After three albums — and the band’s first with major label Warner Bros. — Seattle’s The Head and the Heart hit a rough patch: Singer-guitarist Josiah Johnson was moving on from the band. So the band decided to move on, too — for the time being — to Joshua Tree, California.
“We did stay in Joshua Tree the first time we played Coachella, between festival weekends, so we kind of knew the vibe, but we hadn’t spent too much time there,” says drummer Tyler Williams from a recent tour stop. “We had heard how transitional it can be and kind of lead you to a new place, and we definitely believed different locations have different energies and can impart different feelings into the creative process.
“The idea sprung from, we’re already in this weird phase of our career, why don’t we make it a little weirder?”
Matt Gervais — whose wife, Charity Rose Thielen, was already in the band — replaced Johnson, former keyboardist Kenny Hensley rejoined, and the group emerged from the chaos with “Living Mirage,” released in May.
“You blow up the band and then have to adapt to that,” says Williams. “I mean, I think it was an exciting time and kind of scary, but I think you can make some interesting discoveries.”
Even before the lineup shift, it was already a transitional time for The Head and the Heart. When the band released its self-titled debut in 2009, likeminded strummers such as Mumford & Sons were becoming stars, and The Lumineers weren’t far behind. While that might have helped The Head and the Heart get noticed early on, it wasn’t a place the band wanted to stay for too long.
“I think that that music is so accessible, and especially at that time was very accessible music for people to get into, and it was kind of saturating the radio waves,” Williams says. “I think everything we’ve tried to do since then has been to stand apart from those initial classifications, because I think that we’re a band that has a high level of musicianship in multiple styles. So to shine a little bit of light on that while also writing songs that people can connect to was always the goal.”
As the band broadened and polished its sound, it decided to leave hometown indie label Sub Pop and sign with Warner Bros.
“Sub Pop was great because it was very hands-off musically,” the drummer explains. “There was no critique of what we made, which I think in the early stage of a band is really important to build trust in your own sound and your own members, but then as we grow we were looking for new avenues to take our music in, and to have kind of a guiding hand now in that creative process is really helpful.”
Williams cites U2’s “Joshua Tree” as an obvious touchstone for the making of “Living Mirage” and recounts the “epic experience” of seeing Bono and company perform the album in its entirety at Bonnaroo, but a transitional period in Bruce Springsteen’s career might have had an even more meaningful impact.
“From ‘Nebraska,’ that kind of shift from real folky, more homespun-recorded songs to the very kind of glossy production on ‘Born in the USA’ and how massive that record was with the arrangements and the singles it had was also inspiring, to see that shift and see how artists can move from different styles throughout their career and follow different creative whims, if you will.”
The Head and the Heart will perform Friday night at Kings Theatre in Brooklyn and Saturday night at the Capitol Theatre in Port Chester, New York.