Car Seat Headrest with Why!
Fox Theater,
1807 Telegraph Ave., Oakland
November 1, 2025
I got caught up with an old buddy of mine I hadn’t seen in years. We didn’t have long, but got deep fast, the way you can with someone you’ve known…let’s see…I wish I hadn’t done that math. A long time. Without getting too woo-woo, we’ve been doing the work of living as mindful and intentional people.
The next day, he laid tickets on me for Car Seat Headrest at the Fox that night. He had to skip because of a scheduling conflict. I thanked him and promised I’d do a little homework on the band, then immediately got down to not doing that.
That’s just to say I didn’t exactly know what to expect when I flapped my way over to The Fox. I gathered from their tour photo that they were broadly Indie Rock. The crowd offered no further clues for a rather encouraging reason: it was so varied! The audience definitely skewed teen/young adult, there were a lot of teen/parent combos, but I also spotted a trio of bears, cross-cultural friend groups of varying ages and solo mid-lifers galore.
Opener Why! was enjoyable, even if they didn’t exactly own the stage. It was a little odd hearing them bop their way through bright-sounding songs about isolation as they huddled in a corner of the stage. The shyness extended to their stage banter, as they shuffled off with scarcely a mention of their name. Seriously guys. Why ‘Why!’? I know all the best one word names have long-since been taken, but ‘Why!’ just begs for an unamusing “who’s on first” misunderstanding.
Between sets, the P.A. played a number of pre-recorded spots encouraging the audience to look out for each other and stay hydrated, all done in different celebrity voice impressions performed by Car Seat Headrest’s frontman Will Toledo. I can only imagine how the band itself must feel about its inclusion in the set, as the joke wore thin by its third iteration.
The band strode on stage with drummer Andrew Katz wearing an LED mohawk for the post-halloween show. Toledo greeted the audience and encouraged them to look out for one another. This, despite the previous gag, is one of the band’s values; looking out for each other. Hearing that hinted at the source of Headrest’s cross-cultural appeal. Even giving lip service to community and care is a rarity in the current age. Unfortunately that was about as much as I could get caught up in the group feel-goods.
Car Seat Headrest’s tour supports their much-acclaimed current album, ’The Scholars’. As has become the wont of many performers, they played the album in its entirety. The Scholars is a concept album, using a fictional school setting as backdrop to its songs.
I have to say upfront, the members of Headrest are very competent musicians to say the least. Guitarist Ethan Ives’s moody, grinding solos were impressive, if incongruous in some song settings, and overlong. I can’t speak to their lyricism, live shows aren’t really for that, but the sound and feel comes across as an amalgam of rock and pop influences from the previous 40 years, like a crack cover band, with a dash of Emo (indeed, Toledo’s vocals immediately made me think “Emo Springsteen”) without managing to become its own thing.
From the energy on the floor though, I think I was alone in my reticence. The audience was into it! I couldn’t find an on ramp and called it a night less than halfway through. Of the Scholars album, my friend put it succinctly “It’s anthemic indie rock that had a mid life crisis and went to therapy then made a rock opera about it.” I definitely got that from the show, and it's in keeping with the journey my friend, myself and I’m sure many in the audience were on. I think I just like my anthemic indie rock a little less self-aware.
