A second album under pressure
On October 31, 2013, The Head and the Heart were sixteen days into the life of their second album. Let’s Be Still had been released by Sub Pop on October 15, after a first record that had carried the Seattle group from open mics and self-financed sessions to national touring. The label’s release page identifies the 2013 lineup as singers and guitarists Jonathan Russell and Josiah Johnson, drummer Tyler Williams, keyboardist Kenny Hensley, singer and violinist Charity Rose Thielen, and bassist Chris Zasche. It also fixes the essential discographic facts: catalog number SP1060, thirteen tracks, and a sequence running from “Homecoming Heroes” to “Gone.” Sub Pop
The scale of the change was unusually visible. KEXP’s account of the band’s rise says the independently issued debut sold more than 10,000 copies before Sub Pop re-released it in 2011. KEXP That success did not erase the doubts around the group’s musical identity. Pitchfork’s 2011 review had recognized the grassroots achievement while criticizing the debut’s old-time instrumentation, gospel-tinted harmonies and emotional directness as overly familiar. Pitchfork The useful question for the follow-up was therefore not simply whether the band could repeat its appeal. It was whether six musicians associated with an early-2010s folk boom could make a broader record without manufacturing a false reinvention.
Let’s Be Still answers by changing emphasis. The communal vocals, piano, violin, acoustic guitar and grounded rhythm section remain, but the album is less eager to crowd every silence. On Sub Pop’s artist page, Russell recalled that busking had encouraged the band to fill space before a listener could walk away; with an established audience, the group could trust quieter moments. Johnson described the goal as writing songs that felt bigger without making them frantic. Sub Pop artist biography Those comments illuminate the album more precisely than a generic claim that the band had “gone electric” or left folk behind. Its expansion is partly an expansion of patience.
What more resources changed
The recording process supports that reading. Sub Pop says the album was made at Seattle’s Studio Litho with Shawn Simmons and mixed in Bridgeport, Connecticut, with Peter Katis. Sub Pop AllMusic’s credits list the band itself as producer, Simmons as producer and engineer, and Katis in additional production, engineering, instrumentation and mixing; Maria Scherer Wilson contributed cello, while Eyvind Kang played viola and violin. AllMusic This was not a case of an outside producer replacing the band’s center of gravity. The wider palette was assembled around the group’s own production credit.
More time and equipment also created a problem the debut had not posed: choice. In Sub Pop’s contemporary account, Zasche contrasted the limitations of the first record with the need to maintain focus when the second offered more resources and more possible sounds. That tension is audible across the album. Piano may carry a melodic hook in one song and recede into atmosphere in another. Strings can trace the edge of a vocal rather than announce a roots-music identity. Harmonies sometimes arrive as a full chorus, but elsewhere a lead remains exposed for longer before the ensemble gathers around it.
The result is neither raw rehearsal tape nor glossy anonymity. The album’s 53-minute length, documented by AllMusic, gives the arrangements space to turn. AllMusic “Springtime,” a 53-second prelude, opens directly into the compact “Summertime.” “Shake” concentrates the band’s momentum into four minutes. The title track settles into a gentler exchange of guitar, organ and voices. “Gone,” at more than six minutes, attempts the opposite extreme: a long closing ascent. Whether every extension earns its place is debatable, but the sequencing makes the band’s purpose clear. The second album is testing several sizes of the same ensemble.
Thirteen songs, several centers
That variety matters because The Head and the Heart were never accurately described as one frontman with ornamental backing. Russell and Johnson exchange vocal authority, Thielen changes both the harmonic color and the point of view, Hensley’s keyboard work can define a song’s lift, and Williams and Zasche prevent the quieter material from drifting. A favorable Forbes contributor review concentrated on this interaction, hearing piano, rhythm, strings and vocal interchange as the record’s organizing language. Forbes Even without accepting that review’s superlatives, its attention to arrangement is well placed: the band’s most distinctive effect comes from parts separating and reconvening.
