The Head and the Heart didn’t need a reinvention. They had already graduated from indie darlings to festival mainstays, clocked in their requisite late-night TV appearances, and turned out enough wistful, heart-swelling anthems to keep a Subaru ad exec busy for a lifetime. But somewhere along the way, the band stopped talking. Like, really talking. And if they didn’t figure out how to start again, there might not have been a band left to discuss at all.
That’s how Living Mirage—their most intentional, most expansive, and most meticulously crafted album yet—came to exist.
“We had to dissolve a lot of past relationships or past feelings that weren’t even relevant anymore,” drummer Tyler Williams says. “If we didn’t start checking in with each other and being friends again, I don’t know if we would have made another record.”
So, like a group of idealistic L.A. couples trying to save their marriage, they packed up and went to Joshua Tree.
It was there, in the desert, under that impossibly clear sky that has a way of stripping away pretense, that they tried to rebuild something. “There were some dark moments,” Williams says. “It was a lot of rediscovery.”
Frontman Jonathan Russell remembers feeling like he had plateaued as a songwriter. “I was ready for a reinvention, for something fresh, but I had no idea what that meant.”
It turns out, it meant throwing out the usual process. Instead of showing up with a handful of almost-finished songs for the band to react to, Russell started from scratch, responding to the band’s playing instead.
“If anything, I was more intentional about not coming in with everything mapped out,” he says. “This band’s chemistry is too good for that.”
That shift in approach is evident throughout Living Mirage, a record that sounds bigger, bolder, and tighter than anything they’ve done before. The bass and drums lock in with a new kind of purpose. The harmonies stretch out into something more textured and layered. Charity Rose Thielen’s vocals, in particular, hit like a revelation.
And while the album may sound more polished, the way it came together was anything but.
“We went in with no plan,” Williams says. “We were just jamming in Joshua Tree. John had some guitar riffs, and we’d fill in around them. It was really loose at first.”
It was also a moment of reckoning.
“You don’t realize how long you’ve been carrying old ideas of people until you’re forced to deal with them,” Russell says. “You think of them as who they were in 2011, but that’s not who they are anymore. We had to start seeing each other as we are now.”
That self-awareness runs through Living Mirage, especially on songs like “Misconnection,” which started as a song about a missed flight and turned into a reflection on fate, timing, and universal breadcrumbs.
Russell wrote it about the time he got stuck in Chicago, wound up at a festival, and met his girlfriend of three years. But by the time the song was finished, it was also about the band itself.
“The song is saying, ‘Just because something seems like it’s not working out, doesn’t mean it’s not leading you somewhere better,’” he explains.
Then there’s “Honeybee,” which finds Russell pushing his falsetto into new territory. “I’ve always loved how Thom Yorke or Chris Martin could use their voice as an instrument,” he says. “This was my first real chance to do that.”
When Williams points out how locked-in the rhythm section sounds on this album, he credits it to something simpler than production tricks.
“We just worked shit out,” he says. “That’s it. As hippie as it sounds, we had to get good with each other. The music followed.”
The result is an album that doesn’t just sound intentional—it feels intentional.
It’s a second wind for a band that almost lost itself in the chaos of constant touring, shifting lineups, and unresolved tension.
“It feels like a new band,” Russell says. “Like a solid friendship again.”
They may not have hired a therapist (Some Kind of Monster style), but they got close.
“Charity played the part pretty well,” Williams laughs.
Listen to the interview above and then check out the tracks below.
