Twin Fantasy (Taylor's Version): The Toledo-Swift Parallel Theory
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INTRO
If there’s anything people in online music communities love to do, it’s find parallels. Sometimes this can be useful– if you’re recommending a band to me and the bands you compare them to are some of my favorites, I’ll be more inclined to take your suggestion. When these comparisons venture across genre lines, it’s often to explain an artist’s niche or cultural significance rather than their sound. For example, I once said that Joanna Newsom was to harp music what Turnstile is to hardcore. This was mostly a joke about how the Real Harpheads (I don’t know if they actually call themselves that, but they should) probably roll their eyes at people whose knowledge of harp music begins and ends with Joanna Newsom, similarly to how hardcore dudes complain that “we should’ve gatekept Turnstile harder” now that they’re playing on Jimmy Fallon and selling Glow On-pink teddy bears to normies or whatever.
These comparisons are easily made– usually somewhat in jest –which explains why they’re so common. About half of Music Twitter consists of the “(x) is (y) for (z)” format. “Kero Kero Bonito is Death Grips for people who’ve held onto their sense of childlike whimsy” Sure, that kinda makes sense. “Conor Oberst is Jack Antonoff for people whose Lorde is Phoebe Bridgers and people whose Lana Del Rey is Angel Olsen,” I guess! See how easy it is?
It’s not just the artists themselves though– if you’re on the same internet as me, you’ve probably seen someone post side-by-side comparisons of song lyrics with corresponding motifs or imagery, with the poster linking together the themes of two or more songwriters’ discographies. It’s a way of “putting multiple works in conversation with each other” *pushes up wire-rimmed glasses* *my framed liberal arts degree falls off the wall behind me* Sometimes, it can give you a deeper understanding or appreciation of each artist’s songwriting, other times it can just make you and 7 of your friends laugh. If you find enough parallels, it can lead to a killer playlist.
The thing about this practice of finding musical/lyrical/thematic parallels is that once you start noticing them, you can’t stop. Which leads us to the rabbit hole that I’m about to take you down today…The Toledo-Swift Parallel Theory.
PART I: BEHIND THE BREAKOUT
Back in 2011, Will Toledo (born William Barnes) was just a lonely kid in Virginia with a shitty laptop mic, a 2000 Toyota Sienna, and a dream. Having spent the previous year and a half releasing noisy, loop-based songs (often with nonsensical or stream-of-consciousness lyrics) under the soon-to-be household name, Car Seat Headrest, Toledo fired the shot heard ‘round Bandcamp in the form of Twin Fantasy. The album would go on to be retroactively re-titled Twin Fantasy: Mirror to Mirror, but we’ll get to that later.
A little less than a year after that, the already-world-famous pop-country crossover sensation Taylor Swift dropped Red. By the time Red’s decade anniversary rolled around, so had a total re-recording of the album, complete with demos, alternate takes, previously unreleased songs, and the crown jewel– a 10-minute version of Swift’s most revered song, “All Too Well.”
Red wasn’t the only Taylor Swift album to get the “Taylor’s Version” treatment. When Swift’s former record label, Big Machine Records, was purchased by Scooter Braun of Ithaca Holdings, he acquired the rights to the masters of her first six albums. Alienated by the loss of ownership of her back catalog, Swift embarked on a years-long process of creative and financial self-actualization: she would release full re-recordings of her early albums under her own artistic and legal control. In addition to allowing Swift to reclaim possession of her music, the Taylor’s Version series was also an opportunity for her to revisit past works and let their reimaginings reflect her growth as an artist.
By the time this project was underway, Car Seat Headrest’s 2018 redux, Twin Fantasy: Face To Face, was a few years old and already considered even more of a classic than its original iteration. Unlike Taylor Swift, Will Toledo had never intended for the first recording of his then-most-acclaimed album to be the final one. He released Twin Fantasy: Mirror To Mirror independently on Bandcamp; no one but Toledo himself could claim ownership of it. His ambition exceeded his budget, but he made it work, condensing the studied pop songwriting of the Beach Boys and the sprawling conceptual influence of Pink Floyd into dorm room proportions. Toledo has said that he always planned to re-do the album once his resources caught up with his artistic vision. Just a few years later– equipped with a permanent backing band, a devoted international fanbase, and two studio albums on the famed indie label Matador Records –he was able to make good on his promise. Twin Fantasy: Mirror To Mirror was brilliant on its own, the quintessential Bandcamp classic and a definitive statement on Toledo as a songwriter and performer, but to him, it was a placeholder around which he could build a musical future.
