The Head and The Heart release their sixth studio album, “Aperture,” today. In my review I called it “one of the best in their stellar catalog.”
I caught up with The Head and The Heart guitarist and vocalist Matty Gervais and he shared some of his influences, talked about making a bi-coastal record and provided some insight into the making of “Aperture.”
Below is an edited transcript of our conversation.
Congratulations on “Aperture.” It’s a beautiful record.
Oh, thank you, man.
It feels, when I listen to it, I hear joy. It sounds like a summertime record. It brings me happiness, which is nice to find in art.
Oh, thank you so much. That means everything. It totally has that feel to me, too. You know when you listen to “Shutes Too Narrow,” The Shins, or you listen to the first record of theirs, and it has this role to it, where it’s kind of like, oh, I want to put this on in a road trip with friends and listen to the whole thing in its entirety and sing along. I feel like not every record the band has made, especially since my time in the band, has done that. But this one definitely feels like that, which is cool.
And I think that might be because everybody contributed to it. It seemed like it was a very open process when you guys made the record.
Yeah, it definitely feels like a family unit thing.
Let’s talk about some of your inspirations as a musician, some of your influences, and how those showed up on the record.
Right off the bat, the first thing that jumps to my mind is the timing of Rick Rubin’s “The Creative Act.”
I pored over that book when it came out. I’ve always been a fan of him and his philosophy and the work that he’s done with different artists over the years. And just the sort of way that he opens up the idea that the artist’s job isn’t to put themselves into the music, it’s to channel something beyond themselves.
So it takes sort of the onus off of myself as an insecure songwriter and puts it on a trust in something beyond myself. I kind of had this concept in my head the whole time, personally. And I think everyone, in some way or shape or form, was going along with a similar version of that during the making of the album, so that there were no preconceived notions about what we were there to accomplish.
The songs that are on the record, they just happened. And a lot of the instrumentation and melodic stuff was actually captured on the day that it was written. In the moment, we just hit record and went.
And so most of the record is just capturing an actual unfettered musical idea without it being overworked or overwrought. And then lyrically, it was the same thing where I’ve historically, personally, had gotten in my head so much about how are people going to perceive this? How is that going to reflect upon me? And there was a lot of me-me identity involved in it.
And this time, it had nothing to do with that. It had everything to do with a concept of channeling something that is not my property. Even though maybe I wrote the lyric, it doesn’t mean that it’s mine.
There’s just something ultimately freeing in that. And it paired perfectly with my updated post-pandemic philosophy about touring and what playing shows means because of the dynamic and interplay that the band has with these fans whose relationship to the music is so personal that your job is not to get up on stage and say, hey, look at me, me, me, me. It’s to channel that same energy and that same spirit that came from somewhere else and give that back to everyone else.
So it’s kind of more of this shared catharsis and shared myth-building that we do that helped to steer all the songs into what they eventually became. It was a cool process, I gotta say. Anyways, that was a huge thing and I have to give Rick Rubin some credit for that.
I feel like this record also has, on a song like “Fire Escape,” every friend that listens to it is like, oh, that’s a Beatle-y one. And I’m like, well, okay, look no further. I mean, the Beatles always have been one of the biggest influences on me personally as a songwriter and just their work ethic and not only when they were an active band, but what they were all able to accomplish as solo artists afterwards.
And so it’s kind of fun. And I know that Kenny (Hensly, the band’s pianist), for example, is a huge fan of Paul McCartney. And when we first met, we bonded over McCartney and just Beatles lore, and that was kind of a uniting factor.
And it was always something that drew me to the band, too, was Kenny’s kind of channeling of McCartney and McCartney-style playing. And so it’s fun to have some of that lightheartedness back on the record. And I think it shows through in not just “Fire Escape,” but a number of other songs where Kenny’s piano really shines, because he’s definitely the other Beatles freak in the band.
That’s one of the songs that sounds like the most Head and the Heart to me. It really reminds me a lot of your older material. When I hear that song, I think, oh, that sounds like it would fit perfectly on the first album. It just flows naturally.
