Interview - The Acorn (Part 2)

[In the second part (check out the first part here) of our interview with The Acorn, Rolf and Jeff talk about their new album Glory Hope Mountain and answer melophobe’s signature “fear question” with a response that hits so close to home, we almost wish we hadn’t asked it.]

melophobe: Your new album Glory Hope Mountain has such an interesting story behind it. Could you describe what inspired it and what the creation process was like?

Rolf: Basically, I wanted to document my mom’s life for our family history book, a book that was handed down to me from my dad. My dad passed away when I was 16, and I lost a lot of his history (he was also pretty secretive). I didn’t want that to happen with my mom, so I promised myself that one day I’d sit down with her and get her whole life story.

I decided to do that at the end of 2005. I talked to the boys about it, and mused, “What if we turned some of those stories into songs?” Howie suggested it would be a good idea for an arts grant. So we mulled it over a bit and then applied for a grant based on the concept. We put together a 24-page application in just three days. Four months later, we returned from a tour and found out that we won the grants—a municipal grant and a provincial one.

So then it all hit us: “Holy cow, we actually have to do this now!” So I culled together the interviews with my mom, sat on them for about eight months, let the stories sink in, and then we started recording at the beginning of 2007.

We’re really lucky in Canada. In most cities you have three options for funding: municipal, provincial and federal grants. In Toronto, there are some agencies that give money for everything: recording, touring, showcasing,

Jeff: Our next album [Ed.-yeah!] will probably be funded nicely by the government. The government is really supportive for bands that have some kind of achievement. We were really lucky with the first grants we got because they were independent and somewhat hard to get. But the kind of grants we’re getting now, you have to achieve some sort of commercial success—not that we’ve achieved much, but what we have is sufficient for the grants.

Rolf: We’ve also been touring for about two years at a small level. And we’re on a bigger Toronto label now called Paper Bag, so it all helps in applying for grants. A grant is subsidizing a small part of this tour.

melophobe: Something that strikes me about the album is that whether or not you know the inspiration behind it, you can pull a narrative from it. Did you design the album with a specific narrative structure?

Rolf: The sequencing of the record, we definitely slaved over. We’re all big fans of an album as a conceptual whole. But I think you’re the first person to say you felt there was a certain narrative throughout the album.

Jeff: It’s mostly chronological, but there are a couple songs that fall out of order.

Rolf: There were a lot of things we discovered about the album after we completed it. Jeff nicely remarked that “Hold Your Breath” and “Lullaby,” the opener and closer, have similar chord patterns. One starts at birth, the other ends at death, but at birth, as well. So that was neat.

There are a lot of songs that aren’t narrative at all, but are thematically based. “Antenna” is one, “Low Gravity” another.

melophobe: I thought “Low Gravity,” while not clearly based on one event, is about some sort of conflict.

Rolf: It’s definitely about conflict, but I didn’t have a specific story in mind when I wrote it. A few events in my mom’s life come into play, but that song reflects more on things that had been going on in my own life. It’s one of the songs that intertwines my own personal garbage with my mom’s stories.

“Low Gravity” was finished a month before the album was completed. We had that little ukulele riff for a long time, but couldn’t do anything with it. It was also a really collaborative song as far as instrumentation and the arrangement.

There were some really wonderful moments on the recording. Howie kind of slaved over that crazy feedbacky guitar line. We got Howie a little—no, very—intoxicated, trying to get him to loosen up a bit (he gets kind of intense in the studio, AKA our basement). We had him listen to the arc of the song and play a guitar line. It’s just one track the whole way through, so he plays to the song, which is really, really neat. “Low Gravity” was definitely a fun one to record.

Jeff: Rolf had the idea to record a lot of intentional group percussion parts. I think we had just finished “Crooked Legs” or “Flood,” and Rolf said, “Let’s just do a bunch of total jams that have nothing to do with a song. Maybe we’ll use them later.” So for “Low Gravity” Rolf and our producer Jarrett Bartlett took one of the jams and played the ukulele over it.

Rolf: That’s exactly what happened with “Glory,” too. The original version was a country song, like a little 2-step. Kelp Records asked us to contribute a song for their 13th anniversary compilation. We were in the midst of recording the album and didn’t have any spare riffs or outtakes we liked.

So we took one of those drum jams, pitched it down, slowed it down, and rerecorded “Glory” over that. But when we finished it, we all realized, “This fucking rules! We can’t give this to Kelp!” So we ended up giving them the country version and keeping the new version for ourselves.