Beyond the re-recording metanarratives of Red and Twin Fantasy, there are a lot of other thematic tethers between the two albums– and the artists themselves. Both albums occupy almost identical spaces in their respective artists’ discographies. Taylor Swift was already a global sensation by the time she released Red, but this was her first decidedly pop album, which saw her moving beyond her country roots and reintroducing herself to the world as Taylor Swift: Pop Star. But as much as Red was an assertion of her prowess as a performer, it also established her as a definitive millennial songwriter. Not that she hadn’t been serious about her craft before, but Red marked a shift in critical reception that allowed Swift to be taken seriously in a way that she previously had not.
Twin Fantasy captured a similar moment of self-introduction for Will Toledo, albeit on a much smaller scale. Like Red, it was a sonic and stylistic departure from his previous work, a more mature, streamlined display of his musical talents. It exemplified so much of what longtime fans would come to love about Car Seat Headrest– namely, Toledo’s knack for writing heady, lyrically dense, high-concept records that are equal parts esoteric meta-references and skillfully crafted hooks. Back in 2011, Twin Fantasy lifted Toledo out of obscurity into cult hero status (at least among dedicated circles of music nerds on Reddit and Tumblr) and eventually secured him a record deal with one of the most prolific indie labels. Like Red, it was a career- and persona-defining moment, a point of no return.
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PART II: EVERY LOVE STORY IS A COMING-OF-AGE STORY
As we’ve established, the thematic parallels between Swift and Toledo’s creative trajectories are best exemplified by their albums Red and Twin Fantasy. Each is a concept album about an impassioned yet relatively short-lived relationship and subsequent breakup– though one tells the tale of a high-profile romance between two celebrities that plays out under the flash of paparazzi cameras and across tabloid pages, while the other is a long-distance love story between two closeted gay teenagers whose communication occurs mostly online.
If we want to zoom in even closer, nothing provides a better microcosm for The Toledo-Swift Parallel Theory than a side-by-side comparison of two songs: Car Seat Headrest’s “Beach Life-In-Death” and Taylor Swift’s “All Too Well.” In addition to being critical and fan favorites that were revised and significantly expanded upon in their re-recorded iterations, both songs serve as thesis statements for their respective albums, indicative of each record’s dominant themes and each songwriter’s mission.
The response elicited by the opening line, “Last night I drove to Harper’s Ferry and I thought about you,” is not unlike that of 2000s emo kids hearing the first piano notes of My Chemical Romance’s “Welcome to the Black Parade.” It’s a sleeper agent activation code, a switch flipped in one’s brain, awakening a beast who can’t help but strap in for a 12-minute (and in its re-recorded incarnation, 13-minute-and-18-second) emotional rollercoaster. Toledo pulls the listener in with his measured yet manic patter on the first verse. The call-and-response passage that follows is even more earwormable, the suffocating monotony of Toledo’s daily life bearing down on his overwhelming sense of helpless yearning.
“All Too Well” opens with similarly definitive motifs– autumn leaves cascading to the ground and the now-infamous red scarf left at an ex’s house. Even in its original conception, “All Too Well” is planted firmly in the past tense, told from the far side of a breakup, whereas most of “Beach Life-In-Death” plays out Toledo’s pained, lovesick stupor in the unbearable present, with allusions to the not-so-far-away past (“It’s been a year since we first met / I don’t know if we’re boyfriends yet”).
In every version of “All Too Well,” the central conceit is that the memories of Swift’s past relationship are never far behind her, still as fresh in her mind as they were when she was living in them, though her insights on the relationship change as time passes. Memory is, above all else, subjective. Our recollection of the past is always being reshaped by our continuous present; new experiences make us re-evaluate past ones and notice details that never caught our attention before. The 10-minute re-recording of “All Too Well” includes snapshots of Swift’s romance that weren’t present in the original– getting stood up on her 21st birthday, her ex’s “Fuck The Patriarchy” keychain, running into an unnamed actress while crying in the bathroom at a party. These lyrical addendums also reveal a newfound awareness of the relationship’s significant age gap (“You said if we had been closer in age, maybe it would’ve been fine…I’ll get older, but your lovers stay my age”) with the accompanying Oscar-nominated short film starring teenage Sadie Sink and thirtysomething Dylan O’Brien.
