The Acorn and The Earthquake

The Acorn frontman Rolf Klausener and I sit on the front porch of his Ottawa home sipping espresso as he answers my questions. Thirty minutes earlier an 5.0-magnitude earthquake shook the city. No one or thing was harmed, but the tremors roused some unsettling memories in Klausener of the last earthquake that shook Ottawa's foundations.

The morning before driving to Montreal to put the finishing touches on No Ghost, The Acorn's first full-length release since 2007's Glory Hope Mountain, Klausener was shaken up by an unfortunate surprise. "I came 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!"

This was last summer. Klausener had just recently loaded all of the tracking for not only all of No Ghost onto the hard drive, but also every recording he'd ever done, from The Acorn's debut The Pink Ghosts to their latest project and everything in between. "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. It was 10am and we had to be in Montreal at noon."

Fortunately, The Acorn's engineer had the backup tracking for all of No Ghost, but tragically, the ghosts of the rest of The Acorn's discography were lost. "It breaks my heart," Klausener says. "It's been a year now and I'm over it. But still."

The majority of the instrumental tracking for No Ghost was put down over a three-week retreat to a cottage in Lac Charron, Quebec. Three busy years of touring and working on other projects after the release of Glory Hope Mountain meant the five members of The Acorn had had very little quality songwriting time together. "We were looking for a way to get away from the city and a way to spend some time together after having spent quite a lot of time on the road," Klausener remembers. "And we like recording things on our own anyways."

The cottage's cozy wooden interior and tranquil green surroundings were the perfect venue to foster the boys' musical and lyrical ingenuity. "Within the first few hours we were there, the riff for ‘Restoration' just got pulled out of the air. The next night is when we improvised the groundwork for ‘Misplaced'," Klausener remembers. "It was really magical."

The self-taught recording artist initiated The Acorn in 2002 when his other groups went on hiatus. "That summer I was really bored," Klausener explains, and so began fostering his own sound. The debut The Pink Ghosts began to materialize, and Klausener asked bandmates Howie Tsui, Jeff Debutte and Jeffrey Malecki to join the group.

In 2007, The Acorn released their ambitious and inspired opus Glory Hope Mountain. The group's sophomore project was sparked after Klausener inherited a family history book from his late father. He decided to interview his mother to learn the details of her early life and add to the book. "I knew she came from Honduras and I knew she had a hard life, but I didn't really know anything about her," Klausener recalls. "There was this flood and she was nine and she saved these kids. She ran away from home and nearly cut up her father with a machete." His lyrics reflect rather than repeat his mother's experiences, illustrating the story with vibrant metaphors and personification.

Klausener's lyrics have always come from an organic place, and on these latest recordings his words continue to flower from inspiration visible in the natural world. Whether his gaze is upturned toward the cosmos, fixed on the Gatineau River at sunset, or cast over his shoulder reflecting his own genealogy, his words personify "these little quiet moments" that mediated the songwriting process at the Lac Charron cottage last summer. A retreat from the sterile mechanics of the manufactured world and towards the warmth of organic inspiration and unofficial history, the feeling of the sun against skin, that's when The Acorn do their best work.

See them prove it this fall as they tour Canada, the United States and Europe for their No Ghost Cottage Tour.

Post-Polaris Reflection: Karkwa, Dan Mangan and Shad

The Polaris Music Prize Gala was held last Monday, September 20 at Toronto's Drake Hotel. Quebec band Karkwa took the $20 000 cash prize home this year for the beautiful Les Chemins De Verre. The album's dainty and often poignant songwriting is propelled by swinging melodies, dreamy harmonies, rhythmic basslines and low-fi psychedelic guitars. Take fellow francophones Malajube, who were nominated for last year's Polaris, and combine it with Bon Iver's more pop-y stuff, but then mix in some diverse songwriting and instrumentation and you have something that resembles Karkwa's pretty indie-rock sound.

In July, I predicted that Dan Mangan's everyman folk-rock album Nice, Nice, Very Nice would win the title. I realize now that my prediction was a little premature and influenced undoubtedly by a 3-week-long obsessive rotation of Mangan's album. Which obviously counts for something. And I still love the album; it's probably my favourite Canadian 2010 album lyrically, but after a couple months of sitting on my prediction I began to lean towards another nominee.

