133. Song No. 1,946: “Coeur D’Alene,” The Head and the Heart
The Head and the Heart, 2011

I cannot for the life of me remember what led me to The Head and the Heart in the first place. I heard them once and liked them enough to download two of their albums, but they’ve never been a first-string band for me. Then I scattershot settled on one of their albums for a flight home once, promptly fell in love with this song by takeoff and knew it by the time we touched down.

There’s a lot to love about this song — the indie-folk intensity! the buildup! the piano breakdown! — but what really gets me is its continuation of my personal but accidental theme of The Head and the Heart sounding like airports and establishing an emotional oasis in the work-travel slog. Finding this song, an ode to the things people will do for the places and people they love and the only person they want along for the ride, on the way back to all the things that make home so easy to miss in just 24 hours away was one of those gleefully unexpected moments of musical happenstance that also make The Head and the Heart feel so cinematic and so perfectly able to be the art inadvertently underscoring life.