Where were you during the Ottawa earthquake? Twenty minutes before I was to meet The Acorn frontman Rolf Klausener at his Centretown home, around the corner from my own, I was oblivious as to what the tremors were. I thought something crashed into my building, or the pipes exploded.
Still without a clue, I shrugged and went to meet one my favourite Canadian musicians. “Did you feel the earthquake?!” Klausener asked excitedly within moments of welcoming me into his house. I had never felt one before and was immediately a bit overwhelmed. That was an earthquake, and now I’m in Rolf Klausener’s kitchen watching him make espresso.
Since it’s release in 2007 and my discovery of The Acorn, Glory Hope Mountain remains one of my favourite albums. The twelve songs act as lyrical homage, part biographical part folkloric, to Klausener’s Honduras-born mother. The story is dynamic, the imagery is beautiful and Klausener’s lyrics are poignant and poetic, emotional and evocative.
Last summer, after two busy years of touring, the folk-rock five-piece retreated to a cottage in Lac Charon, QC to write and record their June release No Ghost. The album reflects both a sense of the musicians’ remote surroundings during its conception and their collective experience of pounding the pavement on tour after tour.
Klausener tells me about No Ghost’s recording process as well as the inspiration for Glory Hope Mountain, the history of The Acorn, and a few stories from touring and recording. Admitedly, this version is slightly abridged. We chatted for a long time that day and both agreed that the general public may be less engaged if the interview included our words about Amsterdam city planning and birthday parties.
Can you tell me about the recording process of The Acorn’s current album No Ghost?
We were looking for a way to get away from the city and spend some time together after a lot of time on the road. So we ended up finding this cottage. We like recording things on our own anyways. We hunted around for a while. We went and checked out a lot of them. Pat and I went to check out this one far away cottage, and were a little worried because it was almost two hours north of here. But when we got to the property, we were like, “Oh my god, this place is amazing!”
It has this huge vestibule which we used as the control room, with little windows that look into the main room. It was perfect. It was mostly wood. We brought in some instruments and tested it out and it sounded great.
We spent three weeks there. It was kind of stressful writing written with people around, though it yielded some really really nice moments. I don’t know if I would write like that again without having a songs beforehand, though. The pressure to just come up with songs is a little weird.
And it was finished up in Montreal?
It was actually kind of finished here at the house. We did all the main tracking at the cottage, and we re-did some songs in Montreal.
How did The Acorn start?
It started in the summer of 2002. I had been playing in six bands up until then and all of them all at the same time went on hiatus and were playing like once a year. I was really bored. I had been interested in getting into digital recording and I just started teaching myself over that summer bit by bit. Over the course of the summer I started recording little ideas. By the following summer, I had a lot of what was going to be The Pink Ghosts. After about a year of playing by myself, I decided to ask a few people to play with me all the time. And that was Jeffrey, Jeff and Howie. By 2004, we became a full band.
We just tried to play as much as possible whenever we could sort out the time. And really that’s how it started. No grand ambitions. I never planned on doing this for a living. That was never the intention at all.
Is this your tour van parked in the driveway?
It is, yeah.
Is this what you drive around town?
I do (laughing). I used to have another car but it finally died last year. I hate driving it around. I really much prefer biking and walking.
You mentioned Howie. I have a friend doing an internship for him. He’s doing an exhibit in Montreal? And he did the cover art?
Yeah yeah yeah.
So tell me about the cover art. Was it one of his pieces?
It was yeah. He had been working on this series for about two years called ‘Horror Fables’. He’s a lot like me, except on the art side. He’s applying for grants all the time and constantly working on new art. He did this series based on Japanese ghost stories. The opening of it was at the Carleton University Art Gallery. He did a few of these burnt paint transfers on the walls that were just there for the show and then later painted over. I fell in love with it at the show, and later asked Howie if we could use it for the cover. It was ghost-y, had a sort of anamorphic facial quality, and was also sort of creepy. It seemed to fit the music pretty well.
Did he play on No Ghost?
Yeah he did, he was there recording with us. At the time, there was no official word that he was going to be leaving the band, but I think we all kind of knew that the time was coming to a head. Even from the start we knew Howie was going to be on loan from the art world because that’s really what he does and it’s where so much of his talent lies.
You just got back from a European tour for No Ghost, how did it go? Any good tour stories?
(Laughing) Yeah! Well a lot of the best tour stories come out of the times when you’re not playing a show. The spring tour we just did in the UK and Europe was great over all. We had a couple off nights and were staying with our manager’s mom who lives in Oxford.
The night that we were to leave and the next day go to London we went out for a nightcap. It was the band and our tour manager Allen. We ended up finding this little dive-y old British pub around the corner called the Hollybush. It was like walking into the UK equivalent of Northern Ontario. Not super fancy, a dart board, a pool table, an awesome jukebox with lots of country music in it. Dolly Parton was blaring when we walked in.
We played a round of darts and were having fun. The bartender started talking to us and finds out were in a band. He was all excited and was like, “y’know, Radiohead played their first show here.” And of course every bar in Oxford says that, 'cause they’re from Oxford.
The bartender found out it was Steven’s birthday. So we were all raising glasses, he starts buying us round of whiskey. It’s like one in the morning, and I pull out dice and start teaching all the locals how to gamble, how to play dice. So then it’s three in the morning, and I turn around, and we’re all annihilated at this point, and Steven is lying in fetal position in a chair. Apparently Steven had never drank that much before in his life. He didn’t know his limit. So we pick him up and we literally carry him like Jesus-pose back to the house. We undress him, and he vomits on Layla’s mom’s couch. Fourtet’s mom. He vomits on Fourtet’s mom’s couch. The next morning, he felt awful and we washed the blankets. That was the wildest night on tour.
