Indie folk band The Head and the Heart took the stage at River Breeze Event Center on Friday night, drawing a crowd of fans to Knoxville’s new outdoor music venue.
River Breeze opened to the public in September and Friday’s performance marks a notable appearance for the venue. The Head and the Heart is famous for their song “Rivers and Roads,” which has over 200 million streams on Spotify.
Nashville-based band Bexar opened up the event before The Head and the Heart took centerstage.
While “Rivers and Roads” is perhaps the headliner’s most well-known song, the performance was filled with music from throughout their more than 10-year discography. They went from songs from their debut album fueled by folk sound like “Ghosts” and “Down in the Valley” to more recent pieces like “Honeybee” that employ more pop than folk beats. The band also performed a cover of Matt Hopper & the Roman Candle’s “False Alarm.”
The Head and the Heart is acclaimed for its emotive lyricism, which is clear through how often their songs are used on TikTok for coming-of-age videos like high school graduations or friends moving away. Between songs, lead singer Jonathan Russell explained that after shows people will reach out, saying “they have so many emotions that they don’t know how to feel normal.” He said at one point he thought he was the only one that felt that way.
“I guess I just want to call that out and say I don’t know if it’s normal, but you’re not the only one, and I just hope you find a pen and a pad, or a basketball, a guitar, a piano or a long walk and just know that you are not the only person who has a lot of emotions,” Russell said. “I don’t know what else to say about it. I just wanted to say you are not the only person feeling that way.”
Mackenzie Lance and Cami Johnson, graduate students in UT’s speech pathology program, are long-time fans of the band and said the show exceeded their expectations.
“It was so surreal,” Lance said. “It was awesome.”
Since opening, River Breeze has hosted bands like Yonder Mountain and just last week, held an “unofficial Beat Bama Pep Rally.” The venue aims to provide guests with a festival experience in one night as everything is outdoors and all food and drinks are purchased through wristbands that are preloaded with cash or card funds.
Both Lance and Johnson like to take advantage of Knoxville’s music scene whenever possible. They enjoy going to concerts at the Mill & Mine and River Breeze offered them another opportunity to see a show and they were drawn to the venue for the first time by the band’s performance.
“I literally looked up concerts in Knoxville, I was like ‘I need something,’” Johnson said.
Ellie Gustin, a freshman supply chain management major, and Eileen Smith, a freshman audiology and speech pathology major, got free tickets to the show on Friday and decided to attend, even though they were mostly just familiar with “Rivers and Roads.”
“I knew like a couple songs, but it was so much fun,” Smith said.
Gustin said Knoxville is on the rise when it comes to bringing people in and keeping up with Music City’s plethora of artists that travel there to perform.
“I feel like Knoxville’s getting super popular,” Gustin said. “Everyone loves it.”
While Knoxville may not have been the Seattle band’s usual pitstop, River Breeze and the city that Smith describes to her Chicago family as a “homemade soap kind of town” drew The Head and the Heart into its fold.
“I feel like we’re resident Tennesseans by now,” Russell said while closing out the show with an encore.
