To mark the one year anniversary of Radio Free Canuckistan--as well as the 100th post--we have the conclusion of my lengthy conversation with The Acorn, featured in this month's cover story in Exclaim!.
Part one is here.
Cross-Canada tour dates are here.
Note to JW in Seattle: I don't think Glory Hope Mountain comes out in the U.S. until later in October. Perhaps someone reading this from Paper Bag can clarify.
Unrelated: The funniest post-Polaris press gaffe I've seen yet is here, complete with pictures. Congrats, Mr. Wilson! Thanks to Bartlett for the link.
The Acorn
Rolf Klausener and Jeff Debutte
April 19, 2007
Locale: the porch of the Ottawa home they share with Stef Power.
part two
What do you think of indie rock emo boys who only sing about their broken heart?
R: That’s totally fine. I don’t think the content of this record is any more valid than anything else. It’s just what we chose to record.
So many lyric writers have such interesting lives around them, people in their own family whose stories they don’t know, or people in their own community. When I hear stories like [your mother’s], it makes me think of how featherweight or inconsequential or self-absorbed most of those lyrics are, because lyrics are often the last thing that musicians think about—because they’re coming at it as musicians, not as poets or storytellers. They don’t invest into what they’re singing as much. Is this something either of you have thought about before?
R: I hear what you’re saying. On a personal level, I didn’t feel like writing another record that dealt with my inner turmoil, or insecurities, or paranoia. I really wanted to get out of my own head and explore a story and do something narrative. I’ve always been a huge fan of Andrew Vincent’s writing and Andy Swan’s writing and how effortlessly narrative their stories are. They’re so good at painting pictures. And Miche [Jetté] from Flecton [Big Sky] was a big influence too, how he can take stories and make them into something musical. I just didn’t want to write a record that had to do with broken hearts. I was really bored.
Same thing with the instrumentation. I knew we were perfectly capable of writing a record with great rock guitar lines and rock drums, but I had no interest in doing that again. In the way that Blankets was really different from Pink Ghosts, I wanted to do something different. I knew we had these grants and we could take our time and do something stimulating. In a way, it was kind of selfish.
I remember at the time when we were getting close to the last leg, in last March or April, and I was hammering away at the lyrics. The Arcade Fire record [Neon Bible] came out, and I remember reading articles about how they wanted to get away from things that were close and personal to them, and talk about a global perspective. I remember thinking, ‘Wow, this is the complete opposite. This is about one person’s life—two, maybe—and how unsexy that was.’ Here’s a time when the world is focused on global issues and the environment is in every newspaper, every day, and World War III is pretty much going on right now. So to take a vacation from that and write a story about one person’s life seems really inconsequential and selfish.
But as I told you earlier, I have a friend who works for the David Suzuki foundation who told me: some people choose to try to save the world, and other people celebrate it. That really, really hammered home the whole reason why I was doing this. Why is her story not as important as anyone else’s?
[stops, pauses] Why am I shaking so much?
J: It did seem selfish, because we had a band thing going on where we all had set roles, and when Rolf told us he had this idea for the album it was like, ‘I don’t know what you guys are going to do.’ It was a challenge for all of us to make it our own vision, too. That’s why it was so fun. We all had to re-evaluate how we were coming at things musically and add our own parts. It was so hard, but so rewarding.
R: There were many challenging moments in the recording process. For [Jeffrey] Malecki, he’s a great drummer who is so idiosyncratic. To yank him out of a lot of the songs and replace him with these group percussions, of course he was going to feel like he didn’t have a huge part on the record. But he did: he laid the groundwork for a lot of the songs.
J: There are a lot of tracks where there is so much going on percussion-wise, but if you pulled him out, the whole thing would fall apart.
Rolf, your family lived in Mali at some point?
R: Yep. We were there for a few years. That’s where [my parents] really fell in love after they had me. Their relationship is a whole other thing. But that’s when my mom was exposed to all this African music. She was the one—I didn’t realize this, because I’d always credited my father for this. He loved the music too, but my mom was the one who bought all the records and went to shows and record stores and would collect them from friends. So I have this wonderful treasure trove of records from East and West Africa that are all my mom’s.
When Rolf talks about consciously not making a guitar-bass-drums record, I’m wondering how the rest of the band felt about that. Were you all in a similar mindspace?
J: It scared the hell out of me at first.
Why?
J: Because we’d never done that before.
Did you feel self-pigeonholed because you’ve only ever played in rock bands? You studied music at school, didn’t you?
J: I’ve played jazz and contemporary stuff. I wasn’t worried about the technical standpoint, but from a group standpoint, I was wondering how we were all going to pull together and do this. I wasn’t totally sure we were going to be able to do it.
How do you [Jeff] feel about Honduran folk music?
J: We’d listen to it and I thought it was great, but I wondered: how does this relate to anything we’ve ever done? And how the fuck are we going to bring these two things together? We had some test exercises where Rolf and I got together with a microphone and some of these records and just dissected stuff, and tried to play together and build up bigger percussion things. I didn’t get it totally, until Rolf played ‘Flood Pt. 1’ over one of those rhythms. I knew that if we were going to do this, we had to do a really good job, or it was going to be horrible.
R: Jeff was really critical of the process, and when I would throw out certain ideas, Jeff was one of the first people to say, ‘You can’t just take this and put a guitar line over it.’ Of course, invariably, we’re not stupid. There are so many examples of popular music that do this thing—Graceland being an obvious reference—where there is this marriage. And we’re not going to assemble Ladysmith Black Mambazo to come play on this record. And I didn’t have the budget to fly down to Honduras and meet native players.
There’s a big refugee community in Montreal, I hear.
R: There is. And there was this wonderful moment last summer when I went to see Konono No. 1 at the [Ottawa] Bluesfest, and I was so excited to see them. There was this opening act, which turned out to be a Garifuna band from Honduras. He was more of a contemporary, new-age-y, highly-produced musician, but his drummers were all Garifuna drummers. I was in the distance drinking beer with friends, and I heard him say in broken English: ‘We are from Honduras, and we play Garifuna music.’ I was like, ‘What???!!!’
I went backstage after, and I can barely speak Spanish and he can barely speak English, but I found out he was on this Stone Tree record label from Belize. That turned out to be a wonderful contemporary reference. I went home, looked them up, and found all these wonderful contemporary examples of Garifuna music. They were so much more a refined version of the Smithsonian recordings I’d been listening to, and put them in context. Because I could not make heads or tails of a lot of these field recordings from the 50s. But when I heard them in a more contemporary sense, I could hear all the base elements: the heart drum, where it sat in the mix, and then I could go back and listen to these Smithsonian recordings and understand them more on a musical level.
Did you not think you could do that? Were you daunted by the Smithsonian recordings?
R: I talked to John Higney about it a little bit. Higney, being a music professor at Carleton, said, ‘You don’t have to copy this stuff. Listen to the cadence of the singing. Listen to the accents of the rhythms. There are things you can access there.’ He didn’t say much, but he really made me realize that you don’t have to borrow it all. You can find a bit of inspiration and direction and find a new way of looking at things. You can listen to as many rock records as you want and end up copying a lot of that aesthetic verbatim, but you don’t have to do that. You can find inspiration in tidbits that you attach yourself to. That was a big revelation.
‘Flood Pt. 1’ does that with guitars that sound West African to me, and rhythms that I weren’t aware were Garifuna rhythms. Earlier today we were talking about Bruce Peninsula, and how I heard a lot of First Nations voices in what they do, whether that’s conscious or not, and I also hear that in the ‘Flood’ vocals—which probably has more to do with my frame of reference as a Canadian.
R: What I discovered was that there was a slaveship in the 17th century that capsized off the eastern coast of Honduras and Nicaragua. This huge slaveship of 500 West African slaves ended up escaping and settling on the coast. They mated with the natives, and that became the foundation of Garifuna. So you had this oral chanting tradition of the natives, which is also tied to native Canadian and Mayan oral tradition, mixed with these West African rhythms, and that is Garifuna music. Which is kind of what we’re doing—not that we’re mating with any Garifuna people. Yet.
Yet! Wait until you tour Honduras.
R: I was actually thinking of sending the record to Stone Tree, to see if they wanted to release it in Belize!
What kind of stuff do they normally put out?
R: Contemporary recordings of Garifuna bands. Some of it is almost Afro-Cuban. If you like any of the stuff on the World Circuit label, then you’d probably love the stuff on Stone Tree. It’s similar, at least aesthetic-wise. But they’re much more heavily produced and have a more contemporary vibe to them.
Sometimes when people speak conceptually about cross-cultural stuff, I think we’ve all heard some fairly mediocre records where the term Canada Council becomes a pejorative. (all laugh). You can tell that someone wrote a grant and made it sound really sexy, and they get the money and then you hear the record and—what the hell? This is just a peanut-butter-and-chocolate combo, something that might have seemed like a good idea for a folk festival workshop but doesn’t work at all on record. It can be a very daunting thing to not make it cheesy and not make it a government-funded project about cross-cultural communication.
J: When I was thinking about it, it was important for a lot of reasons that it wasn’t just bringing in a sitar player and claiming to play Indian music. It’s a typically Western thing. Obviously, it’s a bit different because Rolf is half-Honduran, so it’s a part of his heritage. For me as a random white dude, I didn’t want to feel like we were just taking some Honduran elements and sticking it into our sound and getting to talk about how influenced we were.
