Car Seat Headrest Craft A Rock Ballet

Frontman Will Toledo’s ambitious concept album invokes Spanish long poetry, Mozart, and the Canterbury Tales to tell the story of a contentious college.

Ben Boddez

Photos by Carlos Cruz

Published on May 2, 2025

In a world of streaming services, endless singles, and playlistification, there’s something deeply compelling about a good concept album – especially when it comes from a man whose often deeply poetic words have attracted a cult fanbase where the members hang on each one of them. Will Toledo, frontman of Seattle-based indie-rock band Car Seat Headrest, has even heard his latest, The Scholars, described as a rock opera. Accompanied by a complete libretto, with full-on stage directions and each lyric attributed to different characters, Toledo actually prefers the term “rock ballet.”

“We wanted to have some sort of concept going through it, but not necessarily tie ourselves to writing a narrative all the way through, because then you have to worry about stuff that has nothing to do with the music. You might have to start writing songs that fit the plot, rather than that are really good songs in themselves,” he says. “It’s a ballet, it’s more like a dance. Each character comes out and has their moment, their song, their dance, and then they leave.”

Inspired by some of his own favourite rock operas – American Idiot, The Wall, Who’s Next – The Scholars follows the story of a fictional college called Parnassus University, filled with students grappling with both coming-of-age moments and supernatural forces. While some students have awkward dinners with their parents as they discuss sexuality or crushing expectations, others engage in debates about the power of a literary canon, and another still becomes a magical healer who uncovers a dark underbelly to the whole operation.

It’s all deeply ambitious stuff. That’s part of the reason why Toledo, who typically writes alone, made the recording sessions for the band’s first solo album in five years more of a collective workshop with the other band members. They appear in writing credits for the first time and even provide the voices of some of the story’s characters.

With more people to keep track of all the details, it ballooned to an expansive size: Car Seat Headrest have always dotted their tracklists with some lengthy songs, but this one’s got three that stretch past 10 minutes, including their longest ever, “Planet Desperation,” at nearly 19. In searching for the possibility of telling a universal tale, Toledo felt that a story told by younger voices would simply reach most of his listeners.

“The teenage perspective is very helpful, because you have all this youthful energy and youthful ignorance. Then you combine that with the first stages of a more mature mind, where you’re seeing a wider picture, you’re getting a wider range of emotions, and everything is very fresh, new and scary, too,” he says. “A teenage mind can be uniquely disposed to creating art that conveys the vividness of life.”

If there’s any character in the narrative that Toledo feels the most kinship with, it’s Rosa, the aforementioned magical healer who has her most prominent appearance on the 11-minute single “Gethsemane.” As the song unfolds, Rosa discovers that she can heal people with a single touch, but at the cost of taking on their illnesses and pains and having to experience them in her dreams. Toledo dreamt up the character while thinking about his experiences with long COVID, which he contracted on tour in 2022 and saw him develop a histamine imbalance that greatly affected his diet for years.

“I was sick for a good long while trying to recover from that, and just that disjointedness of the body experience kind of puts you in a different reality from everybody else,” he says. “I grew a lot more sympathetic to people who have these very individual experiences with reality, and so I wanted to create a character who spoke to that.”

The Scholars is truly a perfect amalgamation of many different thoughts that were bouncing around in Toledo’s head, meaning there’s about five different answers to the question of why he wanted to tell this story. Often stuck at home with his illness, Toledo’s forays into Chan meditation and Buddhist ideals taught him to detach from the self and seek out connection with the universe – which lent itself to his desire to place himself in many other characters’ shoes. Then there’s the academic fight going on in the story – Toledo credits Mozart, Shakespeare and Chaucer among his inspirations for the album, and was thinking about the timeless nature of their art.

“If you were to go to an opera in Mozart’s time, it would not be how we picture it today, where you have to be quiet and respectful through the whole thing. People were drinking and smoking and playing cards while the operas were going on. If they liked a song, they would applaud and demand that it be sung again in the middle of the performance!” he says.

“If you go back to the source, there’s a lot less of that sort of classiness, that pristine quality that we perceive with the canon,” he continues. “There’s this sort of clash of the upper-class canon and then the lower class challenging it. Where the meaningful art actually gets produced is outside of that clash. It combines the strength of what is old and the energy of what is new.”

Toledo has been telling a story about how The Scholars was adapted from fragments of an unfinished poem by his great-great-great-great-grandfather, the Archbishop Guillermo Guadalupe del Toledo. While Guillermo never actually existed, the framework that Toledo sets up also has to do with this dichotomy of mixing the highbrow and lowbrow.

“I have some ancestry from Spain, and my mother was half Mexican, and I just happened to be more interested in that literature,” he says. “Archpriest Juan Ruiz wrote a long poem called The Book of Good Love [in the year 1330]. It starts off with a bunch of poems in ode to the Virgin Mary, and then it turns into this bawdy tale of woe, so he was mixing religious and more earthy culture.”

The Scholars is full of allusions like these to other songs and literary works, which Toledo says “brings back that larger truth that when we make art, we’re not just making something original that has no precedent. I’m participating in a tradition and working with these pieces that are already here before I come around.” It’s something that he compares to a cocky college graduate thinking that they’ve conquered the world and learned everything there is to learn – something that they’ll soon learn is far from the case as they enter adulthood.

With such a theatrical and expansive body of work, you’d think to expect something elaborate and drama-laden for when Car Seat Headrest finally hit the road for some live shows. Instead, much like a Mozart opera that still gets played 250 years later despite many people misinterpreting the context of how it was experienced, Toledo figures he’ll just let the music speak for itself.

“There’s going to be nothing too fancy, our lights guy has got some very tasteful stuff planned,” he says. “For our part, I think we’re going to go on as stagehands, the all-black look, because we’re seeing our roles as just presenters of the music. Rather than having actors or dressing up on stage, it’s going to be the music that creates that environment.”