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Live at Pacific Amphitheatre
August 20th, 2026 Review by Amaris Becker
It’s been 15 years since The Head and the Heart released their self-titled debut album, and they brought all of it to the Pacific Amphitheatre on August 14th. They played the entire record front to back, and I was fortunate enough to experience it, and then some.
I honestly thought the Pacific Amphitheatre would be an odd venue at this time of year. It sits on the OC Fair grounds, which means the show doesn’t exist in a vacuum like it would in other parts of the year. I was concerned about the fair noise – games, rides, farm animals, and food stands – bleeding into the amphitheater and drowning out the bands, especially considering the genre of music, but I was completely immersed in the show and the overall experience.
Wilderado went on first and opened with “Stranger.” Max Rainer (lead vocals and guitar) spoke about the band’s touring and playing a venue located inside a fair, tying it back to the fairs he grew up around in Oklahoma, where the band got its start.
Rainer was joined by founding member Tyler Wimpee on guitar, Justin Kila on drums, and Aaron Boehler playing bass.
As the crowd filled in, I got the feeling that many people were hearing the band for the first time.
While not everyone knew Wilderado, the ones who did really knew them and were singing the lyrics along with the band.
The band truly connected with their audience through both crowd work and overall stage presence.
By the time they gathered around one mic to close with their hit “Rubble to Rubble,” which Rainer explained is about finding out his wife was pregnant, the crowd was singing it back to them.
When I think of the audience that would come to a Head and the Heart concert, I picture flower crowns, long flowy skirts, and, to put it simply, stereotypical hipsters. But I was pleasantly surprised by the diversity of this audience. A good number were millennial couples now taking their kids to experience the band they listened to in college, but there were people at all different stages of their lives and in all different aesthetics.
As the band took the stage, all dressed in different styles, I realized that this was the point. It was a family and friends show. Anyone could come and everyone would enjoy.
Due to this being the 15th anniversary tour, a celebration of their certified platinum self-titled debut, I was not surprised when the first track “Cats and Dogs” opened the set, followed by “Coeur d’Alene” and then “Ghosts.”
The setup of the stage was perfect. A couch, a lamp, and boxing gloves as decor, which gave the whole thing a homey, grounded feel, like we had wandered into someone’s living room instead of an amphitheater.
By the time “Down in the Valley” played, nobody was sitting and everyone was singing along.
The Head and the Heart’s music isn’t the kind you jump around to. Instead, you sing under the stars and sway as you let the lyrics take you somewhere. That was the energy of the night.
Then came “Rivers and Roads” and cheers went up from the crowd. But when Charity Rose Thielen (violin, guitar, piano, and vocals) stepped up to the mic, anyone still making noise went quiet. When she sang out those first few words, everything stopped. She didn’t get far into the song before the crowd could no longer hold their excitement and sang it back to the band.
“Honey Come Home,” “Lost in My Mind,” “Winter Song,” “Sounds Like Hallelujah,” and “Heaven Go Easy on Me” closed out the album. But what set the night apart wasn’t the album itself. It was the crowd work and the context they put the album in.
Jonathan Russell (lead vocals and guitar), one of the two founding members, gave real background on the songs and how they were created, the kind of context that makes you hear something in a different light after a decade of listening to it.
He told the story of how kismet the formation of the band was. He and Josiah Johnson, who stepped away from the band in 2016, met after an open mic night in Seattle in 2009, and everything followed from there.
Thielen, Chris Zasche on bass, Kenny Hensley on piano, and Tyler Williams on drums rounded out the lineup that recorded the debut. When Johnson stepped away, Matt Gervais, who is married to Thielen, took over filling out the live lineup on guitar and vocals.
Grassroots is how I would describe their rise. It wasn’t built on a record deal, but in a free room you could reserve at a public library in Seattle. This wasn’t a band in a hurry to end the concert or get through their set, and nobody wanted them to be.
Their hit album may have ended, but the set kept going with “All We Ever Knew,” “Fire Escape,” and “Another Story.” Wilderado came back out to join them for “After the Setting Sun,” which was a nice touch and brought a new level of energy to the stage.
Hensley on piano and keys was THE crowd favorite, with his name chanted back to him multiple times that night.
He had apparently gotten off a cruise that day and had his equilibrium thrown off, which he informed the audience was very important for playing piano.
The crowd wouldn’t have noticed even if he had messed up.
Gervais was the most fun to watch by a wide margin, with big stage energy, skipping around, clearly thrilled to be there. He was interacting with his bandmates, the fans, and the crowd as a whole. At one point he was simply chilling on the couch, playing his guitar, enjoying the night
Somewhere before “Tiebreaker” the energy settled and some people sat down for the first time all night. It did not last long. “Honeybee” started playing and brought everyone up again, and “Arrow,” “Virginia,” and “Missed Connection” played next. They ended with “Shake,” with nearly the entire amphitheater clapping along.
The crowd cheered for an encore and got one, but not the one anyone expected. Instead of a big finish, only Gervais and Thielen came back out for a piano version of “Beg, Steal, Borrow.”
It was just the two of them, and it felt raw and intimate after a night of harmonies and crowd-led sing-alongs. It was quiet, a departure from everything that came before it. We could feel the love the couple had for each other and for the music that they make.
The Head and the Heart’s music was built for the outside, and outside is where it lived. Where people could hug, sway, and sing. The Pacific Amphitheatre on that August evening met that need perfectly. An open-air amphitheater, in late summer, and I’d like to point out almost nobody was recording – they all were just too busy being there.
SHOW PHOTO GALLERY
by Todd Markel Rock Images
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SID 260822 | TRACI TURNER | EDITOR
