How the Head and the Heart Recaptured the Magic of Their Early Days

Around 7 p.m. one evening this spring, Matty Gervais and Charity Rose Thielen walked out onto the field at T-Mobile Park. It was Opening Day at the home of the Seattle Mariners, and the married couple from the long-running folk-rock band the Head and the Heart were there to sing the national anthem, right before Hall of Famer Ichiro Suzuki threw out the ceremonial first pitch of the season.

“The Star-Spangled Banner” can be famously difficult to sing live, but they kept it simple, with Thielen and Gervais lifting their voices in understated harmony over his acoustic guitar. “We tried to interpret it as we would naturally,” Thielen says. “We were like, ‘We’re not going to try and be anything but ourselves for this.’”

That’s also the approach they and their bandmates — co-lead singer Jonathan Russell, drummer Tyler Williams, bass player Chris Zasche, and pianist Kenny Hensley — took on their remarkable new album, Aperture, due out May 9. Though it’s their sixth LP, it harkens back directly to the warm, hand-crafted sound and collaborative spirit of the band’s self-titled debut, so much so that they joked about titling it The Head and the Heart 2. “It really was like the first album, in a way,” Russell says.

Back in 2009, the Head and the Heart were a tight-knit group of friends playing open mics and house shows around Seattle. Their debut was a word-of-mouth phenomenon that turned into one of the decade’s biggest indie success stories after Sub Pop re-released it in 2011. “On that first record, everyone contributed so equally, everyone was so invested, and so in love and passionate about their parts,” Russell says. “That’s what made it so enjoyable for us, and what I assume was enjoyable for fans to watch — this band of people just genuinely enjoying playing together. This communal, familial aspect, which we had for years. And I think that took a dip.”

In the years after their debut, the Head and the Heart released one more album on Sub Pop before signing a major-label deal with Warner Bros. for their next three albums. It was a heady, turbulent period that, at times, included outside producers, poppier sounds, and lineup shuffles. “Certain songs go to radio, certain songs are getting chosen by a label, certain things are getting planted in your head,” Russell says. “You can’t help but want to experiment and push the boundaries a little bit. And all of that was fun. Some of my favorite songs are on those records…. At the same time, I’m grateful that we’ve been around long enough to experience that, but also to realize what our real strengths are.”

By the spring of 2023, with their Warner deal complete, the Head and the Heart were without a label or a manager for the first time in many years — “free agents,” as both Russell and Gervais put it. “There were no expectations, there were no deadlines,” Russell says. “It was the perfect time to recalibrate ourselves and ask, what do we want to make? And getting back to being a band in a room was a big part of it.”

That was something they hadn’t done in a long time, in part because of the pandemic, but also because of life changes that have put 2,800 miles between the members of the Head and the Heart. When I speak with Russell over Zoom, he’s home in Richmond, Virginia, where he and his wife welcomed a daughter earlier this year. Thielen and Gervais, meanwhile, are still based in Seattle, with two young kids of their own. (When I reach them on a separate Zoom, they’re in their home studio, surrounded by recording equipment and a surreal portrait of the Beatles by their friend Margot Bird.) The rest of the band is split between the two coasts, a six-person democracy that they’ve worked hard to keep afloat. “There’s no benevolent dictator in this group, and there are no hired guns,” Thielen says. “Everyone has equal ownership. It’s a forever dance.”

Starting two years ago, in April 2023, they began meeting up for a series of week-long sessions at Richmond’s Montrose Recording and Seattle’s Studio Litho — “very casual, blue-collar studios, no plaques on the wall,” Russell notes — to see what they could do together. For the first time since their debut, there were no producers present, just the band and the engineers in each room. “OK, there’s the six of us here,” Gervais remembers thinking. “What happens when we’re listening to each other and getting over our own inner bullshit?”

Gervais has a unique perspective on the band’s internal dynamics. A longtime friend from the same Seattle indie scene as the Head and the Heart, he joined in 2016 as a replacement for co-founding singer Josiah Johnson, whose struggles with drugs and alcohol took him in and out of the band around that time. “When I stepped in, people were not in the honeymoon period,” Gervais says. “It was a very challenging moment for the group. All of a sudden I’m a new person, trying to navigate that, not sure if Josiah is going to stick around or not. I think that weighed heavily on everyone.”

It took time to get past that, and he says Aperture represents the first time he felt fully “comfortable sharing my true self” with the band — a process that yielded writing credits on more than half of the new album, including some of its most stirring highlights. The opening track, “After the Setting Sun,” began with Gervais trying to process several personal losses experienced by members of the band. Working together, they developed it into a song full of golden harmony and hard-won solace. “It does set the tone,” Russell says. “This record’s going to talk about real-life things, heavy things — but it’s coupled with light.”

“Time With My Sins” features an instant-classic Head and the Heart chorus about staying true to a relationship no matter how hard it gets. “I had that first verse sitting around collecting dust,” Russell says. “I had written it at a time when I was in a bit of a dark place and I could sense my wife waiting for me to snap out of it. It was difficult for me to return to that emotion. And then Matty came along and was like, ‘Can I take a stab at finishing it?’”

The latest single from Aperture, “Blue Embers,” is a delicate ballad featuring frank lyrics about depression and existential doubt. “You get to a certain point in your life where you’re like, ‘What do I have to lose?’” Gervais says. “So some of these songs are a little more brutally honest than maybe I had been willing to be in songs in the past.”

Toward the end of the album comes “Finally Free,” a sparsely arranged showstopper with Thielen on lead vocals. “That song just takes the air out of the room,” Russell says. They recorded it in Richmond in an impromptu session that found Zasche, their bass player, sitting in on drums while Russell and Hensley shared a piano. “Charity was directing us all,” Russell says. “We all kind of fell under this spell,” Gervais adds. “She wasn’t wearing a wizard hat, but she might as well have been.”

With the album’s release through Verve Forecast coming up soon, they’re all looking forward to getting back on the road for tour dates that stretch from late May through October. In the middle of that stretch, on Aug. 16, they’ll return to T-Mobile Park — this time with all six band members — for a one-off stadium date opening for the Lumineers, contemporaries of the Head and the Heart whose brand of 2010s alt-folk is arguably bigger than ever. “We had a joint billing in Idaho for eight bucks back in the day,” Thielen remembers with a smile. 

At all their shows this year, they’ll be doing their best to recapture some of the immediacy of those early days. “Many of the places that I saw them play first were someone’s living room, you know what I mean?” says Gervais, who estimates that he probably attended more Head and the Heart shows than anyone besides the band themselves in the years before he joined. “I think that intimacy will be felt, especially with these new songs, because it does feel like a return to that type of earnestness that those early records became known for.”

Last fall, a few months after they wrapped recording for Aperture, they got some news: The Recording Industry Association of America had issued a platinum certification to The Head and the Heart. The debut album they recorded as an unsigned, unknown Seattle band all those years ago had officially sold one million copies. Russell laughs: “I guess now we can put up our own plaques in these studios.”