August Newsletter: Denial

Ten summers ago, we were tucked into the corners of Fremont, recording Teens of Denial with Steve Fisk. I remember it being a sunny summer, both literally and emotionally. Teens of Style, recorded earlier that year, had been a difficult trek, marred by difficulties in mixing and miscommunications with the label. Recording Denial, in contrast, was smooth sailing. We’d been playing the songs live at the few shows we could get locally, and having Steve at the helm for recording and mixing took the pressure off me to make every decision. We felt good about the songs, and so did the people working with us; the only thing weighing us down were the heavy burritos we’d order at the restaurant down the street from the studio.

It’s ironic that the recording process was so congenial, because the writing process had definitely been a stormy one. I jumped into it right after the release of Nervous Young Man all the way back in 2013, and spent a year and a half trying to address what seemed at the time to be the failures of NYM (songs too long, album too long, lack of clarity in the mixes). I wanted to write an album full of straight-up rock songs, simple enough that they could be done in the studio without getting bogged down in mixing problems, short enough that they could keep an average listener’s attention. It wasn’t an easy learning curve; I was used to building up long, meandering works on the computer. I spent my senior year hammering out riff after riff on guitar, angrily rejecting ninety-five percent of them. (There was enough rejected material that How To Leave Town came about relatively effortlessly, with many rejected tracks suddenly finding new life on a more freewheeling “EP”.) 

I wrote last month about my lifelong struggle with anger and resentment. At no point in my life was this more pronounced than during this period. Many of my good friends had graduated a year before me, leaving a sense of desolation in the town. I was looking at an abrupt cliff past my own graduation, with no real plans or trajectory other than wanting to get out of Virginia. The recreation of staying up late and drinking with friends gave me no solace (had it ever?) and left me with a lot of mornings feeling awful. I’m not proud of what I thought or how I treated those around me at that point in my life. All that negative energy turned into a red-hot cooking surface for Teens of Denial, shaping its form, but also blocking me from making much progress on it for many months. I wasted a lot of energy “sustaining my anger” and I can’t say it helped the creative process. 

Yet eventually, the songs eked out. And they reflected what I’d asked for setting out from NYM - a quite different sort of CSH album, with dry, simple songs, and a lot of anger and angst. In its final form, it’s occupied a strange space in our canon. Commercially, it’s been our most successful record, and for fans who aren’t “Car Seat Headrest fans”, they’re most likely to be familiar with songs from Denial. But as far as the “story of the band” goes, its singularity makes it more of an oddball, perhaps overshadowed by records like Twin Fantasy. 

What are your experiences with Teens of Denial? Had you heard other records by us, or was it your first? What kind of an album does it seem like to you?