R: In defence of our common whiteness, I barely speak Spanish. I’m kind of brown in the summer time, but I’m pale in the winter. All this was totally new to me. I was glad that the whole time Jeff was reminding me that we were not out to make a Garifuna record with English lyrics. It was good to have that reminder. Sometimes I felt like, ‘This stuff is so cool. It would be neat to just do it and sing on top of it.’
But there’s so much wonderful creation that happens when we get together, that there was no way it was going to end up being that. I didn’t want it to be cultural appropriation for the sake of grant money or anything like that. Again, researching the Honduran music was an afterthought, way after I’d interviewed my mom and the idea for the record was starting to take shape.
J: You did write the grant application based on the Ontario Arts Council…
R: I did allude to it in the Ontario Arts Council grant, but it was more of an afterthought after I interviewed my mom. The Ottawa grant proposal had a lot more of that in it and included a lot of the research I had done. Which was all from pretty standard ethnomusicology books, like the Garland Encyclopaedia of World Music. That’s a basic starting point, like looking up a word in the dictionary. There are 100 pages about Central American music there. Beyond that, I ended up speaking to an ethnomusicologist. But I knew that no matter what I did, we didn’t have enough time. In a way, it was Graceland vs. Rhythm of the Saints. There was going to be a mix, but not a situation where we had a pure Garifuna song married perfectly with lyrics. It was never going to be that. Once I let go of that idea, the songwriting and the amalgamation came a lot easier.
This band has many core strengths, many things they can do very well, and you wouldn’t want to chuck all that.
R: No, totally. I’m reminded of that every time we sit down to write.
J: Especially with [guitarist] Howie [Tsui]. I have a degree in guitar performance, but I couldn’t begin to come up with his guitar parts. He’s one of the best guitar players I’ve ever seen, and I look up to him a lot. When we’re making a record, you have to let him do his thing, and it’s part of what’s made our music interesting up to this point.
That’s an interesting qualifier: ‘up to this point.’ (all laugh)
R: I’ve played in enough bands where it’s either been an incredibly democratic process, or, in the case of [Greenfield Main’s Jon] Bartlett, it’s: ‘here’s the song, play my song.’ With this band, it was interesting over the last few years, how much positive influence their egos have on the band. I present things, and there is no way it will end up the way I had it in my mind’s eye.
J: Uh, sometimes you do put your foot down.
R: A very gentle, slipper-laden foot. We recorded ‘Oh, Napoleon’ three times to get it right. The first time was this dreamy, atmospheric thing with fourteen guitars strumming, kind of Eno-ish, Julie and the Wooden Stars feel to it with spare drums. I wrote it in a more Appalachian style, and listening to that take a whole bunch of times I knew it was wrong. The night before we left on tour, at three in the morning, I recorded a guitar/vocal/banjo version. We listened to it in the mountains of BC, and I knew it was how we had to do that song. I rarely want to say, ‘This is what has to happen,’ but that was one. We really had to drop our egos on this record and realize what the song was, what the lyrics were, and where the music was going. That was a huge challenge.
One of the simplest songs, ‘Plateau Ramble,’ was a fucking nightmare, just to get Malecki to not play like Malecki. In the initial recording process we spent four hours on it. It’s a fingerpicky acoustic song that’s a foot-stomper, and Malecki was trying all these crazy syncopated beats. It was so hard to tell him to just play the kick drum. He admitted later on how hard that day was, how frustrating it was because I wasn’t letting him do his thing. But he knew that’s the way that song should be.
These guys are smart, talented guys, and I am not as smart as most of them. It’s intimidating, because I really look up to them, and there’s not much I can do sometimes. I feel like they’re on a different plane. Jeff is so smart, and Malecki is another level of humanity that I’ve never experienced. I feel so frayed, scattered and unfocused sometimes trying to relate these ideas to these articulate guys.
[another visitor drops by]
“Biting your tongue” and “words we never say” are recurring lyric themes in many Acorn songs, and yet none of you gentlement ever seem to be struggling for the right words, whether it’s your quick wit or deeper thoughts.
J: Talking a lot is different than communicating.
R: I am by far the least articulate person in this band. You get older and you read enough song lyrics and you get embarrassed by things you wrote in high school. Now when you write something you want to make sure it’s something you can live with for years. Obviously there’s a lot of personal agency and care and concern with the subject matter of this record. But it was as good as I can write at this point in my life.
I read plenty of other [lyrics] and think they’re so good. Andy Swan wrote 30 songs in a week and most of them are better than anything I could write, and it’s so depressing. You listen to the shit on the radio, and a lot of the shit on great independent radio and CBC, and you think, ‘God, did you not even care about that line? Or not think that there might be another rhyme that would go with the previous line? Maybe spend an extra hour writing the line? Do you care that more people than you and your bandmates are going to listen to this record in the next few months?’
That’s why it takes John Samson four years to write a record.
R: He’s a great writer. It’s got to the point where I’ve realized a lot of the music I love is written by people who take care with the words they use. People like Bob Dylan and Miche Jetté find this great synergy between spontaneity and conscious decision, and there’s no reason why you have to make any compromise. I spent a year figuring out the lyrics to ‘Hold Your Breath.’ But ‘Glory’ was the first song I wrote for the record, verbatim. I came home from a Flecton practice where Miche, of course, got us all stoned. I opened up my notebook and it just came out. There was no music, just the words, and it has not changed since.
Is ‘Dents’ [from Tin Fist] a prelude to the whole record?
R: Yeah. It was written around the time I was starting to feel comfortable with the ideas of the record. I wrote that in July of last year, right before we went into the studio. A lot of the stories hadn’t taken shape. If you look at ‘Glory’ it’s more of a feeling song; there is no narrative. ‘Dents’ is the same thing. I was thinking of my mom’s stories all the time at that point. I was looking in the mirror one day and noticing faint lines appearing around my eyes, and I started thinking about the same lines in my mom’s face.
J: When we did that EP, there were three songs we were going to do, and then Rolf showed up with two more. And I remember thinking, what are we doing? These are gold! Let’s put them on the album. That one and ‘Brokered Heart.’ Why are we throwing them on here?
Is part of that not taking the EP format seriously? Both of your EPs and several others in the last five years or so have re-invigorated the format: 20 minutes or whatever, get in, get out, no filler, it’s more than a single, and it distills many of the best things about a band. Often I like a preceding EP better than the eventual album. And you chose to put out two EPs in between your two albums. Did you not think those songs were good enough to attach to a larger project, or did you like the brevity of the idea?
J: A bunch of them didn’t fit thematically on the new record that we thought were good songs. Not to disparage that EP, because I’m proud of it, but we kind of threw it together. This one, we meticulously assembled it, so it’s hard not to disparage the EP in a way.
R: I think a lot of it on our end is our subjective experience of the recording process. We can’t help but feel like Glory took way more out of us and was much more of a challenge. But I listen to Tin Fist now and I think it’s wonderful, and I don’t think about the fact that it took us three days vs. seven months for Glory.
Everything we’ve done with the records, we’ve been conscious of the themes and the sequencing and the story that each record is trying to tell. Whatever record came out at a particular time represented us at the time. I love the brevity of Blankets, but there’s also the sad, logistical fact that we just didn’t have any other songs to record, truth be told.
That was one of the hardest things about Glory, was that I had all these skeletons of songs that these guys didn’t even hear. Or I had a bunch of songs I’d bring to practice and five minutes in I realized I was the only one playing them. No one was playing along. ‘They must fucking hate it!’
When I was in university I was so jealous of those fucking nerds who would say, ‘Yeah, I know the essay was only supposed to be ten pages, but I wrote 15 and then I whittled it down.’ And I would have barely made it to nine and a half with double spacing. It was weird to have that experience with a record where I had to throw things away.
Throughout this conversation, when you cite influences, many of them have been local people from Ottawa. And on the Pink Ghosts reissue there are covers of Chris Page, Flecton and Snailhouse. That community obviously informs so much of what this band is, and some of you grew up here as well and observed what’s happened here over the years. And I know what a big thrill it was for you to be Snailhouse’s backing band. What lessons do you learn from those people?
J: When Blankets came out, one of the key things people kept saying was that it sounded like Ottawa. I don’t know if we reacted negatively, but we were like, ‘Uh, yeah, thanks.’
R: What does that even mean? We sound like the Parliament buildings and the canal?
J: Some of the songs on Tin Fist are like a reaction to that. ‘Hey, why don’t we sound a bit more Toronto here? Handclaps, perhaps?’ We were trying to think of any other Ottawa bands who had been on the cover of Exclaim!, and we couldn’t think of any.
I’m pretty sure you’re the first.
J: It would be nice to give back to those people who helped shape our musical sensibilities.
When I think of Ottawa bands I don’t think of a sound. I think of Wooden Stars, Furnaceface, Greenfield Main, Recoilers, Jim Bryson, Kathleen Edwards, HiLo Trons. I don’t think most of those bands sound alike.
J: I don’t think most people, if you ask them, could identify any bands from Ottawa.
