years (that, itself, was another formative and somewhat overwhelming experience). It definitely taught me a huge amount about producing a record, and when I did my own album under Toy Bastard it was at the same studio (Soundhouse) where we’d first worked with Steve, trying to recall all the wisdom that he’d taught me.
2018 saw the group’s iconic follow up, “Twin Fantasy”. Tell me about working on this project and what those experiences of writing and recording those songs were like? How did you want to approach this album that differed from the previous “Teen Of Denial” process? Not to blow over the next projects, but CSHR went on to write and record “Commit Yourself Completely” and “Making A Door Less Open” in 2019 and 2022. How did the pandemic affect the band on an artistic and professional level as well as yourself?
Twin Fantasy was another record where the writing had basically all been completed, and it was just my job to help it get translated in the best way possible; for that we worked with Adam Stilson in Chicago, which is my favorite music city; that’s where all my favorite Steve Albini and industrial music projects live. I think because I was more experienced, I have less vivid memories of that record than of Denial. We also did it a bit more piecemeal, recording dribs and drabs and then sort of piecing it together like a film. The funny thing about MADLO was we basically recorded and finished the entire thing, and had an entire live act rehearsed and ready to roll, just moments before the pandemic hit. We thought we were about to spend the next two years promoting this thing, and that all sort of vanished very quickly.
How did you deal and cope as a person and artist in the last few years as the whole world, especially the “music industry” was rocked by all this? I imagine you guys were checking in on each other, but there were no gigs and no recording going on at all. It was around this time you started Toy Bastard, correct, or had you already laid down the foundation for this project earlier on?
I think the general throughline of the pandemic was that it took a lot of underlying, systemic faults or weaknesses that had always been there, and exacerbated them and made them much more visible to the public. For our band, I think it sparked a lot of introspection into how we operate as a group, and suddenly we had all this empty time to sit and think about things that maybe nobody was happy with. When you’re playing like 150 shows a year, you don’t really have the time or emotional bandwidth to stop and address those things. Toy Bastard was actually wrapping up recording in January 2020, just moments before everything went down. I ended up deciding to mix and finish the whole record myself, and suddenly had all this free time to basically teach myself this entire skill for 10 hours a day. I was mentally not in a very good place for that entire year, but I’m really happy and grateful for the record and how it turned out. I hope more folks can continue to stumble over it. After that, I made the bizarre decision to spend most of 2021 learning to program and make a sort of Frank Frazetta-inspired video game, which may or may not ever see the light of day. I hope it does, it would make me really sad if it didn’t.
Tell me about TB and how this project came to be. I understand you released, “Say! Real Sludge” in April of 2022. Can you tell me about writing as well as recording this album and what you wanted to achieve/express with this release?
Real Sludge was really just a pandemic-inspired, “hey, let’s do something to kill the boredom” decision; I had all this 90s, tracker-inspired digital music on my hard drive I’d made as a teen, and that sort of thing was making enough of a comeback that I thought it might be fun to just throw it up on the internet for fun, not as a mainline Toy Bastard release, but just as something made by Ethan. I actually have a whole other album’s worth of that stuff I’m thinking of putting up, but maybe to minimize confusion it should belong on its own bandcamp page, haha!
A few months later, in June, you released “Life For Cowards”. I understand that some of the material was written as early as 2015, around the time you joined CSHR and you even went on to say that, “the album has had an incredibly long and pained gestation.” What do you mean by that?
Yes, some of the demos that morphed into that album were things I had written in college, before or around the time I first started talking to Will and Car Seat. For some reason, I’ve always loved and enjoyed music, but I’ve never had fun writing it. It really does not come naturally to me at all, which is a little confounding because it’s just about the only thing that stops me from going crazy. I’m constantly hearing entire songs with complex harmonies and structures in my head, with seemingly no way of getting them down, because the second I run to pick up a pen it’ll be completely gone. Learning notation would probably be good for me!
Can you tell me what it was like to mix and record this project in a professional setting in terms of the approach and particular process(s)?
Self-producing and self-mixing was terrifying but also exciting and electrifying. There’s this nerd glee you feel when you’ve built up so many tiny bugbears or micro-opinions about what you think a rock record should be, and to finally have a chance to make something that’s exactly to those specifications as a listener. It’s sort of like a kid getting to build your own house with a racecar bed and a fireman’s pole. To me, rock records are very much about negative space and ambiance; I’m very into the texture of things. Even when you’re using production and overdubbing and trickery, I think there’s this vital suspension of disbelief in great rock records, where you feel like this is all materially happening in physical space at a very specific snapshot in time. To me, listening to Surfer Rosa, I feel like you can literally hear the tension between members of the band, and you can vividly picture the room they’re in. I’m a huge fan of Steve Albini and Rick Rubin, that whole philosophy of capturing very human sounds in the highest fidelity possible; people so often reduce music aesthetics to this dichotomy where you either have an inhuman, cyber-enhanced pop perfection sound, or this very stylized, very affected representation of a “lo-fi” basement sound (which is often just spending way too much money to sound cheaper than it is), and I think that ignores this huge middle ground where you can use very high-fidelity, high-detail techniques, but use them to capture imperfect performances in a very impartial, non-idealized way. I made a lot of first-timer mistakes with my record which maybe fell short of that ideal, and dragged out the production process by a lot, but that was what I had in my head.
What have you been up to as of late now that things are somewhat back, but forever changed for better, or arguably worse? CSHR recently canceled some winter shows. Were you planning to go out on that tour? Anything new from CSHR and TB in the works? Is there anything else you would like to further share with the readers?
We were extremely torn up about cancelling those shows. Car Seat still has plans, and maybe even some new things we’d like to try in the coming year, but I can’t really talk about any of those yet. I’m pretty far into writing the next Toy Bastard record, God willing I’d like to start tracking on it early next year! I learned a ton from the last record, and I think I have the skills now to make this one sound really, really good. Be free and open with your emotions, tell your friends you love them, and don’t spend time on art made by robots!