As for your last album Glory Hope Mountain, it was a concept album about your mother’s early life. Can you tell me more about that?
The long story is my father passed away when I was fifteen and he passed on to me this amazing family history book of the Klausener family that goes back to 1480 in Switzerland. He always intended to put my story, his story and my mum’s story in the book and keep adding to it. So when I was fifteen I thought at some point I’m going to interview my mom and I’m going to find out her life story because I really didn’t know much about her. I knew she came from Honduras and I knew she had a hard life, but I didn’t know really anything else. It was right after we finished touring for Blankets and I decided to do it then.
I interviewed her, and was telling Howie about it and he was like, “these stories are so incredible.” There was this flood and she was nine and she saved these kids. She ran away from home and nearly cut up her dad with a machete and all this crazy stuff. And he was like, “it might be really cool if you try to write some songs on that.” So it was really kind of Howie’s idea. I ended up applying for some grants and we got them. All of a sudden we realized we needed to make a record and spend that money. And then that summer at Bluesfest, I guess it was the summer of 2006….
*At this point, Rolf’s neighbour approaches the porch we’re sitting on and we start talking about the earthquake. She reiterates over and over the importance of getting into a doorway in the event of an earthquake. Rolf cracks jokes, but she sidesteps them, or doesn’t understand them. She leaves after a few more minutes of safety debriefing, and Rolf and I continue chatting.
What we were talking about?
Oh! Your mom.
So that summer, 2006, I went to Bluesfest and there was a band from Honduras playing Garifuna music. So I found out what record label they were on and that turned me on to the modern version of the stuff. Then I ended up finding some stuff at the Smithsonian library that was sort of the original version of that stuff and that informed a lot of the percussion decisions on ‘Crooked Legs’ and ‘Flood’. ‘Flood’ especially, the drum beat for that is very classic Garifuna. It turned into this really fun sprawling music research project.
It’s one of my favourite albums! Did I say that already?
Thanks! It was a really fun record to do. I still love every lyric on that record. As you start to get along in songwriting, your hope is that you can go back to the lyrics you’ve written a few years before and not cringe.
Does No Ghost have any sort of lyrical concept like Glory Hope Mountain did?
The whole idea for us was to go and not really have anything in mind. We weren’t reacting to Glory Hope Mountain. We just figured it would be nice to write without any sort of constraint. For me, I felt really connected, and this sounds kind of cheesy, kind of hippie, but I felt a real connection to the space and to the time of the year, to my bandmates and a lot of our collective experiences. We brought up a big astronomy textbook and were talking about constellations and things like that. And it was hard not to be influenced by the depth of the natural beauty around us. We were literally submerged and isolated in the forest.
Little images would constantly weave their way into the songs. Like in ‘Misplaced’ the beginning of the second verse is “If you wound a web through the brig and bramble,” and when I was writing those lyrics I was sitting on the deck of the patio and looking at spiderwebs literally going through the brig and the bramble. So stuff like that happened all the time. And for ‘Cobbled From Dust,’ when I was outside on the dock, I was feeling the sun against my skin, and I was thinking about the sun, and it was like “Here it is against my belly/The sum of all your solid parts.” And stars are just like solid material, heavy material clumped together and they get so heavy that they ignite into fire. It’s silly, but that’s where a lot of the inspiration came from.
I think that’s beautiful.
If you like silly, fairy dust, hippie dippy stuff.
No I don’t think it’s silly I think it’s really beautiful. You mentioned you had a crazy story about the last earthquake you felt.
Yeah! We had finished at the cottage and we just came back from the Dawson and Calgary folk festivals. It was the night before Montreal. I had spent two weeks tweaking the drums on ‘Misplaced’ getting them perfect. So everything was ready to go, and I wake up the next morning. I come down into the basement to start packing the studio and I hear, click-click click-click click-click. And then I see that the lamp that was on my desk had fallen onto our recording hard drive!
It was so bad because I had literally dumped everything on my old drive onto this new drive and then thrown away the old drive. And this was the only place I had all the tracking for Glory Hope Mountain and The Pink Ghosts, Blankets, every Christmas EP I ever recorded, every song for a movie that I had recorded, everything was on there. I freaked out! I unplugged the drive and put it in a freezer, apparently that’s what you’re supposed to do. I started calling around to some hard drive recovery places and I brought it in that morning. It was 10am and we had to be in Montreal at noon. And I was having the most insane meltdown. I called Jared our engineer because he had all the No Ghost stuff backed up thank god on CDs and DVDs.
I found out a week later that the night the lamp fell on the hard drive there was an earthquake in Ottawa. And that’s what shook the lamp off the table.
So it wiped it clean?
Oh yeah, I lost everything. Everything. I was planning on remixing and remastering The Pink Ghosts and Blankets. It breaks my heart.
Yeah, that’s pretty tragic.
It’s been a year now and I’m over it, but still. It was like the history of me learning how to record.
So are there any upcoming Ottawa shows?
We have our Canadian tour booked and it’s already been announced apparently. We’ve had a lot of friends ask when the hell we’re going to play. We’re doing an Ottawa Folk Festival show.
We’re talking about maybe doing a residency. Like something crazy and small, like two or three nights at Raw Sugar Café or something. Just selling a limited amount of tickets and having a different local act every night and then top it off with a regular show at a theatre, like the Mayfair or something like that.
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