A similarly altered recollection occurs in the re-recorded iteration of “Beach Life-In-Death,” though its lyrical manifestations are less direct and more outwardly referential. A passage in the Mirror To Mirror version mentions 19th-century British illustrator Aubrey Beardsley by name and makes a possible allusion to Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray. In its Face To Face update, these lines are swapped out for a reference to a scene from the webcomic Crow Cillers (“In the mall in the nighttime / You came back alone with a flashlight”), followed by a line from Frank Ocean’s “Ivy” played in reverse. In the live cover version of “Ivy” that Car Seat Headrest performed on their Twin Fantasy tour, Will Toledo changed some of the lyrics to reflect Twin Fantasy’s subject matter and the re-recording process; this included an interpolation of the mall/flashlight line sung to the tune of “Ivy”’s chorus. “Beach Life-In-Death” isn’t the only song whose 2018 reimagining includes a Frank Ocean reference– while the 2011 version of “Cute Thing” had Toledo begging God to give him “Dan Bejar’s voice / and John Entwistle’s stage presence,” the 2018 version replaces these names with Frank Ocean and James Brown respectively, reflecting how his musical influences have evolved over the years.
Live-action Twin Fantasy
In addition to being albums about young love and heartbreak, Twin Fantasy and Red are both bildungsromans, with their songwriters growing into themselves on a personal level and– especially in Swift’s case –in the public eye. At the time of its initial release, Red served as a twofold coming-of-age narrative, an assertion of Swift’s maturity and autonomy. It wasn’t your classic child star-to-bad girl pivot, though it was a notable shift towards more adult subject material. Swift’s first three albums cast her in the role of the sweet, down-to-earth girl next door whose storybook fantasies blossomed in high school hallways and on small-town backroads. This transformation is perhaps foreshadowed in the “You Belong With Me” music video, in which Swift plays both the shy, dorky protagonist and the popular, promiscuous mean girl with whom she competes for her dream boy. In the final scene, the wholesome Blonde Taylor shows up to the prom in a virginal white dress, playing the modest Madonna to Brunette Taylor’s Whore. Blonde Taylor convinces her crush to leave Brunette Taylor, who stands in the corner glowering in a devil-red dress.
On Red, Swift adopts the color of her bad girl antithesis, not as an outright rejection of her family-friendly image, but as a subtle indication of the more mature phase she’s entering. Though she never explicitly mentions sex on Red, an abstract sensuality pervades the album’s expressions of desire and longing. Lyrics like “I’ll do anything you say / if you say it with your hands” suggest something a little less chaste than a PG-movie ending kiss, and the guy she’s singing about feels rougher around the edges than the Prince Charmings and boys next door that she swooned over on previous records. Beyond just the physical aspects, the relationship she explores on Red feels more grown-up, the stakes of their romance higher because they’re grounded in the real world– Swift and her partner are taking road trips upstate, they’re borrowing each other’s clothes, they’re weaving their lives together and watching them come apart.
Toledo’s coming-of-age narrative was less public and less overt, but still central to Twin Fantasy’s arc. There’s the milestone of a first love and of coming out– or not, as he alludes to in “Beach Life-In-Death”: “I pretended I was drunk when I came out to my friends / I never came out to my friends.” This wasn’t the first time Toledo openly addressed his sexuality in his songwriting, but on Twin Fantasy, he did so with a significantly larger audience and a more cohesive concept. The album shows his desire at odds with restrictive societal constraints– he’s living across the country from the person he loves, wanting nothing more than to be with them, but lacks the resources to do so. Even if he could afford to travel to them, there’s still school, jobs, families, and the need to explain his absence from his daily obligations, potentially outing himself and his partner to those who are unaware of their relationship (and might not approve of it). Thus, he’s left alone with feelings too grandiose to be contained by expectation and routine.
