The Head and the Heart at Forest Hills Stadium, Queens

Jonathan Russell

Seeking a graduate degree, vocalist/guitarist Josiah Johnson moved from Southern California to Seattle, Washington. Navigating Seattle's open mic circuit in 2009, Johnson met vocalist/guitarist Jonathan Russell, a recent transplant from Richmond, Virginia. They met keyboardist Kenny Hensley, who had also moved to Seattle to pursue musical score-writing, and violinist Charity Rose Thielen, who had recently returned from a year studying abroad in Paris, France. Russell drafted drummer Tyler Williams, who had played in the pop-rock band Prabir & the Substitutes in Richmond. Finally, the indie folk band that was coming to be known as the Head and the Heart recruited bassist Chris Zasche, who was bartending and playing in Seattle bands the Maldives and Grand Hallway. According to Johnson, the name of the band was chosen because "your head is telling you to be stable and find a good job, [but] you know in your heart that this [the band] is what you're supposed to do even if it's crazy." In 2011, Seattle's City Arts magazine named the Head and the Heart as the city's Best New Band. By 2013, the band's second album started getting national attention and both the band and its music increasingly found placement in popular television programs and films. Johnson left the band in 2016 to recover from drug addiction; Russell became the band's focal point and Thielen's husband, Matt Gervais, replaced Johnson in the lineup. The Head and the Heart released its fourth studio album, Living Mirage, on May 17, 2019.

The folk-rock genre has mushroomed in the past decade, so the timing is right for a band like the Head and the Heart to find sufficient popular appeal to headline the second night of ALT92.3's Summer Open at Forest Hills Stadium. The spectrum of the genre is wide, and tonight the Head and the Heart's hour-long set leaned more on the pop rock metric. Russell's easy, breezy vocals and acoustic guitar and Thielen's violin rooted the music in a folk tradition, but then the rest of the band frequently kicked in to fill the soundscape with a wall of sound. Bright and bouncy, largely paced at mid-tempo rhythms, the set chugged along with few highs or lows. The musical arrangements were very clean, and the solos seemed immaculately calculated and precise, whereby the musicians never saw the opportunity to stretch and improvise. The music might have been more exciting if everything was not so tightly and perfectly aligned.

Setlist:

1. All We Ever Knew
2. Lost in My Mind
3. Missed Connection
4. Ghosts
5. Another Story
6. Let's Be Still
7. Rhythm & Blues
8. Honeybee
9. Sounds Like Hallelujah
10. Down in the Valley
11. Living Mirage
12. See You Through My Eyes
13. Shake
14. Rivers and Roads