Paste Magazine: Car Seat Headrest's retcon of 'Teens of Denial'
Long-form discussion and song-by-song breakdown of Joe’s Story — thought it was really interesting, especially some of the takeaways on the second page:
“I agree with him that “music is an ongoing story,” but I think that the music itself is ongoing, fluid, dynamic. It changes over time, even as it stays the same. I hear Teens of Denial differently today than I did ten years ago, after all. Him remaking the album because of the argument that “music is an ongoing story” doesn’t make much sense to me—that implies that music is static, and needs to be updated in order to remain relevant to both the musician and the audience. I just fundamentally don’t see it that way. He says one sentence later that “What gives [music] life is the new ears that hear it, and the new hearts that engage with it,” and I agree with that, but not as the justification for retconning a record. If anything, that’s an argument for allowing an album to live on its own—to take on new life because of the new people encountering it, not because the musician went back and decided they no longer liked parts of it.”