Part of growing up is realizing that the ecstasy of true love doesn’t negate the banality of everyday life. You can spend all night talking to someone who understands you in a way that you never dreamed another person could, but you still have to go to work in the morning. On both Twin Fantasy and Red, love is an earth-shattering, almost supernatural force that swallows the narrator whole and magnifies everything to larger-than-life proportions– oftentimes, it’s the actual smallness of life that causes everything to come crashing down.
These albums were released when Swift and Toledo were 22 and 19, respectively. At their core, the emotional experiences they’re singing about are universal ones that almost everyone goes through– love, heartbreak, depression, loneliness, longing –but each artist sings about them like they’re discovering something entirely new. And, contrary to what I just said, they are. Feeling these feelings for the first time means feeling them in a way that no one else ever has and no one else ever will.
There’s a line from Joan Didion’s seminal 1967 essay “Goodbye To All That” where she writes, “one of the mixed blessings of being twenty or twenty-one or even twenty-three is the conviction that nothing like this, all evidence to the contrary notwithstanding, has ever happened to anyone before.” That aggrandized young adult myopia lies at the heart of both of these albums. Nothing is new, except when everything is.
PART III: THE IDEA YOU HAD OF ME or, WHEN THE MIRROR BREAKS
The 2011 version of “Nervous Young Inhumans” includes a spoken-word outro that, like much of Twin Fantasy, has been memed to death by now. In this case, the meme centers around Toledo’s use of the non-word “galvanistic” (the actual term is “galvanic”) to allude to Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. Galvanism is the disproven theory that an electrical current runs through the human body, controlling blood flow and muscle movements, and it plays a key role in Dr. Frankenstein’s experiment. Toledo uses this concept to illuminate how he fell in love with his partner– an illustrator and cartoonist –through his engagement with their art. Moreover, he explains how the act of falling in love is itself an act of creation:
I created you as a character. I’m pretending that I know a lot more about you than I actually do, and also to refer to the fact that I’ve fallen in love with the characters you’ve created in your body of work. This is the part of the song where I start to regret writing it.
Your crush on someone says as much about you as it does about them, if not more. Especially when you fall in love with someone from afar, so much of that crushing/pining/yearning takes the form of projection. You take what you know about them and fill in the gaps with fantasies of how you want or believe them to be. In doing so, you fall for a fictionalized version of them, a proxy lover to stand in for the real person’s unknown variables. In this way, the character you’re in love with is pieced together from parts of yourself– usually the parts that seem impossible to love until you recognize them in someone else. At this point in the song, Toledo has clarified that “most of the time when I use the word ‘you’ / well you know that I’m mostly singing about you,” but it’s still ambiguous whether that ‘you’ is Toledo’s partner or the shadow self that he’s projected onto them. Twin Fantasy and Red both deal with this idea of love as projection and what happens when fantasy overtakes reality and the lover falls for the shadows on the wall of the cave.
Toledo and Swift’s shared tendency to slip into various “characters” lends itself easily to this kind of musical storytelling. Though incredibly distinct in their public images and the style of music they make, both are highly self-referential songwriters whose songs take place in musical universes that span their respective discographies. This video essay from The Take offers an overview of what they’ve coined “The T.C.U.,” and a similar analysis can also be applied to Car Seat Headrest’s catalog. Songs are connected by narrative throughlines, repeated motifs, and recurring characters– many of whom represent personas (or, in Toledo’s case, fursonas) that the musicians often embody. These alternate selves allow each artist to expand upon a specific aspect of their identity. For Swift, this often takes the form of certain archetypes– the girl-next-door, the diva, the hopeless romantic, the madwoman. Even when she’s writing from the perspective of someone other than herself (i.e., “Starlight,” a love song to Bobby Kennedy sung from the P.O.V. of a young Ethel Kennedy), you get the sense that these muses are vessels for her own personal narratives. What’s important isn’t the facts of the story, but the emotional experience that she conveys through it– in this case, the timeless, surreal euphoria of new love. “The Lucky One” tells the story of a world-famous star who seemingly has it all but leaves the spotlight for a life of quiet solitude. The track is rumored to be about both Kim Wilde and Joni Mitchell (the melody samples Wilde’s song “Four Letter Word,” while Red’s cover art and album title are a nod to Mitchell’s classic album, Blue). But it almost doesn’t matter who “The Lucky One” is “actually about,” because the purpose of the song’s subject is to grant Swift access to certain parts of herself. The song’s not “actually about” her, but at the same time, it is. It’s a sort of Swiftian take on Britney Spears’s similarly-titled, thinly-veiled cry for help in the form of “a song about a girl named Lucky.”
