Beloved Seattle band The Head and The Heart have embarked on tour in support of the 15-year anniversary of their RIAA Certified Platinum self-titled debut album. They are playing Sandy Amphitheater on August 22. We had the opportunity to talk with Kenny Hensley (Piano) earlier in the week. We discuss how he met the other members of the band, celebrating the first album, and much more.
Kenny was interviewed by Kevin Rolfe. Enjoy!
* * * * * * *
UCR: So being from Southern California, what led you to Seattle? How did this all get started?
Kenny: Yeah, it was kind of on a whim. I mean, I graduated high school in 06. I wasn’t the best student. I didn’t have any plans for school or college. I traveled a lot. I had saved up a lot of money working odd jobs in high school, so I backpacked Europe and would just travel as long as my money would allow it. Then I’d come home, work another job for a while, travel more. I did that for a couple years. I eventually lived in Oklahoma City for a little while, because my best friend moved out there. And the next year, in 09, I turned 21.
I always loved Sup Pop. That was one of my favorite labels, and in high school, I remember even emailing them, trying to be on their street team at times. I just loved all the bands that were coming out of that label. I was at my parents’ house in maybe February, March of 2009, and I saw Fleet Foxes on Saturday Night Live. It was a band I was familiar with and was a fan of, but it just blew me away that a band that was doing what they were doing and writing that type of music was playing a stage that big, or, you know, doing Saturday Night Live.
It just kind of inspired me. I didn’t have any plan going forward. I actually… my dad was high school buddies with a guy that worked at Warner Brothers Records, and so there were a few months before I moved to Seattle when I interned at Warner Brothers, thinking that might be my foot in the door, and I’d meet people in the music industry. It was an unpaid internship, 9 to 5, and I was just running errands, you know, getting people lunch and coffee all day, and it was pretty soulless. A
round that time is when I saw Fleet Foxes on SNL; I just decided it was time for another move. I took the little money I had, and, you know, my crappy pickup truck and just loaded up my stuff and moved up there. I only knew one person. My older sister had a friend that lived up there. He said I could crash in his basement on an air mattress for a while, while I got my bearings straight.
I was up there, I think May of 2009, and very… super randomly, it was just, right place, right time, but a couple weeks after I moved there… I’m a big Laker fan, growing up in LA. They were in the 09 Finals against the Orlando Magic, and I asked the guy I was living with if there was a good bar that he recommended going to watch the game. He recommended this Irish pub down the street called Connor Byrne. I went down there by myself and just posted up before the game. Chris, our bass player, actually was the bartender there, so I met him first. Without knowing, you know, that we would end up being in a band together for 17 years. But I met him first, and the Lakers happened to win the championship that night.
I was in celebration mode, and had just turned 21, so I could go to bars, and I remember calling all my friends back home and kind of wishing I was in LA, but it was what it was. But because they won, you know, I wanted to celebrate, so I stayed at the bar and just kept ordering beers and drinking, and there happened to be an open mic that night. I was just posted up and was watching the different acts come up and play, 15 minutes each, and both John and Josiah, who I started the band with, had just met, I think, a month before, and they each played a few songs, and I was just really, really impressed by them, and so I introduced myself that night and told them I had just moved from LA and was a musician.
I’d never been in a band, you know; I played music on my own a lot, it was kind of my, like, secret love. I was a skateboarder; none of my friends knew I did it, but at home, what I was really passionate about was writing music. I played guitar growing up, and then started picking up the piano when I was 16 or so. Seattle really was, you know, I’m gonna pick a city that I thought had a great music scene, and go somewhere, and kind of just commit a year to trying to meet people, getting an apartment, renting a piano, and just writing as much music as I could.
I didn’t sing, really, and so I initially thought that the route that made the most sense was maybe getting into film scoring or instrumental music. So I kind of planned on going up for a year, writing a lot of music, then coming back to LA, and seeing if I could get into that world not knowing that a couple weeks after moving there, I’d meet two guys, and we started hanging out and writing songs together. It was really the first time I had ever collaborated with any… anybody, ever. Had never been in a band, like I said.
That summer of 2009, the three of us, you know, were just writing songs to play at the open mic. There was a piano on stage, so we could all play together. It was really just that we didn’t want to play the same songs every week, so we were writing tunes so we’d have something new to play. That ended up being, you know, the first 5 or 6 songs that would end up being on our first record.