In recording “Glory,” all the key elements were done in one night, because we were racing to get it done for the compilation. [Starts talking quickly] It was like, “Let’s slow down the percussion.” Sounds great! “I’ll do the acoustic guitar.” Boom. “Here’s the vocal.” Done. “It needs a couple other things.” Why don’t I put in a screamy solo? Here, I grabbed a microphone, turned up an amp, and just started screaming. So halfway through the song, there’s a kind of “errrrr” noise that sounds like a cello or an organ. That’s three tracks of me screaming into a microphone with distortion.

melophobe: Another thing that strikes me about the album is that there are different voices throughout it. Sometimes there’s the voice of your mother, other times a third-party narrator. Did you intentionally want to vary the voice in the album?

Rolf: You hit the nail on the head. I love that thought that every seven years you shed all your skin and become a new person. I had that in the back of my mind while writing.

For every song, I looked at the story and thought about the best way to narrate it, whether it was from inside my mom’s mind or from an outside narrator. “Flood” is probably from my mom’s perspective. Based on a story of how she almost drowned as a child, you sense this little kid thinking [scared little kid voice] “What the hell is going on?” I wanted it to have a dream like quality.

“Hold Your Breath,” the opener, is an introduction to the story as a whole, and it definitely has a third-party narrator point of view.

melophobe: There are a couple of imagery motifs throughout the album, like the fireflies first mentioned in “Crooked Legs.” Did you pull those from your mother’s stories? And was the repeated imagery intentional?

Rolf: The firefly imagery, specifically, comes from a native Honduran burial ritual, which I read about when I was doing research for the project. When a person is buried in the Kuna culture, there’s a three day ritual that culminates in the shaman burying a firefly with the dead to symbolize the soul going to rest. That image stuck in my mind. It had nothing to do with my mom’s culture or history, but I loved it as a metaphor; it tied in well with other visual cues in my mind.

For example, when I thought of the story for “Crooked Legs,” about my mother running away from home, I imagined an overnight walk on a starry night. Then I imagined her arriving at Tegucigalpa and seeing the city lights. It was my friend Amy Thompson, a visual artist, who later picked up on this [Ed.-Glory Hope Mountain’s album art is based on illustrations by Amy]. She said there were a lot of visual cues, all these dots of light: fireflies, stars, city lights. In retrospect, I can see the tying theme, but while writing, it was all very organic. I didn’t intentionally insert interweaving themes or visual cues. It all came serendipitously.

melophobe: In writing the album, you researched Honduran and West African folk music. Was this music your family listened to?

Rolf: From when I was 0-2, my family lived in Mali in West Africa. My father and mom bought tons of records in Mali and Ghana, so we listened to West African music all the time. My dad would hold slideshows for guests, getting bombed on schnapps, showing slides of where they used to live, giraffes and whatnot. He would play this music in the background.

I always had a sort of passion or affinity for it, and when I got older, I pursued other Africa influenced music. For example, Paul Simon’s Graceland was important to me as a kid.

Later, I got into more of the origins of the music. I listened to a lot of Afrobeat, like Fela Kuti. So when I first heard Honduran Garifuna music, it felt very familiar. Originally, I researched native folk music, which was mostly chanting and not instrumentally based; I didn’t have much of a foundation for it. But when I heard Garifuna, I thought, “Wow, this is amazing; it reminds me so much of West African music I used to listen to.”

Then I found out that Garifuna is tied directly to West African slave trade. Basically, a huge boat capsized off the coast of Costa Rica. West Africans settled along the shores of Nicaragua and Honduras and then blended cultures and music with the native Hondurans.

So I felt really close to Garifuna music. It’s been very inspiring and exactly what I was looking for. I had been listening to the same sort of music for a long time, so I was excited when my research brought about music I was genuinely interested in.

melophobe: Are there any songs on the album that you’re particularly proud of or that were particularly challenging?

Rolf: Jeff, any songs you feel particularly proud of?

Jeff: Well, I’m not the writer.

melophobe: But you can be proud of your friend.

Rolf: Only in his brightest, most drunken moments.

Jeff: My contributions are in the arrangements. I got to do a lot of cool stuff on “Crooked Legs” and a little bit on “Low Gravity.”

Rolf: I was really surprised and pleased with some of the band arrangements. I didn’t expect “Crooked Legs” or “Flood” to become what they are. I have demos of the songs, which are funny to hear, because they’re me drunk in the basement with by drums and guitar, murmuring nonsensical syllables. You can hear the basic shape, but the end product was so different.

