Acorn frontman doesn’t fall far from the tree

Monday, 29 October 2007

To dedicate the time we have now to uncovering moments of someone else’s life that have long since past isn’t something many of us ever aspire to do. However, Rolf Klausener, songwriter and vocalist for Ottawa’s The Acorn, was struck with the kind of motivation most of us hope never to have.

“My father died when I was about 15, and it was a really huge regret that I never got to know a lot of his secrets,” Klausener says. “I didn’t really want to let that happen with my mom.”

The band’s latest release, Glory Hope Mountain, is Klausener’s attempt to evade that fear. The album is a musical manuscript that navigates the course of his mother Glory’s life—a life that began in Honduras and made its way to Montreal, replete with dark moments and filled with more than enough triumph to turn the album from a simple biography into a celebration.

“I really wanted to reflect the joy, the celebration of her life in the songs, and I didn’t want them to just harp on all the dark elements because it’s too easy,” Klausener notes. “Especially for me. The way I write, I’ve always had trouble writing happy songs, and I wanted to write some of the most jubilant and uplifting stuff that I’ve ever written.”

To arrive at a mental place where composing such songs would be possible required a lot of work. The initial idea turned into hours of interview sessions, in which Klausener would set up a couple of mics in his home and have his mom come over to recount her story, beginning with her earliest memories.

“You don’t get a lot of opportunity to just sit down and talk to your parent as a person,” Klausener says. “A lot of times, it’s them complaining about you being too messy or not paying your car insurance or whatever. It was really nice to just be like, ‘Alright, I’m Rolf and you’re Glory—now tell me about your life.’?”

The egalitarianism with which Klausener approached these mother-son interviews is echoed in the album, where the songwriter surrounds his subject matter in waves of experimental folk full of rhythmic drumming, twinkling guitar, and delicate vocals. And while for some, the proposition of having their entire existence compiled into twelve tracks might leave them feeling exposed, Glory was unfazed. Her reaction was shaped by two factors: her unquestioning support for her son’s many endeavours and her own obliviousness.

“My mom grew up in a completely different world than you or I did, and her upbringing was pretty scattered,” Klausener explains. “She had to defend herself from a very young age, so stuff like recording albums and putting in grant proposals to provincial funding bodies—stuff like that is so archaic, it makes absolutely no sense in her practical mind. Her initial reaction was just like, ‘Okay.’ I might as well have been telling her I was going to have lasagna for dinner.”

While the focus of Glory Hope Mountain centred around another, Klausener found himself walking away from the whole experience not only with a few new songs but also with a couple of life lessons.

“I realized that ideas sometimes have a life of their own,” Klausener admits. “If you give birth to an idea, you have to let go of it and let it take on its own shape and form. That’s the fear and the joy of something like this, and that’s one of the things that I really enjoyed learning.

“I was reminded that there are no rules. There’s no rule to writing, to art, to anything really. And that’s the most joyful thing in the world—just letting go of preconceived ideas and thinking that anything has to be any one way. It doesn’t. Nothing has to be in any kind of way. There aren’t any rules.”

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