Just as The Head and the Heart guitarist Matty Gervais started talking about the influence having a new child had on the band’s latest album, who should crawl on to his left shoulder but his older daughter, 4-year-old Franny?

The indie folk rock band’s sixth album, “Aperture,” came together as Gervais and bandmate/wife Charity Rose Thielen had their second daughter in 2023, while singer/guitarist Jonathan Russell also welcomed a child.

“When you have kids to support, the stakes just get higher in everything and life turns up a notch, the colors get brighter, the experiences get brighter and more extreme. If it’s a sine wave, the peaks and valleys of it get more extreme and more expressed so you have to learn and become more equipped to ride those waves,” Gervais said Friday from Seattle. “As a result of that, it’s only a matter of time before that finds its way into the music and for me it certainly found its way into the creation of this record because we’re experiencing the world again through fresh eyes.

“We’re seeing the lightness of everything that’s around us, not just this doomscroll that we are all also part of. Through a child’s eyes, they’re thankfully protected from that and they’re going and playing with pill bugs in the backyard and making elf fortresses out of leaves and stuff that’s just pure and genuinely healthy and fun and good for you, and you’re seeing the world in a new way. The song ‘Aperture’ off this record was definitely inspired by that, coming alive to what’s around you and what’s true in the world that hasn’t gone away, even though if we stay focused on the 24-hour news cycle we’re gonna just be distracted away from that beauty that’s still there. That can offer a way out and a way towards finding that better version of yourself that can then show up in a way that is going to be helpful to others, rather than contribute to this culture of exhaustion and distraction and burnout that everyone’s also experiencing.”

The group took a more DIY approach — self-producing for the first time their self-titled debut — on this album, which includes singles “Beg Steal Borrow,” “Blue Embers,” “After The Setting Sun,” “Time With My Sins” and “Arrow.”

The Head and the Heart are out on their Aperture tour, including an Aug. 3 date at Stage AE in Pittsburgh, and it will be a family affair with the kids on the road.

Gervais said he hopes to take the family to experience the Andy Warhol Museum, as he marveled at the “unique childhood” his children will have, having already visited the Georgia Aquarium, the Rabbit Hole in Kansas City, Preservation Hall in New Orleans and an alligator farm in Florida.

“My childhood was not like that,” said Gervais, who also went to a Pirates road game against the Seattle Mariners earlier this month. “So that’s a cool thing for them. And it’s been really fun. That gets us out of our world too.”

In the Zoom call, Gervais also discussed the fresh start with this album, what they learned self-producing, the band’s charity and more:

Did this album feel like a new beginning for the band?

Yeah, absolutely. Kenny (Hensley, piano) put it best in a previous discussion with someone where he said, this is the first album since the first album where it hasn’t been derailed in one way or another, where all six people that are present in the band currently, the current lineup, were able to participate fully for the whole process of making it, which is crazy to think. But it’s true. Maybe this is the first album since the second album where everyone was able to be fully present because it got derailed by people needing to step aside for health purposes and they weren’t mentally ready to be in the band at the time. And then covid hit and that interrupted it. And then finally, post-covid, we’re all here. We’re all present.

We know who the band is now, because it’s no secret that the band lost a member earlier on in the career. And that’s now 10 years behind us. And I’ve been in the band for 10 years. All the records I’ve been a part of or not were compromised in some way. There’s still great records, but this is the first time where we were able to just be like, OK, this is the six of us. What do we sound like? And so in many ways, it is a new beginning. Through that observation and through all the mistakes that were made over the 15 years of being a band, we all kind of learned from our mistakes and learned what not to do and how we don’t want to make records.

You can kind of get lucky, and this band definitely did on the first record, not every band strikes it on the first effort, and so capturing that lightning in a bottle doesn’t happen all the time. You really have to work at figuring out how to do it again, especially when it happens as sort of magically as it did the first time around. This time was kind of the closest thing that we could ever come up with, given our new circumstances and with all the lessons that we’ve learned over the past 15 years.

Did it feel like a reset button was hit, because you previously had been on Warner Records, you’d been on Sub Pop before. So doing this all self-produced, did that feel different?

