When the members of The Head and the Heart were finally able to meet up and record their upcoming album Every Shade of Blue, they decided to head home.
“We chose to go back to Seattle,” vocalist Jonathan Russell tells ABC Audio. “We chose to go to the same studio that we did our first two records at.”
That return to the city where The Head and the Heart was first founded in 2009, coupled with the fact that the band members hadn’t seen each other in person in over a year due to the COVID-19 pandemic, made recording Every Shade of Blue feel like a “homecoming.”
“We just had so many memories there,” Russull says. He recalls stumbling upon a bike that he had left at the studio a decade earlier.
“My bicycle was literally in the same position in the garage in the studio,” he shares. “It had some flat tires, but other than that, it was good to go.”
For a recording process so steeped in Seattle, it may seem odd that the current single off Every Shade of Blue pays tribute to a place on the complete other side of the country. The song, titled “Virginia (Wind in the Night),” refers to Russell’s pre-Seattle home, where he’s since moved back to and lives now.
Writing a song about Virginia with a band formed in Seattle, Russell says, represents the “strange dichotomy” of The Head and the Heart.
“We all met in Seattle…but the funny thing was it was purely coincidental,” Russell says. “Two people were from California that came up in completely separate times for different reasons, two of us were from Virginia at different times, and then two members were born-and-raised in Seattle.”
Every Shade of Blue drops April 29.
Copyright © 2022, ABC Audio. All rights reserved.