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Coming to Pacific Amphitheatre
August 3rd, 2026 By Clara Amaris Becker
The Head and the Heart lands in Costa Mesa on August 14th, as part of their 15th Anniversary Tour. The tour is a celebration of their certified platinum, self-titled debut, an album that helped define the indie folk revival in the 2010s.
The band got its start in 2009, when Jonathan Russell and Josiah Johnson met at an open mic night in Seattle and started writing together. Four others soon joined – Charity Rose Thielen on violin and vocals, Chris Zasche on bass, Kenny Hensley on piano, and Tyler Williams on drums – rounding out the lineup that would go on to record that debut. Johnson has since stepped away from the group, and guitarist Matt Gervais now fills out the current live lineup alongside Russell, Thielen, Zasche, Hensley, and Williams.
Most anniversary tours are an excuse to run through the hits and call it a day. This one’s different: The Head and the Heart are playing their 2011 debut front-to-back. The whole thing.
The album that gave us “Rivers and Roads,” “Down in the Valley,” and “Lost in My Mind.” Songs that have soundtracked road trips, weekends spent camping, and breakups for over a decade now.
This isn’t a band coasting on 2011 nostalgia, or media content to get filed under “millennial hopecore” and left there. They’re currently touring behind “Aperture,” their sixth album and first self-produced record since that debut, and it’s become one of their biggest commercial moments in years.
The song “Arrow” spent over 20 weeks on the Adult Top 40 chart and hit number one at both AAA and Alternative radio.
While the band promises to play the debut in full, expect the rest of the set to bounce between eras, allowing for the stomp-and-clap, sing along harmonies that built their reputation, and the newer, more polished songs pulling in a fresh audience entirely.
Wilderado is back opening this leg, having already played several dates with the band earlier in the tour. The Tulsa indie/alt-rock group has been steadily building its own following with songs like “Surefire,” “Take Some Time,” “Rubble to Rubble,” and a personal favorite of mine, “Morning Light.”
When I found out The Head and the Heart would be closing out summer with a stop at Pacific Amphitheatre, I thought back to every summer I’ve spent with this band in the background.
They heavily influenced the playlist I made in my teens and have been the soundtrack for a lifetime of beach trips, camping, and long drives with the windows down.
That’s the thing I’ve always found about The Head and the Heart – their songs don’t really belong indoors.
Fifteen years later, hearing that debut album live, outside, under the actual sky it was probably written for, feels less like a concert and more like the way it was always meant to be experienced.
TO FOLLOW
SID 260805 | TRACI TURNER | EDITOR