On Twin Fantasy, the two main characters are Toledo and his partner (or versions of them), represented by the two anthropomorphic conjoined dogs on the album cover. It doesn’t matter which dog is which because the narrative centers around a fusion of oneself with one’s love interest. The nature of the relationship is left somewhat ambiguous. How much of what Toledo felt was actualized? Was he in love with this other person, the fictional characters they created in their art, the fictional character he created in their absence, or all of the above? In Of Montreal’s 2007 epic, “The Past Is A Grotesque Animal,” –which served as inspiration for “Beach Life-In-Death,” –Kevin Barnes remarks, “Sometimes I wonder if you’re mythologizing me like I do you.” It’s safe to assume that Will Toledo has a similar question on his mind.
The love interest (or the idea of them) isn’t Toledo’s only muse in Twin Fantasy. Like Swift, he borrows from pre-existing media and real people to populate the world of the story, often using their words and narratives as vehicles for his own storytelling. “Sober to Death” opens with him quoting the 1972 Hitchcock film Frenzy, using the killer’s mantra to set up a scene from “another movie that I didn’t watch with you” and highlighting the song’s subtext– a relationship between two self-destructive people who are often unable to help each other, despite their best intentions. On “Cute Thing,” Toledo pleads (to his partner, to the audience, to a higher power), “let me be your rock god” and/or, “let me be your rock, god.” As I mentioned in Part III, he expresses a longing for the charisma, swagger, and vocal chops of the musicians he idolizes, and even interpolates They Might Be Giants’ love song “Ana Ng” while confessing that he’s “trying to be John Linnell.” “Bodys,” the song that precedes “Cute Thing,” is supercharged with nervous energy; Toledo stumbles over his words (“Those are you got some nice shoulders / I’d like to put my hands around them”) and comments on the song’s structure as he’s singing it (“Is it the chorus yet? / No, it’s just the building of the verse / So when the chorus does come, it’ll be more rewarding”). The overall effect is that of a kid air-guitaring his heart out from the privacy of his bedroom. “Cute Thing” opens with a fourth-wall-breaking apology for getting “so fucking romantic” and more awkward attempts at flirting, but where “Bodys” feels like a fantasy of Toledo’s rockstar self, on “Cute Thing,” he’s transcended the fantasy and become a bonafide rockstar.
My loyal writing companion
Twin Fantasy contains various references to characters that Toledo’s ex created, like the “nice young Satanist with braces” who gets a shoutout in “Beach Life-In-Death” or the assorted lyrical and visual references to anthropomorphic dogs, suggesting that the act of creation goes two ways. While Toledo is inventing a fictional character/love object based on his partner, his partner is doing the same to him. Both of them are Frankenstein, both of them are Frankenstein’s monster, both of them are little cartoon dogs sketched out in each other’s minds.
In “Cute Thing,” Will Toledo speaks from the perspective of his partner, asking himself to come visit them in Kansas (side note: the first few times I heard this song, I mistakenly thought that Toledo was a city in Kansas, so I assumed it was a clever play on words from his perspective. Turns out Toledo is a city in Ohio and I am bad at geography). The updated version of the penultimate track– titled “Famous Prophets (Minds)” on Mirror To Mirror and “Famous Prophets (Stars)” on Face To Face –excised a passage from the original that mentioned both Toledo and his ex by name, and alluded to that change in “(Stars)”: “I’m not gonna name names / yours was an exception.” The reimagining also extends the song from an already-impressive 10:20 to a whopping 16:10, and includes a reference to David Bowie’s Blackstar.
“(Stars)” isn’t the only re-recorded track to include metacommentary on the re-recording process itself. The 2018 rendition of “Nervous Young Inhumans” cuts out the “galvanism” monologue entirely, and instead features Toledo rambling stream-of-consciousness style, chastising his past self for his naïvité and recounting how his creative process has changed.