One-hundred percent, yeah. The other unique characteristic for this record was we were free agents in many ways. We were in between record labels. There was no more baggage with contractual obligations or any of that kind of stuff that was residual from the Warner years. We were even in between management for much of the creation of it. For much of the creation, we were without a label at all. We were kind of making decisions on our own, and we were doing the whole process of our own volition. That created psychological space.

It’s the only kind of psychological space you can have when you’re starting out and you don’t have all those things in place. You don’t have booking agents and managers and other people. You don’t have a team of people that you’ve hired to work for you that you have to keep people busy and you keep this machine churning. And so it was very unique, and it might never happen again for us where we have that same level of perceived freedom. But now we know what it looks like and what we need going forward to create that same set of circumstances, without necessarily having to blow up all of our partnerships and stuff like that.

Is that a little bit scary just to know that it’s all on the six of you in that room rather than having outside voices saying, do this, do that?

I think everyone would say it’s very liberating. I always find it ironic when bands get signed on their own merits and then they’re proceeded to be changed by the people who they were signed by. I find it funny because there’s something magical about what the band did in the first place that attracted this fan base and this audience and attracted the attention of certain people in the industry. And that, to me, seems like something precious that you wouldn’t want to alter too much. You want to stoke that and encourage that, but not necessarily rearrange it in an unnatural way.

This time around was definitely like getting to just be more naturally who we were and who we are in the moment and make a record that wasn’t really striving to be anything but what the six of us were capable of in a room. And if that meant no big No. 1 singles or whatever, all the things that you start to strive for in the industry, especially with outside voices, coming into play, if you turn that influence or that valve off, you can come to something more pure and more honest and more representative of who we are. And for me, that’s why I got into art in the first place. And I think that’s true for all of us.

It’s an outlet and it’s something that is unique to you. I think when you go out and tour and play these shows, you see how when you share your honest experience, that has the most powerful effect on the people that come see you. That is the reason why they come again and again, because you’re giving them something that is vulnerable and real and you, and it shows them that they’re not alone. That’s why I love music. That’s why I’m a fan of so many artists. It’s for the same exact reason.

So it’s cool to be on both sides of that equation and see how it works and understand it. I’m the kind of person who loves to deep dive. If I love an artist, I just stick with that artist, especially if they remain true to themselves. Then you can go on that journey as long as you see that they’re being true to themselves, you can go on their artistic journey and you find nuggets. And even if there’s some “stinkers” on their records, you don’t care because you just are like, that this is them exploring and doing what they needed to do to be creative. I love that level of investment because it’s a sustainable give-and-take. Because not everyone’s going to knock it out of the park 100% of the time. And if you’re asking for that, you’re asking for something that’s unnatural.

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Does this feel like the (most authentic) form of the band then?

Yeah, it’s always going to evolve. That’s been something that’s another big takeaway from how we’ve gone through as a band and how we’ve evolved and transformed over the years. Different people are in different parts of their lives. Throughout the give and take of the motions of making a record. Some of us when we were making this record, Charity and I had just had our second child. All of us had come out of the pandemic. Some of us, like John, just had his first child halfway in between making the record, or I guess it was toward the end of making the record. There’s a lot of different life changes happening. People are getting sober, and people are finding different ways of being in the world and that’s always going to be in flux, because we’re human beings. So we’ll have to rediscover what that means next time around when we go to make another record, but the toolkit is still there.

A portion of ticket sales from this are going to the band’s Rivers and Roads Foundation. How important is helping out with musical education, especially in this political climate?

It’s unfortunate that it’s true, that it’s going to become our reality that communities are going to have to look to themselves and to each other to find ways of supporting and creating those kind of infrastructures for kiddos and young adults who are on their way up and learning and exploring. Also just in the art world in general, it’s more and more important. What we do is small, but hopefully it’ll grow. And I think, more and more bands are in a wonderful position to be able to do that and to give back to their communities and other people who have seen success in different areas and entrepreneurs and stuff like that. There’s no shortage of generosity and humanity out there.

It’s unfortunate that we’re not seeing that worked into the way that our government functions, but I’m not disheartened because I know how important it is to everyone to keep those kinds of programs alive and to keep that type of spirit flowing because that’s the kind of world we all want to live in. It’s the kind of world we can never take for granted. It’s a bump in the road, for sure. But it’s definitely something that we’re going to continue to attempt to grow and keep alive in our own little way. Hopefully, those small acts are the way that the world just slowly but surely becomes a better place.

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