By Ana Achata, Staff Writer
With The Head and The Heart's upcoming album Aperture approaching, our blog team got the opportunity to catch up with the band. Bandmates Matt Gervais and Charity Rose Thielen of The Head and the Heart spoke about the recording experience, inspiration, and hope for the release!
OK, so you guys have a new album coming soon, how are we feeling about that? I bet you're excited. What are your feelings around that right now?
Matt Gervais: Definitely, yeah, a lot of anticipation and excitement and it’s overwhelming. It's always a crazy thing to wrap your head around all the little details that go into releasing your record and planning a tour and realizing, “Oh, my God, we're gonna be on the road, like, all year.” As soon as you know it, there's a lot of things bubbling around in our brains right now with it all, but it's all really good stuff.
Charity Rose Thielen: Just the pride that you – at least for me personally – have for this album that feels like a return to form for the band. Creatively and relationally, there's so many parallels to when we started as a band. Plus self producing it and kind of just capturing the real time energy that's happening between us. Capturing that to tape and not really getting complicated with the production (always getting complicated with arranging, of course) but just trying to purify down the music to a point where it's just us in this band.
Because we are six people in a collective and democratic band with a lot of opposing forces within, and we finally got to this place creatively and relationally to be able to make a record like how we started. And yet, we couldn't have made this as our second or third record because we had to go through the journey that we've been through as this band for a decade plus which is incredible. I'm so inspired and I'm so proud of this, of us getting to this place and the music that came because of this process. And just so yeah, seeing the reaction live is gonna be– we'll all have jitters. It's never going to be boring in any way.
That's really awesome. I love that this has become, like you said, going back to where you guys first started. Maybe it feels full circle. I think that's really awesome to hear.
Charity: And, like this is who we are now, you know? It’s like our future, too. I wanted to ask, what are some stories or experiences that shaped this album? What did that look like since you have six people? What was that creation process like?
Matt: So this was the first batch of songs that this particular group of six people was able to put together without external forces. We were just finished with the previous record label deal, and we were in between labels at the time when we started making it. So there was not really a whole lot of consideration or concern for what was going to happen during the creation process, which was just this open runway of experimentation.
It was like letting our foot up off of the gas a little bit, in terms of what we felt we needed to accomplish by X amount of days from now. It was kind of like the necessary pause button on all of the external stuff in order to find a way into a process that was way more open minded and free flowing, and just able to uncover the nuggets as they presented themselves to us.
Charity: Hopping onto that, it's like having saner days in the studio, you know? Because we made this over the course of...how long would you say? The process of the actual recording.
Matt: Probably over the course of a year, really.
Charity: Yeah, I feel like that gave us the most amount of space that allowed for saner days where it's not just 12-to-12 craziness. Approaching that in a healthier way, you know? At some point, maybe not this next album, but my vision of things is maybe we'll do the exact opposite at some point soon, where it's like, “Let's make it in five days!” or something.
But I think we really were able to allow so much space and take the foot off the gas. In some ways, internally, we were putting our feet on the gas because we didn't have an external person pressing a button. It was so freeing creatively, yet we still had that internal drive. I think that really allowed this album to be so representative of who we are and the reality of this band more than any other record of the last few.
Do you guys have any specific tracks that you feel particularly strong about, or something that you want people to know about this album? Or something that you wished people asked you more about in relation to this release?
Matt: It's a tough one to answer because any time you make a record, you kind of hope that people do their homework and listen to the whole thing, and fall in love with the whole thing. You always do your best, but you don't necessarily always make a record where each song has its own little story and its own little invitation to be part of that story.
But this record really feels like that – where each song will have a moment to shine on its own. Like, with all of my favorite records, I can never pick which my favorite song is, because I'm like, “Oh, man, it just depends on your mood!” So for this record, I hope it has that same effect where, like, you're on a road trip with your friends. I pictured this, ‘cause when you first get your license, and you go on your first handful of road trips, and you got the records and you got the songs and the albums that totally define what that feeling is and what that road trip means to you and your friend group. I feel like this is one of those records that feels like it’s meant to be enjoyed in this shared voyage, whatever it might be.
Charity: Communal, almost.
Matt: Yeah, it feels like a road trip record, which is like my favorite record. Shins records from the early 2000s and stuff like that, I could look back on it and it takes me back to this particular moment, and this feels like we've made that kind of a record.
Charity: I think the songs – some of the anthemic ones that are book ended in a way – we try to do this with every tracklist and album, you know, like, “Listen to it as an album!” because there is an arc, kind of like a story in film, you know? You have the opening sequence and the setting of the landscape and then this beauty where you're being invited in.
Close to midway through there's some kind of **** that hits a fan, and then you're going through happy tears and then you're going through the myriad over those emotions all in one song at the very end. It's cathartic. I think there's a great arc to this whole entire album. I feel like it can have a powerful effect, at least just on me individually. Again, I'm speaking from a place of “I'm one sixth of this.” It's so much compromise and letting go and it’s greater than just the one individual voice. I feel like I could display my pride for this record because, it's all of us, you know? And we did it!
That's really amazing.
Matt: Yeah, it's kind of crazy too, because we keep coming back to make records, we make full length albums, and it's like, “Why do we always keep continuing to do this?” The whole collection of songs gives you the opportunity to to show a more unfiltered version of yourself, and that's the point of making art and making music.
It’s just like, if everything hinges on this one thing that you put out, like, say you're just releasing the one song, it’s like, “Everyone better everyone really better love this one song!” There's way too much pressure there in that situation. And, it's also completely unrealistic to expect that it's gonna check everyone's boxes. It's impossible. But a record might check enough boxes. You get to feel like you’ve done that in a way that feels natural.
Charity: I feel like the lengths of art have been settled on for good reason. You can experience more of a holistic thing. So... albums!!!
Matt: So, to answer your question, it's like that. Talk about all of it, man!
I know that's a very broad question, I know there's so much stuff that goes into the creation of any kind of art. I don't wanna run you guys over time too much, but thank you so much for taking a few minutes to just scratch the surface on this process. We're all really excited to get to experience your journey secondhand.
Matt: Is there anything that you look for or hope for in a Head and the Heart record as someone who's been a fan for a while?
I love what you guys are doing. I've liked every single record, and I go back to it often. My dad had The Head and the Heart with “Rivers and Roads,” that was his favorite. I listened to that a lot when I was like 10 years old. It has a special place. You guys are awesome.
Matt: Thank you, yeah, this record feels kind of like coming back to a lot of the feelings that were there. It’s like the big brother to that.
Charity: It's the bigger, wiser, more mature, big brother/big sister to the OG.
Awesome. All right, well, thank you guys so much. I wish you all good things.
[This interview transcript has been edited for length and clarity.]
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