My question was more about how you’ve been influenced by the creative people that are here. Because you [Rolf] play in Greenfield Main, Recoilers and Flecton—and certainly none of those sound like The Acorn.
R: I’ve talked about Werbo in a lot of interviews. They’ve long since disbanded. Flecton used to play in that band, as did Jeff Kines, who I think works at Songbird in Toronto. In some of the Werbo songs on their Lakehead Tragedies album… I was just getting into the music scene at the time. Recoilers were just staring, and I went to see Werbo a bunch of times.
Hearing them sing about Sandy Hill and Centretown and streets that I knew—I guess I could have heard that listening to Westerberg sing about Minneapolis, but where I heard it was listening to Werbo sing about Ottawa. Suddenly I felt completely validated. Here was a band who romanticized a city I thought had no romance in it whatsoever. I’d sit on the OC Transpo and the city looked differently to me, listening to that music. You can write and be influenced by the people around you and it’s just as valid as listening to the Beatles sing about Penny Lane.
On a personal level, I’ve always felt very low on the songwriting totem pole of this city, when you have people like Feuerstack and Bryson and Miche Jetté and they can encapsulate all these wonderful sentiments and ideas. I spend just as much time listening to those records as I do anything else. I say this without a hint of irony and sarcasm that that music is just as important to me as anything else.
If there are some people who know about Ottawa because we went out and toured, that’s great. It’s neat to think that people think of Ottawa when they think of us. And we’re not shy of talking about Ottawa when we’re on tour. That said, I don’t think Ottawa is any more special than Kingston or Guelph or whatever. It’s about how much subjective weight you put on the songwriters around you.
I get starstruck pretty easily. Going to see Werbo at the Hi-Fi with 50 other people there, I felt like I may as well have been at some huge stadium seeing U2 in 1987. I remember pissing next to Mike Feuerstack in the Hi-Fi bathroom, and this was the first conversation I had with him. I think I said something like, ‘I was really nervous about talking to you for the first time, because I really love your music.’ He just looked over and said, ‘Huh! Well, that’s stupid.’ [all laugh] That kind of changed everything. But as well as I’ve got to know him over the years and as much as we joke around, behind his back I still look at him with stars in my eyes and go ga-ga when I hear his songs. But he doesn’t have to know that.
J: I’m just wondering when Rolf is going to start sounding articulate.
What was it about the Wooden Stars for you?
R: For me, it was the craziest music I’d ever heard, and it was being written around the corner. I don’t know what’s so special about that actually: seeing or hearing a mind-blowing work of art and then realizing it comes from the same city. The Wooden Stars are an example of people who could take two guitars, bass and drums and do something completely different with it. Much like what someone like Deerhoof do, in a way. The Wooden Stars weren’t a massive influence, but in a weird Sonic Youth way: no one really sounds like Sonic Youth, but everyone claims them as an influence. The Wooden Stars were proof that there are no rules. A lot of people in this town made me realize that there were no rules. Jim wrote punk rock songs with country music in the background. Mike Feuerstack wrote poetic lyrics with music that didn’t make it sound totally cheesy.
J: Or totally hilarious set to heartbreaking, gorgeous music.
R: There was a time when Blankets came out and we were touring and I was so disenchanted with Ottawa, and the fact that not many other Ottawa bands were touring. A lot more people are touring now. But we were so far down the totem pole in terms of our live show. You could go see the HiLo Trons at Barrymore’s, and they’d sell out the club every time and put on an amazing live show. And yet no one knows who they are, and lots of people know who we are. It’s incredibly frustrating. Not to invalidate what we do.
And I only realized in the last couple of years since I started playing music with him, but Miche is an amazing songwriter. At practice, he can’t remember his own lyrics after smoking so much dope, so he’d give us the lyrics so we could follow along. I’m reading his lyrics, and I’d say, ‘Wow, how did you write this song?’ ‘I don’t fucking know, I was drunk one night, I just, fuck, wrote it down, whatever, fuck.’ Over the course of writing this record, I spent a lot of time with Miche’s lyrics and seeing how he paints wonderful pictures in his lyrics.
Ohbijou talk about how much they love Brantford, and when you get to the point in your life when you’ve lived in your hometown long enough not to move away, or you realize that it’s valid, when you get over that hometown mentality that your hometown sucks, you can see the beauty in it. Luckily, I started seeing the beauty in Ottawa at a time when I wasn’t totally jaded.
Speaking of rules of recordings, I really like the way the acoustic guitar sits in the mix on this record. It doesn’t sound the way acoustic guitars sound on most records: it’s big and huge in the forefront and used texturally in the background, and it has this folk fingerpicking inside rock music. And I don’t know if this is entirely just geographical association with the Ottawa Valley, but I also hear a bit of Bruce Cockburn in the approach.
R: That’s how I grew up playing guitar, was listening to fingerpickers. I was listening to early Paul Simon. My friend David got me into this really amazing Bruce Cockburn Christmas album in the early 90s. I remember seeing the video of him playing ‘Joy to the World’ or something, and realizing what an amazing guitar player he was. In Grade 12 I played a coffeehouse and tried to play ‘Sunshine of Your Love’ on an electric guitar and vowed to never play electric guitar again for as long as I live, because I’m horrible at it. It’s so out of necessity.
But The Acorn do not sound like acoustic guitar music.
R: It’s interesting what you say about the mix, because I’ve always liked acoustic guitar players who can bring that instrument to the forefront and not make it sound like a cheesy folk record. It’s an obvious reference that comes to be via Flecton, but Tim Rutilli [Califone, Red Red Meat] does the exact same thing. He can take a piano and an acoustic guitar and a violin and make them sound just as big as 20 guitars on a My Bloody Valentine record.
Jarett [Bartlett], our recording engineer, really hit that point home when we were recording. We were trying to layer 20 guitars or something, and he just said, ‘If I just record one guitar, it will probably sound a lot bigger than 20 guitars or an electric guitar.’ It’s about the timbre of the instrument.
There is a weird side of me that Jeff manages to stifle, where I think that acoustic guitar is so “real” or “raw” or “natural.” But what’s natural about a hand-crafted instrument with a big resonating body that’s any more real than something vibrating through a big speaker? There’s a weird subjective bias that I have about the acoustic guitar where I think it’s more valid, but it’s not.
Many people have that problem.
R: Yeah, like: ‘Yeah, you’re playing folk music—you’re getting to the root of it.’ But when I listen to a live recording of Buddy Guy playing electric guitar in a blues club in 1967, that sounds as fucking real as anything else, and about as raw as you can get. Every instrument can be toyed with in the mix to make it sound more interesting, and I think Tim Rutilli does a great job of that.
When did ukulele and banjo enter the band?
R: Jake [Bryce of the Recoilers] brought those to the Tin Fist sessions and just started playing along, and we decided that it ruled. For ‘Brokered Heart’ I wanted these very percussive layers of acoustic instruments and have it sound really full. Jake had been playing ukulele for about two years at this point. I was expecting to do everything on classical guitars and acoustic guitars, and then I found this other great instrument that has a totally different range and timbre that was perfect for the song.
[Keyboardist] Keiko [Devaux] joined when? I remember seeing a show at the Green Room [in Montreal] where she was sitting in.
J: She played some shows, then not for a while. Then she played on Tin Fist and Kelp Records put out a press release letting her know she was in the band.
Who wrote the press release?
R: I think I did. But I did ask her if she wanted to play with us in the fall. She had worked through ‘Maplebees’ with me and I knew it sounded nice with a piano. When we were recording, she was originally just going to play on that song. But she started arranging parts on other songs while she was in the studio, because she has a wonderful ear for that, and ended up playing on five of the six songs. Once we brought her on tour, she quickly became indispensable. On this record, she was amazing. She has an incredible ear for subtlety…
Which the rest of you don’t?
R: When we were first getting to know each other, the music that we talked about and both really liked, she always hit on the same points that I thought was really special, in music like Rachel’s and Califone, things like dynamics and choice of instruments. Her taste and aesthetic alone were enough to make me curious about her being in the band. It’s not always super obvious how important some of her compositional choices were, but ‘Glory’ and ‘Hold Your Breath’ are two examples of how spare but how important her parts were.
And she’s an incredibly emotional person who invests so much emotion into songs. She’s told me so many times about a live performance, or even just a practice of a song, will make her high, where she can’t express in words how moved she is by a particular performance of a song. That bridges the gap between the technical prowess in the band and the emotional decision-making in the band.
I’ll confess that I really loved Pink Ghosts, and the next couple of times I saw the full Acorn band I felt that the special, intimate nature of the record was not there. And I was worried that The Acorn would become just another two-guitar-bass-drums band, albeit a very good one. This proves that it’s not just that.
R: I’m not 21 anymore, and as you get older your tastes grow wider and you start to see how wonderful the world of music is and there are no rules and anything is possible. I remember thinking, does Paper Bag know that this is the record they’re going to put out? I don’t know that we’ll ever be popular, but I love the idea that it was a bit of a coup.
J: I remember when we sent the first few tracks off to Paper Bag… [both laugh]
R: We sent them ‘Flood’ and ‘Crooked Legs,’ which are the most ‘raucous’ songs on the record. I love looking at labels like Constellation and Rune Gramofon and it seems like there are no rules there. I love that we expressed ourselves as truly and honestly as we could, and regardless of genre or cohesiveness or homogeneity of the record, it is what it is. Take it or leave it.