We met Charity at the same bar that fall. Chris eventually, who was the bartender, asked if we needed a bass player, and he joined. The one guy that didn’t meet at the bar totally randomly was our drummer, Tyler. He went to high school with John in Virginia, and he moved out to be our drummer because we needed someone. Once we had some demos together, he heard them and was impressed by it, and moved out, and then there were six of us. We had a few others in the earlier days that were kind of in and out, but it was more like a collective. We didn’t have a band name for a while. But yeah, that’s kind of the long story short of how… why I moved up there, and how we… we all met initially.
UCR: That’s so cool. I’m sorry, I’m sure you’ve told that story a million times, but I’m just so fascinated by origin stories.
Kenny: Oh, you’re good. Honestly, I mean, it still gives me goosebumps thinking about just how lucky we were to meet, and the timing. Like, what if I hadn’t moved up there, you know? What if the Warner internship had been everything I wanted, and maybe I would end up in the music industry, but not a musician, you know?
UCR: Right.
Kenny: So yeah, I mean, I still remember the walk from my buddy’s place down to that bar. I was excited for the game, and it’s wild to think that that was the last night of my life before I met these people and started this, and now, 17 years later, I’m 38, and it’s been all my adult life.
UCR: It’s funny, as you were telling that story, I remember very vividly watching that Finals, and I’m just thinking about where I was watching that. Little did I know that you were way up in the northwest, and one of my favorite bands was about to be meeting.
Kenny: Totally. We always joke that if it wasn’t for Kobe and the Lakers, we might not have ever started.
UCR: Right!
Kenny: Or if they hadn’t won that game. I might have just left right after, and who knows if I had gone back there again. A lot of just serendipitous, one-in-a-million type of things that I think have to happen for what happened to click, you know?
UCR: I think you’re right. I don’t know if you’re anything like me, but if the Lakers would have lost that game, I probably would have been… because you didn’t, at the time, have any attachment to that bar, so I probably would have been like, well, they lost here, I’m going somewhere else.
Kenny: Totally.
UCR: Just to see if that… any little bit helps, you know?
Kenny: No, totally.
Kenny: I guarantee you I would have done that. It’s so funny; it’s nice also just having the date. I would never remember the exact date that we met, but now I can always look up, you know, when the Lakers beat the Magic in the 09 Finals, and I know that’s the night that at least the three of us met for the first time.
UCR: That’s a good point.
Kenny: And, little checkpoints along the way, like, the next year we beat the Celtics, and by that point, we were touring on our own a little bit, and I remember that night, we played a show in Sandpoint, Idaho. It was us and The Lumineers. Maybe 15 people came. I still have the flyer for it; it was 5 bucks. I ran across the street to watch Game 7, and, you know, it was a stressful game. We won the game; I played the show in a Kobe jersey, because I was all excited.
UCR: We better get off the Lakers; I’m gonna spend this whole interview just reminiscing with you about the glory days.
Kenny: I know, sorry, sorry.
UCR: That Game 7 was insanity…
Kenny: Oh my gosh.
UCR: Has it been a strange adjustment going from a tour where you’re promoting and playing songs off a new release in Aperture? Then going back to the beginning on this tour and celebrating and reflecting on your first album.
Kenny: A little bit. I mean, last year, we toured a lot of the year after we put out Aperture, and that was all, you know, the Aperture Tour. We always play songs from every record, but it was really focused on that. Then we were gonna take January and February off before starting up this 15th anniversary tour. We kind of got the Brandi dates pretty late. We’ve been wanting a big support tour for a long time. We’ve kind of been in this weird in-between period where there’s not a lot of bands for us to open for that are in our genre. So we’ve headlined for most of the last 10, 11, 12 years.
We got a January Australia trip with the Lumineers, and they’re old friends, like I told you. So we went out there and did a support tour, or support shows for them, and then all these Brandi dates, and it was a different way of thinking about it, having 45 minutes. We kind of thought, you know, this is our chance to try to gain new fans, and so we just tried to play as many songs that we thought people would love in as short, you know, in a 45-minute set as possible. We tried to mix it up. But there isn’t a lot you can do with 45 minutes, so we tended to keep the setlist pretty similar, just play a lot of songs that were singles. It was kind of like a greatest hits set.
