The Head and the Heart invite audiences to share in their collective sober vibes on current tour

Indie-folk outfit The Head and the Heart are out on the road, rapping up a long year of touring which featured a co-headlining tour with Father John Misty, and a stop in our area both earlier in 2023 and again later this week in Lawrence, with a sold out show at Liberty Hall.

[Editor’s note: check out our review of the show here.]

The Head and the Heart have kept a steady presence on the touring circuit since the 2022 release of their reflective fifth studio album, Every Shade of Blue. The Seattle-based band formed in 2009 and inked a deal with Sub Pop Records just months later, and is operating independently now.

With a bit of a twist on the normal rock’n’roll vibe, we’d seen the band announce publicly that they were making a tour “lifestyle” shift collectively on this most recent outing. To talk about what group sobriety means for a huge band in 2023, we hopped on a call with drummer Tyler Williams ahead of the LFK gig.

The Pitch: We came across the tweet last week about how the band had made a collective decision to tour sober this time around. Sober living is a societal pivot we’re covering more and more right now, and there’s even thinkpieces about how Gen Z not drinking is killing live venues, financially. So when we saw the announcement that you’d decided to invite your audience to embrace your group sobriety, we wanted to know more about how that came to be? It would be one thing if this was just a private choice some members made or whathaveyou, but it’s a different thing when you actively invite others to meet you where you are, and that seems fascinating?

Tyler Williams: There’s so many layers to this onion. The world is stressful, right? It’s insane. To even think about the future, I feel like, you know, you just don’t know where we’re headed. AI is gonna take your jobs and global warming is gonna destroy the world—it’s just so it feels so apocalyptic.

And we’re heading into a presidential election year, yeah, nothing feels good, man.

I think most people feel in their own way that the country they grew up in is burning down in front of them. There’s this entire thread of constant anxiety running through us, and then you consider how alcohol plays into that, and into how you manifest anxieties, especially when dealing with the concept of the future. It’s all the same thing, and it comes from the same place. You want to eliminate as much stress as possible in an overly-stressed world. Removing alcohol from the equation has helped with that. But then beyond the general idea of sobriety providing that stability, you look at the granular levels within the band. Our personal relationships are so much better when we’re not drinking, because we’re not moody. Last night? We all got enough sleep. And no one is hungover and being pissy about things that don’t matter. It translates into a stronger connection among us and that stronger connection means a better show on stage. No one is beefing over dumb things. This world we live in doesn’t come with a lot of space to breathe. You wake up and there’s eight people in the front lounge of the bus you’re on, and it can just be exhausting to tour. But we’re working to flip it on its head and make that into a great time, and a productive time. Being sober, and being present for each other, is turning out to be the best way to do that.

What what are you doing with all that newfound time and presence? Because that can be equally stressful to be like, Well, I’m, I’m here now, what the fuck do I do with it?

Well, I mean, being in a band also comes with a lot of homework, you know, there’s so much stuff you do that isn’t on stage. You’re making decisions on where you’re going to tour next year, where to make your record, even what label to be on. You’re sitting there in the greenroom for eight hours before soundcheck and that’s time you can be having real conversations with each other. Improving contact among us makes us a better band in the future. We look to Jason Isbell as such an example here. He was on a crazy rock’n’roll path having a blast and getting blasted every night, but decided to skip that. Then the songwriting shot forward and his career took off, because he was able to invest that extra time into what mattered. There’s just this programming that once you turn 21, you’re supposed to start going to the bar and that’s how you have fun. I think that push might be why there’s something of a societal backlash.

That societal mess swings the other direction, too. People in your orbit come to the show, or a VIP meet & greet, and folks have just forgotten how to hang out socially without alcohol. The idea of buying someone a beer to show respect is just such a common currency in this space, it’s tricky to turn down folks and have that make sense in the moment. 

We’ve been putting NA beers on our rider, which has been really helpful. When you’re holding a Budweiser Zero or whatever, no one bats an eye. I think it’s funny, this kind of pressure we have to have a drink in your hand. Like, over the pandemic I discovered this brand called Hop Water…

Our office is stocked with it at this point.

It’s like, when we were in the studio for working on every shade of blue up in Seattle, we, I think charity had had that picked up and brought in. And sorry, one second. And I think I crushed like five of them in a row. I was like, Yeah, and I was like, Oh, wait, this actually I’m like, really chill right now this is a great, like, offset to what a like a alcoholic buzz would be. Right? Right. So we really got into that over the pandemic. And then when we started touring last year, we actually did a little like, I don’t know what it’s called, like a partnership with them, where, you know, they would send us a bunch of hot water, and we just, like post photos of it on stage or whatever. And it’s like, this is so much better than drinking beer. And it’s a company that we like working with, and I don’t know, it’s just kind of a cool, you find different avenues, you know, writers, it’s not always just about your liquor, you know,

What are you inviting an audience to see in you right now, versus like a show five years ago?

Everyone’s getting a little older, you know, we’re 14 years into this. At a certain age, it just doesn’t feel good anymore. And you start to slow down, it slows you down, and it weighs on you. And you know that that those six beers that you had two days ago, you’re still feeling it, you know, two days later, so I think like, it’s helped us like feel really like useful, like energetic and I don’t know, like, I think when people come see the show, they’re gonna see us like engaging with the audience. No one has their head buried, buried down because they don’t feel good. Everyone’s everyone’s looking around and like, the musical connections that we’re making are so much deeper because we’re really in the Present Moment, you know.

Are working on new music right now? Planning a recording?

Yeah, this is sort of the the exciting next chapter, I’d say is, you know, we were out of our major label deal, which is a very nice thing to say. And we’re sort of free agents. And now we’re just creating music on our own, like we did, like on the first record, where there was no expectation, it’s like, let’s get in there together. Let’s self produce it. And let’s see what happens. So we have up on a farm in Virginia. And right across the street there’s a studio. So literally, like everyone comes and stays in my house, we walk 100 yards out the front door, and we’re working with this great engineer who has amazing gear. And we’ve just been doing it all ourselves. So we have probably a few more months of that over this winter. And then hopefully, we’re turning in a record that we’re really proud of.

Of all the songs you are performing on tour right now, that are in rotation, what’s a particular pleasure to hit on this run right now? Anything that’s been reworked or something brand new? What track should Lawrence be on their toes for?

“Dreamer” was off our 2016 release, and that song we constructed in the studio but didn’t fully know how to paly it live. It was really fantastic musically but we needed to grow as musicians to find the right fit for it. It’s now one of the easiest for us to play when we’re in the zone, with a really beautiful set of melodies. That feels like it’s a good microcosm for everything we’re doing right now. Being in the zone, connecting in a deeper way with the lyrics. We’re just finding ways to take control of all parts of what we’re doing.

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