I've been a big fan of hip hop artist Shad for a long time, and I'm not really all that into hip hop. He's from my hometown London, Ontario and graduated from my high school a few years before me. I remember seeing him perform on stages with my friends' high school bands, one of those stages being my high school auditorium. I bought his first album When This Is Over at Grooves Records in London, a stones-throw away from Call The Office, the last venue I saw him perform in February. But I feel like Londoners aren't the only ones who feel that kind of homeboy pride for née Shadrach Kabango. He is currently the hottest thing in Canadian hip hop, an industry that's never before picked up so much steam before the likes of him and his contemporaries. And most can agree that TSOL is a gem. A diamond in the rough, really, and an unpretentious one at that. Shad's beats are fresh and his humility refreshing. It speaks much louder than the current industry bombast, and people are listening up.

So while some might be retracting their premature predictions in favour of the actual winner, I'm questioning both the jury's and my own elections. But it doesn't matter now anyway, not until next year's roundup. This year was Shad's second spot on the shortlist, here's hoping it'll be the third time that will charm the Polaris jury.

Credit where credit is undoutedly due: Caribou's Swim and The Besnard Lakes' The Besnard Lakes are the Roaring Night are both incredible albums, worthy nominations, and on my rotation all the time.

What makes a hit?

I've been thinking a lot lately about that anthemic indie rock sensation "Home" by Edward Sharpe and the Magnetic Zeroes.

You probably listen to it a lot too. It was the feel-good song of the summer. Maybe of the year. And I don't know many under 25s that can't help stomping a foot, clapping a hand, singing a part, shouting the chorus as loud as they can when it comes on. But I've begun to wonder if the altfolk 10-piece really are indie rock revolutionaries as they sometimes seem to be when you feel changed, happier, hippier when you listen to "Home". Or if they've just bought into a fail safe formula. Think about it.

They say that in this iPod generation, when discovering new music is quick easy and cutthroat, the first seven seconds are essential to hook the listener. In the good old days of radio, songwriters had no idea when a listener wold tune in and hear their song. They were compelled to not only write a catchy tune, but repeat that same infectious phrase several times throughout the song in the hopes that one play, even just a part of a play, would hook the listener and sell their album. Nowadays, it is in the first seven seconds that a listener decides whether the song will float or flounder, and songwriters have got to cater to that demand.

So now, songwriters take heed: a WHISTLED MELODY, especially in the opening phrase, is a tried and true hook. Lay it over something rhythmic and simple, like a propulsive bassline or acoustic guitar jangle, and you've got something that glitters real nice whether it's gold or not.

In the first seven seconds of "Home", this is what the listener hears. That catchy-as-hell whistle melody. In the first 30 seconds, "Home" exhibits two other aural hooks that have worked for other hit-songwriter's in the past. The first is that all-in-unison "HEY!" that follows the whistle phrase. What is it about an in unison "HEY!" that always catches you wanting to throw your fist in the air? Arcade Fire know how to put them to work. Overtime, actually. But people eat that shit up.

The second is the male-female vocalists duet. Survey says m/f duets are all that. Just ask Marvin Gaye and Tammi Terrell. Plus, the lyrics are almost disgustingly adorable. Marvin and Tammi were willing to climb mountains and cross rivers, but she's the apple of his eye. And her love for him, well it's a different sort than that for Maw and Paw. You may just have to hear it to get it, though.

I call it the "Young Folks" formula. No, Peter Bjorn and John's "Young Folks" didn't have any in unison "HEY!"s, but it had just about every other marketable component that "Home" does, and it had it first. I'm not exactly suggesting that Edward Sharpe and the Magnetic Zero's consciously extracted the hit-maker ingredients of "Young Folks" and used them in their own hippie anthem, but they could have taken them into account.

And anyway, I think part of that songs popularity is about their oh so charming image. Catchy or not, you can't help but smile when you see them perform that song. Who doesn't want to be as happy are? As free-spirited and in love as they appear to be? It's sort of become the prolific happy hippie tune. Kind of like "Gangster's Paradise," y'know?

Here's a real treat. Edward Sharpe and the Magnetic Zero's "Home" filmed and performed in a crowd of indie darlings and hippie disciples, part of the Blogotheque's Take-Away Shows.

And now for something comparatively frightening. Edward Sharpe's frontman Alex Ebert used to be in post-punk indie group Ima Robot. Remember them?

His pseudonym Edward Sharpe was the same in that group as well, but their sound and image couldn’t be more different.