After over 15 years and now six albums together as a band, Seattle indie-folk outfit The Head and the Heart needed a fresh start.
Coming out of the pandemic, the band felt distant. Spread out across the country, from coast to coast, the hard realities of encroaching middle age, adulthood, and raising families shifting focus and priorities. They were still together, but they felt lost, perhaps no one more so than the band’s piano player Kenny Hensley, who nearly died.
During lockdown, Hensley had surgery on a lingering shoulder injury, only to soon after injure his other shoulder, requiring another surgery. During his long recovery, and time alone at home, he struggled with severe anxiety, eventually developing a dangerous addiction to Xanax.
“I started self-medicating way too much,” Hensley told Revue. “I always had bad anxiety, and was prescribed Xanax for flying because I just didn’t like flying. And that turned into a daily thing, which then turns into now I need two of them, or three of them, or four of them, to have the same effect. And before I knew it, I was just completely dependent on the stuff. And if you tried to stop, you’re hit with a wave of such extreme, like, ‘you’re going to die’ anxiety, that it’s just impossible. It felt like absolute hell.”
While preparing to tour in support of The Head and The Heart’s last album, 2022’s Every Shade of Blue, Hensley decided he would quit his addiction cold turkey, a decision he didn’t realize how dangerous it was until it was almost too late.
“I ended up in the hospital,” he said. “I had a seizure, and was found on my back, blood pooling up behind my head… I didn’t know at the time, but I guess if you quit Benzos like Xanax, cold turkey, your brain can literally shut down. It’s just something you’re not supposed to quit cold turkey. You’re supposed to taper off. And I had no clue.”
After getting out of the hospital Hensley did a month in a treatment facility, and then spent the next year away from the band, who had decided it was best for him to step back from that tour.
“By the next year, I was ready to come back and I felt really good and healthy,” he said. “And now it’s been three years, and as hard as that period was, I’m so glad I went through it because it just changed me at my core in a lot of ways. I appreciate life, and appreciate what we get to do so much more.”
Just one listen to the anthemic, driving lead single “Arrow” off The Head and The Heart’s new album Aperture, and you can hear their shared conviction to starting again.
Self-producing the album and sharing all songwriting duties as a group, The Head and The Heart returned to the harmonies and collaborative spirit of their earliest beginnings, forming out of an open mic in the Seattle music scene back in 2009.
Free from the major label pressures of their last three albums, Aperture (their first for new label Verve Forecast) harkens back to their 2011 self-titled debut on famed Seattle indie label Sub Pop. So much so that Hensley said the band considered titling the record The Head and The Heart 2.
“The process of making this record really did feel like we went back to our roots,” he said. “It’s our sixth album. We had been on a major label (Warner/Reprise) for the past three, and for the first time in a long while, we were kind of free agents. This time around, we were out of our contract, and we actually had a manager switch up too. So there was this period where we realized for the first time, maybe ever since we had started, there wasn’t anybody telling us when we had to finish something, and there were no deadlines, and we could kind of take it at our own pace. There was no direction from outside sources. And so we really just decided (to) take advantage of this and just start booking trips together, writing trips, recording trips, and build it from the ground up together.”
Ultimately titling the record Aperture as a metaphor for closing themselves off to the darkness, and opening up to the light, it speaks to their shared resilience
“We’ve been through a lot as a group, and there have been a lot of curveballs and moments that were really tough to get through,” Hensley said. “And at this point, I’m just proud of us for sticking through it and still being a band. I feel like we’ve come out the other end, and are doing really well. And I feel like this record, and the songs, translate to that.”
“Arrow” joins a growing list of the band’s songs that have topped the Adult Alternative Radio chart, that includes “Lost In My Mind,” “All We Ever Knew,” “Missed Connection,” and “Virginia (Wind in the Night).” With other platinum hits like “Honeybee,” and live favorite “Down In The Valley,” the band has amassed a catalog of singalong standouts that make it no surprise why their return to Meijer Gardens on May 30 sold out as soon as it went on sale.
The band’s success has been hard earned. They’ve famously gone to group therapy together, and still check in with their therapist, who Hensley said they view like a loving mom figure in their lives.
But it was some words of wisdom from a music legend that they still hold on to like a driving force as they follow their own path moving on now.
“We had a really good advice early on actually from Dave Matthews,” Hensley said. “He was kind of a mentor to us in the early days. He lives in Seattle half the year, in the summers, I believe, and then in Charlottesville the rest of the year. And he would come to shows early on, and he just told us… just stay together. And that was his number one piece of advice. No matter how hard it gets, no matter how much you hate each other at times, no matter how much you want to quit; don’t let it happen. And there have been times where I think we would have hung it up, and been done, but that piece of advice rings in our heads, and we keep pushing forward.”
The Head and The Heart
Wsg. Futurebirds, Ana Graves
Frederik Meijer Gardens and Sculpture Park, 100 E. Beltline Ave. NE, Grand Rapids
May 30, Gates open 5 p.m., Show 6 p.m., SOLD OUT
Theheadandtheheart.com, Meijergardens.org/calendar/concerts