J: We assumed, wrongly it turns out, that they wanted ‘Spring Thaw’ times 12. That’s what I thought made us attrractive to a label. But instead, they got zero of those—times 12!
We've been talking for almost two hours now. What else should I know?
R: This project was so all-consuming in so many ways. It’s kind of scary, because I hope to god I can do something this special again sometime in my life. There are times when I listen to it and think that I won’t.
You probably won’t do something that means this much to you.
R: I hope something does. I’m sure my mom does. But I remember thinking that even if I never record another album again, I’ll be happy knowing that I recorded this, at least. I hope this is just another step in the process. I felt like with this record I was finally writing songs I could be proud of, that these lyrics meant something to me, and I want to do more of it.
J: You didn’t feel that way after Blankets? Because that’s the way it feels every time I do a new album. ‘Finally, we’re starting to feel it! The next one will be so good!’
R: I had this simultaneous pride. You did talk about the idea of writing songs just about a broken heart and how that might be trite, but there are sometimes when I do feel like, why not write about something really intense and special? Sometimes listening to pop music I don’t feel like I hear that enough. I don’t mean this in any kind of superior way, but I do think there isn’t enough special music out there. Maybe it’s just a matter of context, and I don’t know the background. But I want people to know the background behind this music and know that there’s something intensely personal here and it’s not just about a relationship that went sour.
J: One of the things we were setting out to do was to make something that sounded unique. I don’t know where this fits into what’s going on [in music trends].
Which is the last thing you should be thinking about.
J: Of course. But now that it’s done I’m thinking about it. And I feel good about the fact that we made something really unique.
R: And then I saw Bruce Peninsula and I thought, oh well. I saw them at Track and Field and I thought, ‘Wow, this is awesome. Let’s hump!’
-end-
Showing posts with label Rolf Klausener. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Rolf Klausener. Show all posts
Monday, October 01, 2007
Friday, September 28, 2007
The Acorn, pt 1
This month's Exclaim has my cover story on The Acorn, the finest band in Ottawa, whose last record I reviewed here.
I first met Rolf Klausener when I found him on my kitchen floor, one morning in the middle of Pop Montreal maybe three years ago. He arrived with Jon Bartlett, whom I had given carte blanche to use my Mont Royal apartment as a crash pad for the Kelp Records crew. Rolf made a mean omelette and, as a big Notwist fan, was very polite when challenging me over a racist comment I made about all German music since Kraftwerk being inherently inferior.
That day he was hand-assembling copies of his debut CD from his new project, The Acorn, called The Pink Ghosts. I fell in love with it immediately, its haunting melodies set to a combination of Canadian folk music and bedroom electronics. It soon evolved into a proper band, one that features three of the more expressive and textural musicians you're likely to see in the indie rock ghetto; keep your eye on drummer Jeffrey Malecki in particular.
This interview was conducted after Rolf and his roommate Stef Power drove me from Guelph to Ottawa one beautiful August afternoon and proceeded to wine and dine me at the home they share with bassist Jeff Debutte. Thanks to Ms. Power for putting up with all our boring rock talk, to engineer Jarett Bartlett for an interview I didn't end up using, and to Rolf for his hospitality and for introducing me to his mom the next morning--she's the subject of the excellent new Acorn album, Glory Hope Mountain.
I'd recommend you read the Exclaim piece before wading deep into these waters--despite the fact that the paragraphs aren't double spaced there.
The Acorn
Rolf Klausener and Jeff Debutte
April 19, 2007
Locale: the porch of the Ottawa home they share with Stef Power.
Mr. Klausener, what do the following names mean to you: Rupert Allen, Brent Bambury, Tiffany Beaudin, and Guy Bérubé.
R: (laughs, suspicious). Uh, I don’t know the Tiffany name. Brent Bambury of course was the second host of Brave New Waves…
OK, but you don’t know their relationship to each other and to yourself?
R: No, I don’t.
You were all nominees for Ottawa’s Hottest Fuck at Les Prix Golden Cherry Awards in 2005.
R: (both laugh hysterically) Oh shit, that’s hilarious! I thought, why would you bring up Guy Bérubé? Why would you know him? How did you find that?
On the interweb.
Of course. Well, thankfully, and rightfully, Brent Bambury won that.
How did you get nominated?
I have no… fucking… idea. I think it was because I was doing the SAW Gallery’s website, and they held the event. [Acorn guitarist] Howie [Tsui] and I went to a bunch of their more racy events, this thing called Jizz that was based on this Toronto event (Vazaleen). I took off my shirt a few times, and of course that makes you fuckable or something. Whatever!
Around the time that The Acorn started becoming a band and playing around Ottawa, I heard someone refer to them as the cutest band in Ottawa.
J: Well, that’s true.
R: That’s how we got to where we are.
But did you not do well in Ottawa quite quickly, once it transitioned into a band?
R: I wasn’t playing that many shows on my own. The last show that I played on my own was an experimental music festival thrown by the Pleasure Through Sound folks. There’s something about when you throw a new band together in Ottawa and try to play shows, people will automatically take interest for at least the first or second show.
J: We had some duds in there, like the one with Les Mouches where eight people were there.
R: I think [Les Mouches’] Owen [Pallett, later of Final Fantasy] never wanted to play a show with us again or speak to me again. They were incredible, though. Someone gave me the Toronto is the Best compilation and I loved that band right away. I’d never heard of Owen before. I wrote to him and offered to put a show on in Ottawa for him. It was The Acorn’s third show as a band, and we were quite mediocre.
J: That was a weird night, though, because we had [Kelp Records’ Jon] Bartlett playing drums and [Recoilers’] Jake Bryce filling in for Howie on guitar.
R: It was weird. Then Les Mouches played a phenomenal set. Owen was so good and the projections were so incredible. Then they came over to my house and Owen seemed so completely disenchanted. They played Nintendo and Owen barely spoke to me all night. I thought, wow, I’ll probably never see any of these people ever again.
J: Having played in other Ottawa bands, I thought there was some nice attention being paid to The Acorn that wasn’t to other bands.
R: I’d been playing with the Recoilers for seven years at that point, and there was never any ambition to play outside of the city, or playing more than we needed to. Or booking our own shows, for that matter. I’d never booked a show before. I didn’t want [The Acorn] to play a show with someone that we didn’t want to play with. When I started my own band, I wanted to have fun and be with people I really like and play shows I want to play. That was my only ambition. The very first show we played was with Great Lake Swimmers and Barmitzvah Brothers, and the next show we played was with Julie Doiron. Then we did this art series...
And that was with Radiohead, wasn’t it?
R: Yeah, right. Radiohead and Pulp—it was kind of a weird combo. No, we only played with people we wanted to see. We weren’t very good at all. The Pink Ghosts is mostly instrumental and stuff I recorded in my bedroom on 20 tracks. It was never supposed to be done live. I think it took us a year and a half to get a footing as a band.
J: I still surprised people came to those shows, considering how bad they must have been.
R: I remember Samir [Khan of Kepler] coming up to me after the first show he saw us play, which was the Kelp 10th anniversary show at ZaphBebo. We played a pretty good show that night. He said, ‘You got yourself a good band, and that’s a rare thing.’ I think he was talking about the dynamic we had. I already loved everyone in the band plenty, but that was a nice outside justification.
What drew you to these three guys? Because they’re so obviously the right three guys, in terms of textural playing that they bring to these songs.
R: It was purely instinct and luck and coincidence. I’d seen Jeff play for years, and played with him as well.
You were in [Jeff's band] the Soft Disaster, yes?
R: Briefly, until they kicked me out. I didn’t have the attention span or the chops.
J: You were just in seven different bands at the time.
R: I was aware of how talented Jeff was, and I wanted him in the band but not necessarily on what instrument. He was one of the first people I thought of.
Howie was weird because we’d just started to get to know each other that summer. He’d just moved to Ottawa and we ended up at the same shows, and ended up talking about the same record labels and the same bands, so I knew we had some musical connections. At the end of one party, he whipped out this guitar and started noodling. I had no idea. He said, ‘Oh, I just dabble. I made a little EP with my friend.’ It was this beautiful, noodly, spacey guitar stuff and I thought it was great.
I wanted him in the band because the aesthetic was really similar, but also because I knew he wasn’t a typical musician. He doesn’t know G from F, he doesn’t know a tone from a semi-tone. And he certainly doesn’t know when his guitar is out of tune. But he has amazing instincts. I loved the fact that I got along with him—he’s incredibly funny—and his musical instincts are so natural.
And [drummer Jeffrey] Malecki was really strange, because I didn’t even know he played drums until a few months before I asked him to join. I was telling Colin Vincent that I was sick of playing by myself and was looking for a drummer, and he recommended him and told me he’d been playing jazz drums forever. So without ever hearing him, despite knowing him for years, I took Colin’s word for it and asked him to come over to my living room and play. It was incredibly loud and we had to stop after two songs, but instantly it worked.
J: That was my first time meeting both Jeffrey and Howie too.
R: That was weird. ‘Yeah, okay, so I’m not sure if either of you are real musicians or even know each other, but…”
[To Rolf] You were in five or six bands at that point, and from what I know about Ottawa, that’s not uncommon. But why did you [Jeff] want to join this band, when you already led your own?
