You and a guest will meet Christina Perri and enjoy 2 tickets from the artist's guest list to an upcoming show of your choice*! To see tour dates, click HERE. You will also receive a merch package with Christina Perri goodies!
In matters of love, should you rely on your heart or your head? This is the question Christina Perri posed as she began writing her second album, a collection of cathartic songs that seek to reconcile how we make decisions in love and life. The singer’s first album, lovestrong., grappled with the aftermath of a breakup, signaling Perri as an honest, genuine artist ready to share her emotional journey with her fans. That disc, released in 2011, was bolstered by the success of Perri’s single “Jar of Hearts” and led the musician into nine tours over 27 months. Her final show supporting lovestrong. took place on October 9, 2012 at Los Angeles’s iconic Hollywood Bowl with Jason Mraz. Two weeks later, Perri penned the first song for head or heart, her second album.
“The thing about me is that I don’t know how not to write,” Perri says. “Because I continue to fall in and out of love, I find myself often at those massive highs and lows. I wrote ideas for album two but I never called it album two. Those were songs that were getting me through tour. But when I came home I wrote a song called ‘Trust’ and I had an epiphany. I’ve tried trusting my heart, I’ve tried trusting my head and I feel as though I’ve chosen wrong each time. I knew the album had to be called head or heart and half the songs would be heart songs and half would be head songs. That was the moment when it began for me creatively and conceptually.”
Perri spent two months writing and demoing on her own toward the end of 2012 before spending several months in early 2013 writing with nearly 30 co-writers. She said yes to any collaboration, refusing to get in her own creative way (“I wanted to play a game called ‘Yes,’ the singer explains). Perri emerged from these ongoing sessions in Spring with nearly 50 possible songs for head or heart. The musician knew immediately which to take into the studio, mostly because instinctually she knew which songs fit together to create the overall picture she wanted the album to paint. A big factor in the song selection was also a concern for how they would translate onstage, particularly since Perri toured so extensively on her debut.
The singer chose 16 to record and flew to London to meet with producer Jake Gosling (Ed Sheeran). Perri initially intended to lay down one track with Gosling, but ended up staying at his farm in Bagshot, U.K. for the summer to record in his “tiny shack of a studio.” The pair crafted nine of the album’s 13 songs together and finished recording back in Los Angeles in August. There Perri also recorded with Butch Walker, John Hill and Martin Johnson. Her final number, “I Don’t Want to Break,” was co-written with fun.’s Jack Antonoff, who co-produced the track with Hill in New York at famed Electric Lady Studios.