The reimagined versions of Twin Fantasy and Red both added yet another layer of storytelling by introducing new characters that didn’t previously exist– the older versions of Toledo and Swift –who are in conversation with their younger selves. The first iteration of each album is a story about a pair of star-crossed lovers; the second iteration is a story about how it feels to re-tell that first story and to exist continuously outside of a narrative that’s frozen in time.
In his review of Fearless (Taylor’s Version), YouTube music commentator Professor Skye uses the term “polished juvenilia” to describe the Taylor’s Version series, and this feels like a core tenet of the Toledo-Swift Parallel Theory. In the original versions of their albums, the relationships feel fresher in the artists’ minds, while the later versions see Toledo and Swift not only reflecting on these relationships with more distance and maturity, but also reflecting on the process of writing these songs in the first place. Certain lines from the original albums ring with retroactive foreshadowing, as though Swift knew that she’d be retelling her “sad, beautiful, tragic love affair” or Toledo had the hindsight to apologize “to future mes and yous.” Both albums’ retitlings– the Taylor’s Version suffix and the retroactive differentiation between Twin Fantasy: Mirror To Mirror and Twin Fantasy: Face To Face –denote a sense of wisdom, clarity, and self-knowledge that comes with age and experience, as well as each artist’s need to settle unfinished business.
PART IV: AND NOW THESE TWO REMAIN
It’s fascinating to watch how prophetic Red and Twin Fantasy: Mirror To Mirror have been in the grander scheme of each artist’s career trajectory and how much the Taylor Swift/Car Seat Headrest Venn diagram overlaps. Promotion for Car Seat Headrest’s 2020 album, Making A Door Less Open, revealed that Toledo would be playing a new character, Trait, in the band’s current era. Trait, a hazmat-suit-and-gas-mask-wearing anthropomorphic rabbit, originates from 1 Trait Danger, Car Seat Headrest’s comedy EDM side project/extended video game universe created by Will Toledo and drummer Andrew Katz. The mask is Toledo’s way of removing himself (or the character that the audience has made him into) from the equation and inviting fans to try on characters of their own at masquerade-themed live performances. The masquerade tour also included Toledo repurposing some of his pre-Matador songs that he hadn’t played live in years. Car Seat Headrest’s 2022 live shows opened with the 2013 deep cut “Crows,” whose refrain features the line “What if for just one night you turned into an animal?” You can imagine Trait picking up a corded phone and speaking through his gas mask: “I’m sorry, the old Will Toledo can’t come to the phone right now. Why? Because he’s dead!”
Just months after the release of MADLO, Taylor Swift dropped two companion albums– folklore and evermore –that saw her embracing stripped-back folk and country production and revisiting storylines about small-town gossip and youthful love triangles. Shortly afterward, she announced the Taylor’s Version re-recording project in an effort to reclaim the music from her back catalog. These reimagined albums included never-before-heard bonus tracks “From The Vault,” like Red: Taylor’s Version’s melancholy ode to misspent youth, “Nothing New.” The song is a duet with Phoebe Bridgers, who acts almost as a stand-in for Swift’s younger self. The past couple years of Swift’s career have been an ironic resurrection of sorts. After pronouncing the old Taylor dead in 2017, the new Taylor spent years proverbially digging her up.
The Toledo-Swift Parallel Theory is this seemingly bottomless rabbit hole, and in some ways, I feel as though I’ve barely scratched the surface. For instance, did you know that a dream about a fake Taylor Swift song served as the inspiration behind the Stef Chura-and-Will Toledo collaboration “Sweet Sweet Midnight?” Or that, because of their mutual acquaintance, Lucy Dacus, Toledo and Swift are no more than two degrees of separation from one another?
It’s an intricate puzzle that’s given me a more in-depth appreciation of each of these artists individually and in comparison to one another, despite their many differences. There’s a constant doubling, always a commentary on the commentary, a story being written and rewritten, a continuous mythology that transcends the music itself. Seemingly loose threads connect and cross over each other, weaving a never-ending web of coincidence– or something more.
Grace Robins-Somerville is a writer from Brooklyn, New York, currently living in Wilmington, North Carolina. Her work has appeared in Earshot, Merry-Go-Round Magazine, and The Alternative. You can find her on Instagram and Twitter at @grace_roso.