J: Earlier, Rolf said that I was one of the first people he thought of. And that’s probably because every time he played a solo show, I’d be the first one to go up and talk to him afterwards saying, “Hey, yeah, so, if you ever need a band…’
R: I don’t remember that at all. I don’t remember you ever talking to me at a show.
And yet apparently he was aggressively campaigning.
R: Samir told me that you wanted to play.
J: He told me you were looking for other people. I thought the songs were great and exciting and I wanted to be a part of that. I knew Tim from Soft Disaster was moving to Boston, so I was looking for something else. And these were some of the best songs I’d ever heard anyone in Ottawa write.
Did you hear the Christmas thing? [The first unofficial Acorn release was a Christmas EP Klausener made, featuring a cover of Palace’s “New Partner”]
J: Yeah, he gave it to me.
R: I’d been playing with CuBase for three months at that point. I was so excited to do something on my own, and I gave a copy to everybody I knew, basically. I spent all night burning CDs the night before a New Year’s show at Babylon with 20 bands or something. My roommate Aaron played bass and his brother played drums and we did three songs. I ran around the club all night handing people CDRs.
[conversation interrupted by Jon Bartlett dropping by]
[resumes with Rolf trying to figure out how to turn the new album into soundbites, expressing his frustration with a recent interview that asked him little more than: ‘Why are there ukuleles and marimbas on the record?’—a question it took him 15 minutes to answer.]
R: Obviously she didn’t have much time to listen to the record and didn’t know me, but at the same time, we didn’t throw this together on a weekend. We spent two years making this goddam record.
But Rolf, you have thrown a record together on a weekend before [Tin Fist EP].
R: It’s true. When we first started talking about this album, I wanted to do it live in a room with 15 people—so unrealistic. I didn’t really think that I’d have to sit with the material, with my mom’s stories, for nine months before I could realistically start writing in a way that I felt okay about it. It took that long to absorb. First, the music that I was researching, and then letting the stories percolate and hone what the essence of them was, and what stories were key to moving the whole story along.
So this was two years ago—the Blankets EP would have just been released? Or when did you start thinking about this?
R: Blankets was out and we’d toured coast to coast. My dad had always wanted to write an autobiography, because he’s had an even crazier life than my mom. He worked for the UN in all sorts of secret military things that I will never know about. Based on how he talked about wanting to document that, I thought it would be neat to talk to my mom and learn more about her. I’d always thought about it, and one day at the end of practice I just said, ‘Hey guys, how about we record an album about my mom’s life?’ And they all said, ‘Yeah, cool.’ That was the extent of it. I was closing the door to the apartment as they were leaving.
I interviewed her and had the stories recorded, and then I started researching Honduran folk music. Which wasn’t the original idea, but the more I thought about it, I thought I wanted to do something more than drums-bass-guitar. But I realized it was opening a huge can of worms and it was going to take forever.
I think it was in March of this year, when I thought, wow, this album is never going to happen. We were listening to some rough mixes when we got back from tour and I thought, goddamit, this is nowhere near where I thought it would be. Then I got fired—and the whole album came together! So I’d like to thank my bosses at CHUO for firing me, because I spent the next month writing every day on this porch.
I spent two and a half weeks writing the lyrics to ‘Hold Your Breath’—which is pathetic. They’re not a major revelation or anything. I was very conscious of word choice and movement and pacing. I thought, I’m going to have to sing these songs for the next couple of years, and I want to feel good about the lyrics and care about them. I thought there were a few lines on Tin Fist where I didn’t feel that, where I thought they were a bit too melodramatic.
J: When we got back from tour, it sounded a lot like it sounds now. But for Rolf, lyrically, it was still skeletal.
What did you [Jeff] think of the idea initially? And what did you know about his mom?
J: I’d met his mom once, maybe. She didn’t come to our shows. My first initial reaction was: [raspberry sound] What the fuck???!! This is a really bad idea! [Rolf cracks up]. I thought, and not in a callous way, but: who cares about your mom?
Yeah, but who cares about your broken heart?
J: Sure, that’s even worse. But as the songs started to come about, I realized that it’s also about a lot of bigger things than just his mom, and she was a good way to talk about these things.
I don’t think people have to know what it’s about. The way we all listen to any music, there will be certain lines or phrases that impart meaning, whether or not we understand the lyrical intent or an entire narrative. And The Acorn has never mixed a record to sound like shiny pop music with the vocals way up front, so even other Acorn lyrics for me have been about certain lines or phrases. I don’t think I know what any of your other songs are actually about specifically. I respond more to the music. So I wonder how much of this album’s narrative will be apparent to people who don’t read this article or anything else surrounding its release.
R: I do wonder about that.
Does that make you hesitant to play it up, or is it integral to absorbing the record?
R: It’s there and I don’t want to pretend that it’s not the backbone of the record. That’s why I did spend so much time on the lyrics. It couldn’t be overtly narrative. The themes are really important. There were so many serendipitous moments while writing, connections such as: there was a river and a mountain in her hometown, and then she moved to Montreal, surrounded by rivers and with a mountain. Survival and perseverance threaded through the entire record. As I was writing them, I could see how so many of the themes permeated every story in her life. The highlighted stories were microcosms for her entire life.
Then I started thinking about how they reflected on my life. Towards the end of the record, as I was approaching being born in her life’s narrative, I could see how my life was tying into her stories. There were a lot of moments where a line would come out very spontaneously, and I’d have a little moment of shock, or a giggle, as I realized how much of them tied into my own life. Those were some of the best moments. It didn’t even feel like coincidence.
How many specifics of your mother’s life did you know before you interviewed her?
R: I knew she had a rough life. I knew she was orphaned until she was seven. I knew that her father was not a good father. I knew that she eventually stumbled into Montreal and met my father. But that’s it. Partially because my mom—she isn’t private, but she doesn’t want to talk about the hard elements of her life. But when she does talk about those things… When I was a kid and discovering drinking and drugs, my mother would tell me her own stories and there was full disclosure: ‘Oh, let me tell you about the first time I did heroin!’ [all laugh] Here I was in high school and I’d just got drunk for the first time, and here we’re talking about cocaine and heroin. Disclosure has never been an issue for my mother.
For me, it’s been a matter of taking the time to talk to her and ask her questions. And then she would tell me everything. Everything. The song ‘Oh, Napleon’ was a case where I couldn’t believe what she’d gone through. I alluded to the band what that song’s about, and it was disturbing and I was upset when she told me the whole story. I was amazed by the candour and honesty that came through, and how she took it all in stride.
I can only think of two things in my life that make me re-evaluate any hardship in my own life. One is the movie The Endurance, about the Shackleton expedition to the Antarctic, and the other is my mom’s life. Whenever I think about those two things I think I have it so fucking easy, it’s ridiculous.
The image of crooked legs runs through the whole record. What does that refer to?
R: That was a story about when my mother was back at her father’s farm for a few years. She was into the routine of being ignored, of spending time with the servants at the farm and doing menial chores. She was getting closer and closer to her adopted brother, Napoleon. Every night her father would get people to go out and tend to the sugar cane, because there was a refinery on the farm. When her brother was of age, her father asked him to go watch over the people working at the sugar refinery. He was terrified of the dark and refused to do it.
How old was he?
R: Fourteen or 15. She was about 12. He had polio and had a bum leg, and he had to ride a horse to do this. And if he fell off the horse, he would crack his skull open. So he was terrified to do this because he was scared of the dark. And there were no floodlights in rural Honduras in 1953.
The father was insistent, and so he took off his belt, which was sweaty and hot because it was a sweltering night, and whipped Napoleon, who wasn’t wearing a shirt. The belt wrapped around Napoleon’s waist, and when the father ripped off the belt, it tore an entire chunk of skin from around the torso. It was bleeding like crazy.
So my mother, 12 years old, runs to the shed and gets a machete. She runs at her father with a machete and climbs up him as if she’s going to slit his throat. She tells him, ‘If you touch him, I will kill you.’
Things calmed down after a bit. Later that night, after things had settled and Napoleon went to bed with bandages around his stomach, my mother broke into the farm’s safe and took all of her father’s money. She packed it all up and got on this dirt road and walked tens of kilometers overnight, from one in the morning until dawn, to Tegucigalpa, which is the capital, to the Catholic boarding school where she was staying until her father came to reclaim her when she was about six.
She said, ‘Here’s a bunch of money, I’d like to stay here for as long as I can.’ They asked her what happened and she told them the story. The next day her father came by and said, ‘What the fuck is going on? You broke into my safe.’ They talked to him about the situation and he was like, [makes a hands-off gesture] ‘Cool, fine, fuck you, whatever, stay here.’ He left her there. She was there for two years until the money ran out, and then moved out and started living on her own when she was about 13.
That’s where that story came about. There were a bunch of other elements that came into play when I started doing all this research on Honduran folk music, on the Mayan tribes. There’s a story of the firefly. There’s this wonderful element of ceremonial burials in the Kuna culture. One of the things they do is, the shaman would perform this three-day long funeral ceremony when someone would die. On the last day, they would take a firefly and bury it with the corpse, to represent the spirit of the deceased. I love that image, and I was looking for an image to tie together the city lights and the starlight. That tied into ‘Hold Your Breath’ quite well.
