and i guess it’s just as well, but i miss your face like hell

The Head and The Heart’s debut album never connected me on the first few listens. That was back in 2010. In 2011 I was fortunate to see them live at the Calgary Folk Music Festival and by the end they had won me over. They managed to create a concert experience unlike one I’ve ever been at. Everyone was dancing, everyone was singing, everyone could feel the emotion and you could tell the band was too.

There was a song they played called ‘Rivers and Roads’ that I had never heard and when I looked at the version of the album I had the song was nowhere to be found. It turned out that they had re-released the album in 2011 with ‘Rivers and Roads’ as an extra track. It suddenly made the album more poignant and enhanced the tracks around it. I still don’t like the whole album but the middle of it is pure gold.

Shaun recently texted me about how ‘Rivers & Roads’ had been featured in Chuck and How I Met Your Mother. Shaun and I both had this song in our Top songs of 2011 (which you can find here and here on the blog). Usually I’m upset when a song I love is brought into the mainstream, but this song is just so beautiful and heartfelt that it needs to be heard. It’s a song of longing, distance, love, happiness, sadness that can really take over your emotions. It is a track of many guises. This is what makes it so successful and why anyone should be able to relate to it.

Very few lyrics this year hit me as hard as the, “but I miss your face like hell”, especially the way it is used in the song. I’d have to think that this song really hits the band close to home as you can almost always see Charity Rose Thielen cry during the refrain.

Check out the video above and read the lyrics below:

a year from now we’ll all be gone
all our friends will move away
and they’re going to better places
but our friends will be gone away

nothing is as it has been
and i miss your face like hell
and i guess it’s just as well
but i miss your face like hell

been talking bout the way things change
and my family lives in a different state
and if you don’t know what to make of this
then we will not relate
so if you don’t know what to make of this
then we will not relate

rivers and roads
rivers and roads
rivers ’til i reach you