Then it was a different experience to go into the 15th anniversary tour, because we wanted to do two sets. We wanted to play the first album front to back, and then have a second set of favorites from the rest of the catalog. I ended up really loving that. There were some growing pains, for sure. Because we, for years, have always closed with “Rivers and Roads,” and all of a sudden, we were playing that fifth, you know? And so we’re playing in sequential order of the album, and there was some getting used to the feeling of playing the songs in that order. Then how do you put together a second set that includes none of the first record?
I feel like it took a handful of shows to feel comfortable, but once it started feeling good and making sense, we all had a blast. I think it took a lot of pressure off of us to know that the setlist was pretty much locked, at least the first half every night. We all make decisions together, and the setlist is a daily conversation. Knowing that we only need to choose 8 or 9 songs versus 22, and come to an agreement on the order and where songs go, was a lot less of a headache on a daily basis. It was really nice to just know, okay, we’re coming out, playing the first record every night, that’s set in stone. And then we tried the second half just to play some favorites.
UCR: Obviously, “Rivers and Roads” is a great closer for a show, just an amazing Way to end the night. But it’s refreshing, in a way, to get these songs in a different place and feel them in a different way.
Kenny: We always hear people say, you know, your first album’s the best, and this song’s the best, and it’s more often than not focused on the first album. And coming out and being able to play a bunch of shows where we did the first album first, got that out of the way, and then had to come up with an entire second set of songs that didn’t feature any of those songs, and realizing how strong it was. I mean, if anything, I feel like the energy and the crowd was almost more into it the second half of the set.
Tthe first album was really great, but it’s a little sleepy, and, I’m sure people loved listening to it in that way, but the second half gave me a lot of appreciation for the rest of our catalog, and I think it opened up the eyes to some of our fans, too, that, you know, it’s not all about the first album.
UCR: You’ve played a zillion shows, so this is kind of a hard thing to pin down, but do you have a show, or maybe, like, a run of shows on a tour where it was just, like, the best? Like, you’re just thinking, this was amazing, I’ll never forget it.
Kenny: I feel like those early years, or the first year or two, was just all so new that everything was… I was ecstatic to do it, period. And those were the smallest shows we ever played. Before we had a crew, and we were in tour buses. We initially were just playing around Seattle, and then we eventually made it to Portland for a show, but Salt Lake was actually one of our first markets, because our bass player, Chris, was good friends with this band from Salt Lake called The Devil Whale. I’m not sure if you’re familiar; they’re amazing, but we kind of started touring in our van to Salt Lake, and we’d open for them at Urban Lounge or, you know, one of the smaller venues in Salt Lake.
Then they’d come to Seattle and open for us. And so we did that Seattle to Salt Lake trip quite a bit on our own in the early days. So I have really great memories of that era, just going to Salt Lake City and playing with the Devil Whale at Urban or at Kilby Court, you know, any of those small rooms. That as super special.
We’ve played, you know, pretty much every venue in Salt Lake, and one more just to add to the stories, I guess, is the first time we did, like, a support tour for a big band; we did a few shows with The Shins, and we played Sasquatch Festival.
At the end of Rivers and Roads, I used to pick up my piano stool and slam it down on the ground really hard, just as, like, an emotional ending. At the Sasquatch show, I slammed the piano bench down so hard, and my hand kind of slipped through it, and I thought I broke my hand. I got X-rays in Salt Lake. It wasn’t broken, but it was, like, a contusion, and then my left hand was just screwed, though. I couldn’t play with it at all. And so we opened for The Shins at Red Butte.
Which was such an insane thing for me to experience at all, because I was a big fan of theirs, and just playing with a band that we all knew and had known for years as fans. That was one of the most nerve-wracking shows, because we’re playing this big venue, we had never played a show that big in Salt Lake, and I had to play the whole show with one hand, basically.
It was just embarrassing, and I tried, but I couldn’t stretch out my left hand at all, so I was pretty much useless piano-wise. But yeah, aside from all those early Urban Lounge shows, and Kilby, and, you know, everything in between, that one always rings a bell when it comes to Salt Lake.
UCR: Well, what’s funny is, I’m sure the fans were none the wiser and just loved that show, but you’re sitting there, probably just a nervous wreck the whole stretch.
Kenny: Oh, totally. Even my friends were like, that was great! I’m like, you couldn’t tell that I wasn’t playing half of what I normally play. Like, no, it sounded good. But, you know, people never know; it’s all about the look of it all.
UCR: Thank you so much for taking the time. I really appreciate it, and I cannot wait for Saturday.
Kenny: It’s gonna be great, yeah, thanks, thank you for the interview.