The firefly is in both bookend tracks, which both deal with her mother.
R: There’s definitely some artistic license there, when the brother tells her, ‘When you see fireflies, that’s your mom.’ I was thinking it would be neat if her brother was comforting her as she grew up with this firefly metaphor.
‘Hold Your Breath’ was more setting the scene, but ‘I Will Watch Over You’ was always meant to be her mother facing her own mortality and seeing her child being born. And my mother was a breached baby, so she was suffocating. She was pretty much DOA when she was born. ‘I Will Watch Over You’ would have been the inner monologue of what her mother was going through, imparting these words to her child that she would never see grow up. Those two songs bookend each other.
I also realized that there were elements that related to things my mother told me when I was growing up. When I would cut myself, my mom would grab my hand and start sucking the blood. I’d be like, ‘Ew, mom, gross!’ And she’d say, ‘What? It’s my blood going through your veins.’
Also, if you’re going chronologically, ‘I Will Watch Over You’ is a song that my mother could have theoretically sang to me when I was born.
That’s how I took it the first time I heard the record. And I thought, wait a minute, did she die in childbirth too? I’m pretty sure she’s still alive…
R: I didn’t want to make anything up, but it was too tempting. Once I started getting into it all, it was good to have fun with it and have some creative license.
How many of these stories were the band aware of? Did you have explicit access to the source material?
J: A lot of them, like ‘Lullaby,’ it was very explicit. Songs like ‘Hold Your Breath,’ we knew exactly what was going on. Some songs he just gave us a précis. A song like ‘Oh, Napoleon,’ he’d just say: ‘You don’t want to know.’ Probably 80% we were aware of, at least after the fact.
R: She was so open with me, and I’ve seen her be open with complete strangers. She never had a problem with me writing the record. But at the same time, she really doesn’t realize that people will listen to this and we’re going to do interviews where we talk about her life. I really didn’t feel it necessary to disclose everything. If people really, really want to know, I’ll tell them off the record.
Halfway through writing the record, I realized that a lot of them were slow, quiet and kind of sad. I wanted there to be some uplifting stuff on this record, because ultimately her story is really uplifting and beautiful. It was trying to find a way to talk about these stories and themes in a positive way, and not focus on how crazy and challenging her life was. Which was hard.
How and when did she end up in Montreal?
R: She was on a vacation in her early 20s in Miami with some friends, for a few weeks. She bumped into this wonderful Nicaraguan woman who lived in Montreal. They spent a week together, and this woman told her that Montreal was great: lots of Central Americans there, lots of jobs, so much opportunity, a beautiful country with snow. My mom was totally enraptured with the idea of Canada. At the end of her holiday she thought, ‘OK, fuck it, when is your train leaving?’ She packed her stuff…
Just the stuff she brought on vacation?
R: Exactly, and went on an overnight bus ride to Montreal. She got there, and the woman ditched her at the bus station. She said, ‘Oh, yeah, my boyfriend is waiting for me. I’m sorry. Here’s my phone number.’ She gave my mom her phone number, but my mom lost it.
So now she’s stranded in this country where she doesn’t speak French or English, and she walked around all night and went to a hotel. The chambermaids there were all Nicaraguan and Honduran, who told her there was this wonderful area on the north area of St. Laurent where there’s this community centre—which is now [restaurant/music venue] La Sala Rossa—where all the Hispanic people hang out. Just go there, and we’ll find you a place to live. So my mom called a friend in Nicaragua and told her to close her bank account and send her all her money. And she just stayed, and that was it.
What year was that?
R: ’74.
And she met your dad there?
R: After a few different roommates, she was staying with this woman who was pretty nice. They were both working all these crazy textile jobs. My mom got fired so many times because she was so charming and good at lying, that she’d tell them she could work industrial sewing presses and all this stuff. And then she’d get fired. Finally she found a job where she could scheme her way in and stay there.
She got this cheap apartment sharing a bedroom with a woman. Every night, after working for 12 hours, this woman would get all dolled up and go out every night. My mom would say, ‘How can you go out every night and party?’ And the woman would say, ‘Well, you know, that’s what I do.’ My mom didn’t think anything of it.
One night my mom wakes up in the middle of the night, and this woman is fucking some dude right next to her, three feet away from her. She’s like, ‘What the hell are you doing?! I’m right here!’ The woman says, ‘Gloria, are you retarded? I’m a prostitute—this is what I do! This is my job!’
My mom thought, okay, I’m outta here. She grabbed her stuff and left that night. She walked around all night, so depressed and not knowing what she would do. So she’s walking around Laurier and St. Laurent.
It’s morning, and she sees this nun about 100 metres away from her, and they’re walking towards each other. She comes up to her and looks at her and says, ‘Sister Margaret?’ They freak out—this was her teacher from Honduras. She was Canadian and had been in Honduras on some kind of Catholic internship exchange, and so this was her childhood teacher. She said, ‘I’m just over here at a Catholic boarding house. Come over, have some tea, we’ll hang out, there are some people leaving and we might be able to get you a room.’ She got a room and ended up staying for months.
One day, this UN social worker, Bernard Klausener was coming by, checking it out and doing the rounds. They introduced him to my mom, they hit it off, and they started dating.
I think I’m going to eat up all my tape if I keep asking you specific questions.
R: I thought about how to summarize a lot of these stories, but I can’t.
How many hours of tape did you get from her?
R: Eight hours. I still haven’t edited it all. She went into so much detail. She tells stories in such a crazy, fractured way, and I just tried to make sense of it all. It’s all from the first 30 years of her life.
-part two will appear soon-
The Acorn's upcoming tour dates are here, starting October 11.
I first met Rolf Klausener when I found him on my kitchen floor, one morning in the middle of Pop Montreal maybe three years ago. He arrived with Jon Bartlett, whom I had given carte blanche to use my Mont Royal apartment as a crash pad for the Kelp Records crew. Rolf made a mean omelette and, as a big Notwist fan, was very polite when challenging me over a racist comment I made about all German music since Kraftwerk being inherently inferior.
That day he was hand-assembling copies of his debut CD from his new project, The Acorn, called The Pink Ghosts. I fell in love with it immediately, its haunting melodies set to a combination of Canadian folk music and bedroom electronics. It soon evolved into a proper band, one that features three of the more expressive and textural musicians you're likely to see in the indie rock ghetto; keep your eye on drummer Jeffrey Malecki in particular.
This interview was conducted after Rolf and his roommate Stef Power drove me from Guelph to Ottawa one beautiful August afternoon and proceeded to wine and dine me at the home they share with bassist Jeff Debutte. Thanks to Ms. Power for putting up with all our boring rock talk, to engineer Jarett Bartlett for an interview I didn't end up using, and to Rolf for his hospitality and for introducing me to his mom the next morning--she's the subject of the excellent new Acorn album, Glory Hope Mountain.
I'd recommend you read the Exclaim piece before wading deep into these waters--despite the fact that the paragraphs aren't double spaced there.
The Acorn
Rolf Klausener and Jeff Debutte
April 19, 2007
Locale: the porch of the Ottawa home they share with Stef Power.
Mr. Klausener, what do the following names mean to you: Rupert Allen, Brent Bambury, Tiffany Beaudin, and Guy Bérubé.
R: (laughs, suspicious). Uh, I don’t know the Tiffany name. Brent Bambury of course was the second host of Brave New Waves…
OK, but you don’t know their relationship to each other and to yourself?
R: No, I don’t.
You were all nominees for Ottawa’s Hottest Fuck at Les Prix Golden Cherry Awards in 2005.
R: (both laugh hysterically) Oh shit, that’s hilarious! I thought, why would you bring up Guy Bérubé? Why would you know him? How did you find that?
On the interweb.
Of course. Well, thankfully, and rightfully, Brent Bambury won that.
How did you get nominated?
I have no… fucking… idea. I think it was because I was doing the SAW Gallery’s website, and they held the event. [Acorn guitarist] Howie [Tsui] and I went to a bunch of their more racy events, this thing called Jizz that was based on this Toronto event (Vazaleen). I took off my shirt a few times, and of course that makes you fuckable or something. Whatever!
Around the time that The Acorn started becoming a band and playing around Ottawa, I heard someone refer to them as the cutest band in Ottawa.
J: Well, that’s true.
R: That’s how we got to where we are.
But did you not do well in Ottawa quite quickly, once it transitioned into a band?
R: I wasn’t playing that many shows on my own. The last show that I played on my own was an experimental music festival thrown by the Pleasure Through Sound folks. There’s something about when you throw a new band together in Ottawa and try to play shows, people will automatically take interest for at least the first or second show.
J: We had some duds in there, like the one with Les Mouches where eight people were there.
R: I think [Les Mouches’] Owen [Pallett, later of Final Fantasy] never wanted to play a show with us again or speak to me again. They were incredible, though. Someone gave me the Toronto is the Best compilation and I loved that band right away. I’d never heard of Owen before. I wrote to him and offered to put a show on in Ottawa for him. It was The Acorn’s third show as a band, and we were quite mediocre.
J: That was a weird night, though, because we had [Kelp Records’ Jon] Bartlett playing drums and [Recoilers’] Jake Bryce filling in for Howie on guitar.