The album also broadens who can occupy its foreground. On the acoustic “These Days Are Numbered,” Thielen’s lead vocal is not merely a change of texture between Russell and Johnson songs; it shifts the record’s emotional weight toward restraint. musicOMH singled out that performance, as well as the title track’s guitar, organ and blended voices, while calling the album a step forward. The same review considered the six-minute “Gone” overstretched. musicOMH That mixed judgment is helpful. A bigger canvas created real contrast, but it did not guarantee that every slow build would become an epic.
AllMusic reached a related conclusion from a cooler angle. Its review heard a lusher, more languid album and found the band most engaging when it moved outside familiar roots-rock construction, particularly on “Summertime,” “Shake” and the title track. AllMusic Taken together, the reviews locate the album’s central risk: retain too much of the debut’s architecture and the group could sound cautious; stretch every idea and it could lose the economy that made its choruses travel. Let’s Be Still is compelling when it treats scale as contrast rather than a demand to make every song enormous.
The stage as a stress test
The release was tested in public before listeners had much time to memorize it. On October 14, the night before the album arrived, The Head and the Heart played Seattle’s Columbia City Theater and performed the new record from beginning to end. KEXP reported that “Homecoming Heroes” opened the set, “Gone” completed the album run, and the group then returned to earlier material. The report also records Russell telling the room that this was the band’s third performance that day, one of the others having been an afternoon set at KEXP. KEXP
That full-album concert was more than a release-night ritual. New songs were placed before a hometown audience without the protection of long familiarity. KEXP described “Summertime” and “Shake” as immediate, while the title track and “10,000 Weight in Gold” supplied the more aching side of the set. Its account of the encore is equally revealing: Russell and Thielen returned with one acoustic guitar and performed without the PA before the full band rejoined. The movement from a complete, newly arranged studio album to two unamplified voices demonstrated the group’s underlying continuity. Expanded production had not made intimacy obsolete; it had given the band another way to frame it.
The road case continued days later. Between two sold-out First Avenue shows, Russell, Johnson and Thielen visited Minnesota Public Radio’s The Current on October 27 to discuss the new record and perform “Shake,” “Another Story” and “Let’s Be Still.” The Current also reported that the album had debuted in the Billboard top ten. The Current By the date of this spotlight, the second album was therefore not only a studio proposition: it had been presented in full at home, carried into a radio session, and received as a top-ten release.
The “Shake” snapshot
The period’s clearest official visual is the performance-centered video for “Shake.” Boing Boing premiered it on October 23 and credited E. Ryan McMackin as director. Boing Boing Issued through Sub Pop’s verified YouTube channel, the clip keeps the camera on the players instead of imposing a separate storyline. Official “Shake” video That choice suits a song whose force depends on coordinated motion: percussion drives, piano and guitars add brightness and pressure, and the voices turn an individual line into a group event.
The video should not be mistaken for proof that the album was captured live without studio construction. Its value is simpler. It makes visible the division of labor that contemporary reviews kept hearing. No one gesture explains the density; the effect comes from six musicians making entrances, leaving openings and answering one another. As a document released eight days after the album, it also shows how Sub Pop and the band chose to introduce the record’s enlarged sound: not through spectacle, but through the sight of an ensemble at work.
A wider version of the same band
By October 31, Let’s Be Still had established a credible second act without pretending that The Head and the Heart had abandoned their first language. The record still relied on direct melody, shared singing and a recognizable acoustic core. Its advance was architectural. It distributed attention more widely, used additional studio resources without surrendering the band’s production role, and allowed stillness to function alongside the stomp and release that listeners already knew.
The album did not settle every criticism attached to the debut. Some passages remained close to familiar folk-pop forms, and the closing reach of “Gone” divided reviewers. But the strongest songs showed that familiarity and growth were not mutually exclusive. “Shake” could deliver an immediate communal rush; “These Days Are Numbered” could narrow the frame around Thielen; the title track could make softness feel deliberate; and the complete sequence could survive a hometown stage only hours before release.
That is the timely meaning of Let’s Be Still: not a command to stop, but evidence that a fast-rising band had learned to control pace. Sixteen days after release, The Head and the Heart sounded larger because they no longer needed every member, every texture and every emotion to arrive at once.