As far as what was challenging, songwriting wise, this was my first attempt to be narrative in any way. I never thought of myself as a narrative songwriter. I usually write in a stream of consciousness style. For example, “Glory” was written in about three minutes. But with “Hold Your Breath,” which is only twelve to sixteen lines, I slaved over it for a month of so. I was on the porch every day rewriting, rewriting, rewriting. It took me a whole week to write the first verse; it was totally pathetic. I would deliberate with my roommates, like “What do you think of this line? Is it stupid? No? You’re not cringing? Yes! It stays!”

Also, I wanted the songs to be ones I would enjoy singing for a long time. I had never thought about longevity of songs before. But I wanted Glory Hope Mountain to be like looking at a family history and being proud of certain things. I really wanted to be proud of the lyrics. I’m happy with them, but, of course, I’m way too close to them now; I don’t really have an objective opinion anymore.

But, again, it’s difficult to write narratively. You have to strike a balance between direct and metaphorical storytelling. I didn’t want to say, “Well, once upon a time there was a person; they went here; there was conflict, denouement and then a conclusion.” I didn’t want to be that literal, but at the same time I didn’t want to write like “The mist of the skies are raining upon the hearts of the lions’ manes.” It’s challenging to strike a balance between metaphorical, lyrical and narrative songwriting.

melophobe: I love that even the album art shows that balance between narrative and metaphor. At first glance, you see a woman at the base of something, and think “Oh, it’s a person and her story.” But when you open the liner notes to reveal a mountain, it’s so much more. It’s a mountain! It’s a journey! It’s life! It’s a metaphor!

Rolf: Exactly. When we designed the album art, that’s what we had in mind.

melophobe: Do you change the arrangements of the songs when you play live or do you stay pretty true to the album?

Jeff: We wanted to stay true to the album, so much so that we added another member. We were a five person band but added Shaun Weadick before touring as another percussionist.

Rolf: Last Summer, when we were close to finishing the album, we played a music festival in Guelph, Ontario. Shaun is our drummer’s roommate in Montreal, and he happened to be going to the festival. We were aware that he was a very good musician, so we asked him to play with us for a show. By the end of the weekend, we all thought, “Wow, he fits in so well; maybe we can use him on tour.”

Shaun also wrote a ukulele part for “Antenna,” but he didn’t actually record it. So I think we credited him with “imaginary ukulele” or something.

melophobe: I noticed there were at least three members with ukulele credits on the album.

Jeff: Yeah, we all like to play a lot of instruments.

melophobe: Did you learn any new instruments for the album?

Rolf: I actually learned the ukulele. I’m not an expert by any means, but I got comfortable with it by the end of the recording.

Jeff: I started the viola maybe six months before that time. I got good enough that I wasn’t embarrassed to be recorded on the album, but I’d love to go back and rerecord; I’m much better now.

melophobe: For our final question, we’ve been asking artists what are their greatest fears? It’s a play on our name melophobe, meaning the fear of music.

Rolf: That’s cool.

melophobe: I’m glad you think it’s cool and not completely intrusive.

Rolf: I guess dying is an obvious answer, but I’m not necessarily afraid of it. It would just suck. Life is so much fun right now; I can’t image not eating food or not sleeping in a comfy bed or not making love to a beautiful woman. So dying would suck; it would really be awful; it would screw up so many of my plans.

Jeff: Dying would suck, but I’m not afraid of it. I’m getting better, but for a long time, I had a food phobia. I was afraid to eat new food, unfortunately, stuff that was good for me like vegetables and fruits. I had to work on it really hard. I’m sure no one wants to hear about this. It started when I was 5 or 6. My mom and I figured it was a control thing. But when you’re young and you start saying these things, you start to believe it. So by the time I was 15, I thought “this is stupid; I should eat these foods,” but I couldn’t do it. I would try and gag. It’s been a long process getting over that.

I’m also afraid of spiders. That’s a lot better. Spiders. I’ll go with that one.

Rolf: I’m afraid of not changing the aspects of my personality that I can’t stand: the occasional lying, the inability to be completely satisfied in my relationships. I’m afraid those things will never change. When I think about those things, I wonder, “Am I ever going to fucking grow up?”

Jeff: Wow, I didn’t know you want to change those things.

Rolf [laughing]: I think you should end on that.

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