R: It was weird. Then Les Mouches played a phenomenal set. Owen was so good and the projections were so incredible. Then they came over to my house and Owen seemed so completely disenchanted. They played Nintendo and Owen barely spoke to me all night. I thought, wow, I’ll probably never see any of these people ever again.
J: Having played in other Ottawa bands, I thought there was some nice attention being paid to The Acorn that wasn’t to other bands.
R: I’d been playing with the Recoilers for seven years at that point, and there was never any ambition to play outside of the city, or playing more than we needed to. Or booking our own shows, for that matter. I’d never booked a show before. I didn’t want [The Acorn] to play a show with someone that we didn’t want to play with. When I started my own band, I wanted to have fun and be with people I really like and play shows I want to play. That was my only ambition. The very first show we played was with Great Lake Swimmers and Barmitzvah Brothers, and the next show we played was with Julie Doiron. Then we did this art series...
And that was with Radiohead, wasn’t it?
R: Yeah, right. Radiohead and Pulp—it was kind of a weird combo. No, we only played with people we wanted to see. We weren’t very good at all. The Pink Ghosts is mostly instrumental and stuff I recorded in my bedroom on 20 tracks. It was never supposed to be done live. I think it took us a year and a half to get a footing as a band.
J: I still surprised people came to those shows, considering how bad they must have been.
R: I remember Samir [Khan of Kepler] coming up to me after the first show he saw us play, which was the Kelp 10th anniversary show at ZaphBebo. We played a pretty good show that night. He said, ‘You got yourself a good band, and that’s a rare thing.’ I think he was talking about the dynamic we had. I already loved everyone in the band plenty, but that was a nice outside justification.
What drew you to these three guys? Because they’re so obviously the right three guys, in terms of textural playing that they bring to these songs.
R: It was purely instinct and luck and coincidence. I’d seen Jeff play for years, and played with him as well.
You were in [Jeff's band] the Soft Disaster, yes?
R: Briefly, until they kicked me out. I didn’t have the attention span or the chops.
J: You were just in seven different bands at the time.
R: I was aware of how talented Jeff was, and I wanted him in the band but not necessarily on what instrument. He was one of the first people I thought of.
Howie was weird because we’d just started to get to know each other that summer. He’d just moved to Ottawa and we ended up at the same shows, and ended up talking about the same record labels and the same bands, so I knew we had some musical connections. At the end of one party, he whipped out this guitar and started noodling. I had no idea. He said, ‘Oh, I just dabble. I made a little EP with my friend.’ It was this beautiful, noodly, spacey guitar stuff and I thought it was great.
I wanted him in the band because the aesthetic was really similar, but also because I knew he wasn’t a typical musician. He doesn’t know G from F, he doesn’t know a tone from a semi-tone. And he certainly doesn’t know when his guitar is out of tune. But he has amazing instincts. I loved the fact that I got along with him—he’s incredibly funny—and his musical instincts are so natural.
And [drummer Jeffrey] Malecki was really strange, because I didn’t even know he played drums until a few months before I asked him to join. I was telling Colin Vincent that I was sick of playing by myself and was looking for a drummer, and he recommended him and told me he’d been playing jazz drums forever. So without ever hearing him, despite knowing him for years, I took Colin’s word for it and asked him to come over to my living room and play. It was incredibly loud and we had to stop after two songs, but instantly it worked.
J: That was my first time meeting both Jeffrey and Howie too.
R: That was weird. ‘Yeah, okay, so I’m not sure if either of you are real musicians or even know each other, but…”
[To Rolf] You were in five or six bands at that point, and from what I know about Ottawa, that’s not uncommon. But why did you [Jeff] want to join this band, when you already led your own?
J: Earlier, Rolf said that I was one of the first people he thought of. And that’s probably because every time he played a solo show, I’d be the first one to go up and talk to him afterwards saying, “Hey, yeah, so, if you ever need a band…’
R: I don’t remember that at all. I don’t remember you ever talking to me at a show.
And yet apparently he was aggressively campaigning.
R: Samir told me that you wanted to play.
J: He told me you were looking for other people. I thought the songs were great and exciting and I wanted to be a part of that. I knew Tim from Soft Disaster was moving to Boston, so I was looking for something else. And these were some of the best songs I’d ever heard anyone in Ottawa write.
Did you hear the Christmas thing? [The first unofficial Acorn release was a Christmas EP Klausener made, featuring a cover of Palace’s “New Partner”]
J: Yeah, he gave it to me.
R: I’d been playing with CuBase for three months at that point. I was so excited to do something on my own, and I gave a copy to everybody I knew, basically. I spent all night burning CDs the night before a New Year’s show at Babylon with 20 bands or something. My roommate Aaron played bass and his brother played drums and we did three songs. I ran around the club all night handing people CDRs.
[conversation interrupted by Jon Bartlett dropping by]
[resumes with Rolf trying to figure out how to turn the new album into soundbites, expressing his frustration with a recent interview that asked him little more than: ‘Why are there ukuleles and marimbas on the record?’—a question it took him 15 minutes to answer.]
R: Obviously she didn’t have much time to listen to the record and didn’t know me, but at the same time, we didn’t throw this together on a weekend. We spent two years making this goddam record.
But Rolf, you have thrown a record together on a weekend before [Tin Fist EP].
R: It’s true. When we first started talking about this album, I wanted to do it live in a room with 15 people—so unrealistic. I didn’t really think that I’d have to sit with the material, with my mom’s stories, for nine months before I could realistically start writing in a way that I felt okay about it. It took that long to absorb. First, the music that I was researching, and then letting the stories percolate and hone what the essence of them was, and what stories were key to moving the whole story along.
So this was two years ago—the Blankets EP would have just been released? Or when did you start thinking about this?
R: Blankets was out and we’d toured coast to coast. My dad had always wanted to write an autobiography, because he’s had an even crazier life than my mom. He worked for the UN in all sorts of secret military things that I will never know about. Based on how he talked about wanting to document that, I thought it would be neat to talk to my mom and learn more about her. I’d always thought about it, and one day at the end of practice I just said, ‘Hey guys, how about we record an album about my mom’s life?’ And they all said, ‘Yeah, cool.’ That was the extent of it. I was closing the door to the apartment as they were leaving.
I interviewed her and had the stories recorded, and then I started researching Honduran folk music. Which wasn’t the original idea, but the more I thought about it, I thought I wanted to do something more than drums-bass-guitar. But I realized it was opening a huge can of worms and it was going to take forever.
I think it was in March of this year, when I thought, wow, this album is never going to happen. We were listening to some rough mixes when we got back from tour and I thought, goddamit, this is nowhere near where I thought it would be. Then I got fired—and the whole album came together! So I’d like to thank my bosses at CHUO for firing me, because I spent the next month writing every day on this porch.
I spent two and a half weeks writing the lyrics to ‘Hold Your Breath’—which is pathetic. They’re not a major revelation or anything. I was very conscious of word choice and movement and pacing. I thought, I’m going to have to sing these songs for the next couple of years, and I want to feel good about the lyrics and care about them. I thought there were a few lines on Tin Fist where I didn’t feel that, where I thought they were a bit too melodramatic.
J: When we got back from tour, it sounded a lot like it sounds now. But for Rolf, lyrically, it was still skeletal.
What did you [Jeff] think of the idea initially? And what did you know about his mom?
J: I’d met his mom once, maybe. She didn’t come to our shows. My first initial reaction was: [raspberry sound] What the fuck???!! This is a really bad idea! [Rolf cracks up]. I thought, and not in a callous way, but: who cares about your mom?
Yeah, but who cares about your broken heart?
J: Sure, that’s even worse. But as the songs started to come about, I realized that it’s also about a lot of bigger things than just his mom, and she was a good way to talk about these things.
I don’t think people have to know what it’s about. The way we all listen to any music, there will be certain lines or phrases that impart meaning, whether or not we understand the lyrical intent or an entire narrative. And The Acorn has never mixed a record to sound like shiny pop music with the vocals way up front, so even other Acorn lyrics for me have been about certain lines or phrases. I don’t think I know what any of your other songs are actually about specifically. I respond more to the music. So I wonder how much of this album’s narrative will be apparent to people who don’t read this article or anything else surrounding its release.
R: I do wonder about that.
Does that make you hesitant to play it up, or is it integral to absorbing the record?
R: It’s there and I don’t want to pretend that it’s not the backbone of the record. That’s why I did spend so much time on the lyrics. It couldn’t be overtly narrative. The themes are really important. There were so many serendipitous moments while writing, connections such as: there was a river and a mountain in her hometown, and then she moved to Montreal, surrounded by rivers and with a mountain. Survival and perseverance threaded through the entire record. As I was writing them, I could see how so many of the themes permeated every story in her life. The highlighted stories were microcosms for her entire life.
Then I started thinking about how they reflected on my life. Towards the end of the record, as I was approaching being born in her life’s narrative, I could see how my life was tying into her stories. There were a lot of moments where a line would come out very spontaneously, and I’d have a little moment of shock, or a giggle, as I realized how much of them tied into my own life. Those were some of the best moments. It didn’t even feel like coincidence.
How many specifics of your mother’s life did you know before you interviewed her?
