Seattle's The Head and The Heart covers Billboard's State of Independence Issue, a look at independent music in 2011.

One day last spring, Tyler Williams lost his cell phone on the streets of Seattle.

The drummer for folk band the Head and the Heart never expected to get it back, let alone within the prophetic series of events that followed.

Williams' bandmate Charity Thielen got a call that day from a stranger who found the phone. Thielen connected the two, and they arranged to meet at the man's office, around the corner from Seattle's Pike Place Market.

What seemed, at first, to be a chance encounter with a good Samaritan instantly became something more, when Williams found himself on the doorstep of Sub Pop Records.

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"I had to hold back from saying, 'My band is recording an album right now, let me get you a demo!' " Williams recalls with a laugh. "I called Charity the second I left the building and said, 'This is an omen. My phone was just picked up by a Sub Pop employee.'

He held his tongue at the time, but the drummer's Sub Pop premonition materialized several months later, when the Head and the Heart signed with the seminal Seattle label, after a veritable feeding frenzy in which both majors (Warner Bros. and RCA among them) and indies (like Glassnote) vied for their affections. Still, it's no accident that got the Head and the Heart where it is now, with 45,000 units sold (according to Nielsen SoundScan) and slots on national and international tours opening for the Decemberists, Iron & Wine and Death Cab for Cutie.

Nor is the sextet your average flash-in-the-pan buzz band. Though the group had every opportunity to blow up-by the end of 2011, it'll have played Sasquatch, Bonnaroo, Newport and Austin City Limits, not to mention the late-night trifecta of "Letterman," "Conan" and "Fallon"-the Head and the Heart prefer to play low- and mid-capacity venues. The band tours small towns and chats with fans on Twitter and at its merch table. The act concentrates on local, noncommercial radio stations and plays in-store sets to support independent record shops. The Head and the Heart is taking care to leave no stone unturned, and this grass-roots approach -- coupled with a hotbed local scene and a universal appeal -- has enabled the band to realize an uncompromising, independent career path that works -- and works well.

Any way you slice it, the Head and the Heart is a young group. Its six members met less than two years ago, at several open-mic nights at Conor Byrne Pub, a Seattle bar and venue that has become a staple of the city's burgeoning folk and blues scenes in recent years.

While Thielen (violin/vocals) and Chris Zasche (bass) are native Seattlites, the other four had recently coalesced there: Williams and Jonathan Russell (guitar/vocals) from Virginia, Josiah Johnson (guitar/vocals) and Kenny Hensley (piano) from southern California. They began writing and performing together in the Pacific Northwest, playing everywhere from tiny bars and street corners to friends' living rooms and wooded Seattle waterfronts. Their harmony-infused folk-pop songs, many about growing up and moving on, caught on in a community where fans and fellow musicians were eager to share new music.

"I remember our first set of concerts," Johnson says. "We'd see the same people coming back but they'd come with a couple more of their friends, and then a couple more the next time." The audience rose exponentially, as Seattle's folk scene fell in love with singalong melodies like "Rivers and Roads."

Among those won over in the early months of the band's success was Hannah Levin, a DJ at noncommercial KEXP Seattle. As host of local music show "Audioasis" Levin often invites Seattle bloggers to guest-DJ. On one such occasion, Abbey Simmons, co-founder of the blog Sound on the Sound, brought a Head and the Heart demo to share.

"I listened to about 45 seconds [of "Down in the Valley"] and texted my producer to say, 'We need to book these guys right now for an in-studio,' " Levin says. "When you've been in the business as long as I have . . . you can just tell when [a band] is going to go off. And it was really clear with them." Within weeks of its "Audioasis" session, the Head and the Heart opened for Vampire Weekend.

Even with the band's tireless work ethic (or perhaps because of it), happenstance trails the Head and the Heart everywhere: The day Billboard met the band at a dimly lit New York diner marked the one-year anniversary of its self-released debut album. For the release show, the members returned to their birthplace: Conor Byrne Pub, where more than 200 friends and fans congregated in support. The show sold out easily, and during the next few months, the band members found themselves ordering box after box of replenishments for local record stores Sonic Boom and Easy Street. Fans were not only sharing the music-they were buying it multiple times over, as gifts for friends and family.

By the time the Head and the Heart signed with Sub Pop in November 2010, the group had sold nearly 8,000 copies (according to Nielsen SoundScan) of its nine-song debut, racking up mentions on Northwest music blogs and in alt weeklies, all with neither label nor management to push the record.

A few label ears perked up at the ring of 10,000 self-released copies, and a fierce courtship ensued. But the group had known all along where it would eventually land. "They're exuberant and charismatic, but there's also a confessional quality to their songs," Sub Pop co-founder Jonathan Poneman says of what attracted him to the group. "It's something very unpretentious, unrefined . . . it feels real."

Next: The Head and the Heart Swells with Fan Outreach