Yeah, I hadn’t heard anyone say that specifically, so that’s really cool.
Production-wise, it’s literally just us. And so the first record, the self-titled debut, Head in the Heart, every song is just bass, drums, piano, guitar, vocals. That’s it. It’s very straightforward and simplistic. And this album, production-wise, is pretty much the same. There’s a couple of songs where we added a little bit of a production element. But we were very conscious of keeping it to that bare minimum of, “What is this going to sound like when we go onstage and play it in front of people?”
It’s going to sound exactly how it is on the record, because that’s what’s there. You know what I mean? And that’s kind of exciting. Self-imposed limitation was also a big part of how we got to the way the record ended up sounding.
What are some of your favorite songs on the record? Personally, “Arrow” is what drew me in.
For me personally, you know, the title track, I gotta say, it’s one of my favorites. It felt like channeling something beyond myself.
On this album I was able to take much greater reign and freedom in putting forth my own ideas. And so there’s a bunch more songs on this record that represent my writing as far as lyrics and melodies go. And “Aperture” is one of them.
That song feels like this big, grand summation of the whole record in terms of all the little different snippets of life that come out in the other songs. Like, “After the Setting Sun” is about grief and loss. “Time With My Sins” is about confronting your own demons and recognizing the mistakes you’ve made in relationships and hopefully coming out on the other side of it.
“Blue Embers” is about dealing with depression and trying to grapple with the deepest parts of depression where you just feel like there’s a brick wall in front of you. “Finally Free” is Charity’s masterpiece in my mind. It’s just a manifestation of catharsis.
And it’s kind of perfectly timed to come right before the final track because it’s just… it’s meditative and slow and it tells this almost surrealistic story of everything. And so I feel like, you know, “Fire Escape” is kind of going on about nostalgia and missed opportunities between friends. “Pool Break” is a deep song about your relationship with your father and how that’s impacted you.
“West Coast” is a relationship song about getting through hard times and hopefully getting back together. But there’s some uncertainty there as well and pathos. Anyways, I’m going over every song because it’s kind of like they’re all little microcosms of life, and “Aperture” is sort of this unintentional attempt at bringing it all into one big area of focus.
Tell me about the pros and cons of working with a producer and not working with a producer since “Aperture” is a self-produced record.
When I first came into the band, it was to promote the first record with a major label. Then we did two more to complete the contract with the major label. We got to experience what that was like and work with some amazing, heavy-hitting producers who are all incredible people and have accomplished amazing things, and we learned so much from them in the process. But I think what unwittingly happened as a result of that is when you hire this other voice to interject in the creative process of a six-person band, you basically create a tie-breaking vote that can steer it in one direction over another. Whereas when you have this six-person band, there is no tie-breaking vote. It’s split evenly.
It means you have to come to consensus, and there’s something about consensus with this particular group of people that leads it towards something that is unique to this band. And I think adding a producer, not intentionally but unintentionally, maybe, leads it into other territories, which can be interesting and fruitful in their own ways but aren’t necessarily accurate representations of what this group of six people does, or can do, when they’re united and coming to consensus.
And so that brings up the whole thing about therapy, and the band went through therapy to get to this place, and we’ve been doing therapy for years now, like half a decade, to kind of get over communication barriers and interpersonal barriers. To be able to function more smoothly as a unit and not take things personally, and be more sensitive towards each other and be more empathic towards the overall needs of the group and the needs of a song.
If having a prducer comes at the expense of a relationship, it might end up being ultimately detrimental to the end goal of what we’re all here trying to do, which is to put out great music that’s meaningful to us and hopefully is meaningful to other people. So that’s kind of my summation of producer versus non-producer.
The other side of that is that everybody in the band has great ideas and brings to the table their own production abilities that are all unique to us. When those things are combined, that’s just what sets it apart from having a producer. That’s what makes this band this band and not some other band.
You guys recorded in Richmond, Virginia, is that right?