R: I knew she had a rough life. I knew she was orphaned until she was seven. I knew that her father was not a good father. I knew that she eventually stumbled into Montreal and met my father. But that’s it. Partially because my mom—she isn’t private, but she doesn’t want to talk about the hard elements of her life. But when she does talk about those things… When I was a kid and discovering drinking and drugs, my mother would tell me her own stories and there was full disclosure: ‘Oh, let me tell you about the first time I did heroin!’ [all laugh] Here I was in high school and I’d just got drunk for the first time, and here we’re talking about cocaine and heroin. Disclosure has never been an issue for my mother.
For me, it’s been a matter of taking the time to talk to her and ask her questions. And then she would tell me everything. Everything. The song ‘Oh, Napleon’ was a case where I couldn’t believe what she’d gone through. I alluded to the band what that song’s about, and it was disturbing and I was upset when she told me the whole story. I was amazed by the candour and honesty that came through, and how she took it all in stride.
I can only think of two things in my life that make me re-evaluate any hardship in my own life. One is the movie The Endurance, about the Shackleton expedition to the Antarctic, and the other is my mom’s life. Whenever I think about those two things I think I have it so fucking easy, it’s ridiculous.
The image of crooked legs runs through the whole record. What does that refer to?
R: That was a story about when my mother was back at her father’s farm for a few years. She was into the routine of being ignored, of spending time with the servants at the farm and doing menial chores. She was getting closer and closer to her adopted brother, Napoleon. Every night her father would get people to go out and tend to the sugar cane, because there was a refinery on the farm. When her brother was of age, her father asked him to go watch over the people working at the sugar refinery. He was terrified of the dark and refused to do it.
How old was he?
R: Fourteen or 15. She was about 12. He had polio and had a bum leg, and he had to ride a horse to do this. And if he fell off the horse, he would crack his skull open. So he was terrified to do this because he was scared of the dark. And there were no floodlights in rural Honduras in 1953.
The father was insistent, and so he took off his belt, which was sweaty and hot because it was a sweltering night, and whipped Napoleon, who wasn’t wearing a shirt. The belt wrapped around Napoleon’s waist, and when the father ripped off the belt, it tore an entire chunk of skin from around the torso. It was bleeding like crazy.
So my mother, 12 years old, runs to the shed and gets a machete. She runs at her father with a machete and climbs up him as if she’s going to slit his throat. She tells him, ‘If you touch him, I will kill you.’
Things calmed down after a bit. Later that night, after things had settled and Napoleon went to bed with bandages around his stomach, my mother broke into the farm’s safe and took all of her father’s money. She packed it all up and got on this dirt road and walked tens of kilometers overnight, from one in the morning until dawn, to Tegucigalpa, which is the capital, to the Catholic boarding school where she was staying until her father came to reclaim her when she was about six.
She said, ‘Here’s a bunch of money, I’d like to stay here for as long as I can.’ They asked her what happened and she told them the story. The next day her father came by and said, ‘What the fuck is going on? You broke into my safe.’ They talked to him about the situation and he was like, [makes a hands-off gesture] ‘Cool, fine, fuck you, whatever, stay here.’ He left her there. She was there for two years until the money ran out, and then moved out and started living on her own when she was about 13.
That’s where that story came about. There were a bunch of other elements that came into play when I started doing all this research on Honduran folk music, on the Mayan tribes. There’s a story of the firefly. There’s this wonderful element of ceremonial burials in the Kuna culture. One of the things they do is, the shaman would perform this three-day long funeral ceremony when someone would die. On the last day, they would take a firefly and bury it with the corpse, to represent the spirit of the deceased. I love that image, and I was looking for an image to tie together the city lights and the starlight. That tied into ‘Hold Your Breath’ quite well.
The firefly is in both bookend tracks, which both deal with her mother.
R: There’s definitely some artistic license there, when the brother tells her, ‘When you see fireflies, that’s your mom.’ I was thinking it would be neat if her brother was comforting her as she grew up with this firefly metaphor.
‘Hold Your Breath’ was more setting the scene, but ‘I Will Watch Over You’ was always meant to be her mother facing her own mortality and seeing her child being born. And my mother was a breached baby, so she was suffocating. She was pretty much DOA when she was born. ‘I Will Watch Over You’ would have been the inner monologue of what her mother was going through, imparting these words to her child that she would never see grow up. Those two songs bookend each other.
I also realized that there were elements that related to things my mother told me when I was growing up. When I would cut myself, my mom would grab my hand and start sucking the blood. I’d be like, ‘Ew, mom, gross!’ And she’d say, ‘What? It’s my blood going through your veins.’
Also, if you’re going chronologically, ‘I Will Watch Over You’ is a song that my mother could have theoretically sang to me when I was born.
That’s how I took it the first time I heard the record. And I thought, wait a minute, did she die in childbirth too? I’m pretty sure she’s still alive…
R: I didn’t want to make anything up, but it was too tempting. Once I started getting into it all, it was good to have fun with it and have some creative license.
How many of these stories were the band aware of? Did you have explicit access to the source material?
J: A lot of them, like ‘Lullaby,’ it was very explicit. Songs like ‘Hold Your Breath,’ we knew exactly what was going on. Some songs he just gave us a précis. A song like ‘Oh, Napoleon,’ he’d just say: ‘You don’t want to know.’ Probably 80% we were aware of, at least after the fact.
R: She was so open with me, and I’ve seen her be open with complete strangers. She never had a problem with me writing the record. But at the same time, she really doesn’t realize that people will listen to this and we’re going to do interviews where we talk about her life. I really didn’t feel it necessary to disclose everything. If people really, really want to know, I’ll tell them off the record.
Halfway through writing the record, I realized that a lot of them were slow, quiet and kind of sad. I wanted there to be some uplifting stuff on this record, because ultimately her story is really uplifting and beautiful. It was trying to find a way to talk about these stories and themes in a positive way, and not focus on how crazy and challenging her life was. Which was hard.
How and when did she end up in Montreal?
R: She was on a vacation in her early 20s in Miami with some friends, for a few weeks. She bumped into this wonderful Nicaraguan woman who lived in Montreal. They spent a week together, and this woman told her that Montreal was great: lots of Central Americans there, lots of jobs, so much opportunity, a beautiful country with snow. My mom was totally enraptured with the idea of Canada. At the end of her holiday she thought, ‘OK, fuck it, when is your train leaving?’ She packed her stuff…
Just the stuff she brought on vacation?
R: Exactly, and went on an overnight bus ride to Montreal. She got there, and the woman ditched her at the bus station. She said, ‘Oh, yeah, my boyfriend is waiting for me. I’m sorry. Here’s my phone number.’ She gave my mom her phone number, but my mom lost it.
So now she’s stranded in this country where she doesn’t speak French or English, and she walked around all night and went to a hotel. The chambermaids there were all Nicaraguan and Honduran, who told her there was this wonderful area on the north area of St. Laurent where there’s this community centre—which is now [restaurant/music venue] La Sala Rossa—where all the Hispanic people hang out. Just go there, and we’ll find you a place to live. So my mom called a friend in Nicaragua and told her to close her bank account and send her all her money. And she just stayed, and that was it.
What year was that?
R: ’74.
And she met your dad there?
R: After a few different roommates, she was staying with this woman who was pretty nice. They were both working all these crazy textile jobs. My mom got fired so many times because she was so charming and good at lying, that she’d tell them she could work industrial sewing presses and all this stuff. And then she’d get fired. Finally she found a job where she could scheme her way in and stay there.
She got this cheap apartment sharing a bedroom with a woman. Every night, after working for 12 hours, this woman would get all dolled up and go out every night. My mom would say, ‘How can you go out every night and party?’ And the woman would say, ‘Well, you know, that’s what I do.’ My mom didn’t think anything of it.
One night my mom wakes up in the middle of the night, and this woman is fucking some dude right next to her, three feet away from her. She’s like, ‘What the hell are you doing?! I’m right here!’ The woman says, ‘Gloria, are you retarded? I’m a prostitute—this is what I do! This is my job!’
My mom thought, okay, I’m outta here. She grabbed her stuff and left that night. She walked around all night, so depressed and not knowing what she would do. So she’s walking around Laurier and St. Laurent.
It’s morning, and she sees this nun about 100 metres away from her, and they’re walking towards each other. She comes up to her and looks at her and says, ‘Sister Margaret?’ They freak out—this was her teacher from Honduras. She was Canadian and had been in Honduras on some kind of Catholic internship exchange, and so this was her childhood teacher. She said, ‘I’m just over here at a Catholic boarding house. Come over, have some tea, we’ll hang out, there are some people leaving and we might be able to get you a room.’ She got a room and ended up staying for months.
One day, this UN social worker, Bernard Klausener was coming by, checking it out and doing the rounds. They introduced him to my mom, they hit it off, and they started dating.
I think I’m going to eat up all my tape if I keep asking you specific questions.
R: I thought about how to summarize a lot of these stories, but I can’t.
How many hours of tape did you get from her?
R: Eight hours. I still haven’t edited it all. She went into so much detail. She tells stories in such a crazy, fractured way, and I just tried to make sense of it all. It’s all from the first 30 years of her life.
-part two will appear soon-
The Acorn's upcoming tour dates are here, starting October 11.
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