We split our time between Richmond, Virginia, this studio called The Brink, which used to be called Montrose, which is close to Tyler’s (Williams, the band’s drummer) house in Richmond, Virginia, and it’s owned and run by this wonderful guy named Mike Reyna, who does front of house for a bunch of bands, including Tame Impala and War on Drugs. He’s an amazing guy. And so we split our time between that, and he was engineering all those sessions, and then the other half of the record was made at Studio Litho in Fremont, which is where the first two albums were made, and were made with the same engineer, Sean Simmons.
So it was kind of this perfect bi-coastal duality to be able to be convenient for the East Coasters and then also be convenient for the West Coasters when the need arised. Yeah, it’s interesting. And then there’s that song, “West Coast,” which I hadn’t even thought about that until now, which kind of does pay homage to both coasts, but it’s in the context of a relationship, but it was also very much the story of this record.
I was going to ask about touring, but you’ve been around the country, around the world probably. How did you like the time on the East Coast?
It’s a different vibe over there, but we love it. There’s just so much that the East Coast has to offer, from the obvious big, amazing metropolitan areas like New York to cool places like Boston, and then going further south into places that we love like getting into North Carolina and the beautiful beaches of Wilmington and going further south into Florida. It’s kind of funny, because on a given day in tour, or on a given couple of days, this happened last tour. Charity (Rose Thielen, the band’s violinits/volcalist and Gervais’ wife) and I spent the evening taking our 4-year-old through New York City, Rockefeller Center Plaza, getting ice cream, Times Square, and the next morning we woke up and we’re at Wrightsville Beach in North Carolina.
It’s just like this crazy, jarring about-face that only touring bands would ever experience because you’re literally sleeping while the bus is cruising you down the highway. It definitely gives you this very strange, skewed, surrealistic version of the country, because you’re going on a road trip, but you’re not ever behind the wheel. So you’re just waking up in different cities all the time.
Last question, going from east coast back home to west coast. What do you remember about being a young musician coming up in Seattle?
As you know, and I know you are a fan of the same bands that I am, Seattle is absolute mecca for music when we were young and impressionable in the nineties. We used to go to the trading musician and we’d see members of the Presidents of the United States shredding and trying out guitars.
We’d go to Coleman Pool in West Seattle and be like, holy shit, I’m pretty sure that’s Eddie Vedder. Turns out it was and he gave us a quarter because we didn’t have a quarter for the locker to put our clothing in at the pool.
And then later on, me and (friends) Phil and Scott were all downstairs in my parents’ basement and we had just finished jamming for the day. We went outside to the front yard and looked into the neighbor’s yard and we saw that Chris Cornell was in the front yard with Matt Cameron looking at a motorcycle they saw in the newspaper classified ads. And this is at the height of black hole sun being on MTV every two seconds.
So my quick witted friend Scott says, let’s go down in the basement and play “Fell on Black Days.” So it’s me, Phil and and Scott down there playing it and two minutes later, Chris comes walking into my parents basement and then then Matt Cameron right behind him. It was an unbelievable experience
The energy that surrounded that scene at the time and to have all these personal experiences of being around it and seeing those people in real life and and going to the smaller shows too that were happening. It was just a mind blowing time to be alive.
And there’s no question that that drove me and and many of my friends to be artists and creators and musicians ourselves.
If I wasn’t already a fan of Chris Cornell and Soundgarden, which I was, I became a lifelong fan from then on out. Because I saw his humanity and how friendly they were, how kind they were, and just it it put real human faces on this thing that could otherwise be viewed as like this untouchable rock star thing.
And you know, fast forward 20 years and I’m getting to do the SMooCH benefit at the Showbox. I’m playing Beatles songs with this all-star band. I’m playing while my guitar gently weeps with Mike McCready on stage. Seeing those guys give back in the same way that our band is trying to give back with the Rivers and Roads Foundation is amazing. The community that set those guys up to thrive is still very much alive, and it’s very uniquely Seattle.
