The Acorn | Interview

Story by Dylan Bliss 

| Published Nov 9, 2010

Sometimes I like to think of Canada as this enormous thundercloud looming over the United States pouring down a torrent of talented musicians directly upon our heads. It’s a fairly ego-centric way to approach the discovery of The Acorn, but in this case, I’m only happy when it rains.

Rolf Klausener has headed up this experimental folk project for the past 5 years, and with the success of his second album, “Glory Hope Mountain,” he has been trekking across the globe gathering fans ever since. Meanwhile, he managed to settle down with his band in a cozy Canadian cottage to record their most recent album, “No Ghost”. Klausener is very passionate about the recording process, and it most certainly translates to the records.

The Acorn is yet to tour anywhere near Lincoln, but a formally zealous request has promptly been issued

DailyER Nebraskan: Where did the name the acorn come from, and how is your band’s particular sound developed?

Rolf Klausener: The first one’s easy; the second one’s longer. Basically, when I started writing material on my own after a bunch of bands I was a part of in Ottawa, I sort of just went on a hiatus. I started a project, it was like an electro-acoustic experimental project with the German spelling of the words “three acorn music”

The reason I chose that name is because the family crest on my father’s side, which is on the Swiss side of my family, basically just has three acorns on it. And that’s why I called it “three acorn music”. After a year of playing under that name and no one being able to pronounce it, I decided to change the name to The Acorn. So it was based on my father’s family shield.
The music evolved from there, really. I just a huge music fan; everything from folk to hardcore punk to classical jazz, everything. So, the band has evolved kind of how my music taste has evolved. At the time when I started The Acorn I was really into a lot of German eclectic music and a lot of finger picking, so I think the first Acorn release was really influenced by that stuff. As I got the band together around 2004, I started playing live with other musicians, and from there the band evolved into a kind of experimental folk band and the songs became songier as we went on and we became more interested in lyric and melody.

By the time we hit Glory Hope Mountain the aim for that project was pretty biographical, a biographical record based on my mom’s life. It was based on her immigration from Honduras to Canada and so the songs were based on those stories and borrowing, really, from Central American folk musicians. Our newest record, No Ghost, is basically more of like a “band” record. Just us getting together in a cottage for about a month over the summer and just kind of writing whatever came out and sort of committing to that.

DERN: You guys have a pretty hefty tour going on right now all around the US, Canada, and Europe. How is this outing different from previous tours in your experience?

Klausener: With any band that tours regularly, for the first time we’re starting to see, especially in the US, we’re starting to see more fans who are familiar with our music and requesting our music at the shows, which is really nice, because we’ve always done a few small, 4 or 5, US tours. So it’s really nice to see that there is a small fan base developing in the US. Obviously, most are found in larger cities like New York and Chicago. It was really nice to play Pontiac, Michigan last night and have a solid number of fans there. It was really new to us and really wonderful and heartwarming, so that’s a nice change, but for Canada... Canada is a territory where we’ve toured across it six times or so

We’ve been touring Canada for five years now and we have a really wonderful set of friends and fans across the country, and so now that means that when we go across Canada we put on a much bigger show and we can really dip into our back-catalog and we do a really interesting set that really borrows from some of our old recordings and makes the show more dramatic
As for Europe, we’ve toured there several times now, and it seems like with Europe every tour just gets better and better. Our European audiences definitely outnumber the US audiences, which is really great. So it’s just amazing to be able to travel to these wonderful places and eat all these wonderful types of food and on top of everything just play a show and have a nice fan base.

DERN: I’ve read that you often collaborate with all five members of your band when writing songs. What kind of challenges does that present?

Klausener: Well, I mean, there’s some truth to that, but the collaboration process, as far as lyrics and stuff are concerned, I generally write the skeletons of the songs and lyrics on my own and then and then bring them to the band for us to arrange. That’s where a lot of the collaboration takes place. Every once in a while, I’ll use the band as a sounding board for lyrics and things and it’s really great that I can trust them to give me a really interesting opinion on a different lyric or idea.
As far as the collaboration process is concerned, it’s always been loose affair and with Glory Hope Mountain we had a lot of time to work on arrangements for the songs and change courses and rework songs, re-record them and approach them from different angles. But, No Ghost was the first time where we actually sat, you know, in a space and just jammed there together and actually worked on the songs from the bottom up

The challenge of that for me was to literally be around people while i was writing lyrics. It’s something that I discovered that I really don’t enjoy doing. For me, the lyrical part of the process is a very very personal part, and I’m sure maybe other musicians would attest to this. I need to be in a really focused, intense space when I’m writing my lyrics, so it’s a very free and unconscious place. You know, the worst song comes from any belabored activity when you’re actually sitting there trying to write a song, that’s when the worst, most involved lyrics seem to appear.

DERN: How important is the recording atmosphere for the band in the development of your guys’ albums?

Klausener: For me, it’s everything. I don’t really ever like recording a record in the same space twice. For me, the space is really intrinsically connected to the writing process. I often like to experiment with different sounds and focus heavily on the engineering of the record. I’m a huge fan of the recording process. I really respect recording gurus like Brian Eno and artist of that ilk
I really enjoy the process of playing with the space, and for me it has a lot to do with how we approach the arrangement of the songs

With No Ghost, the cottage has this beautiful, natural re-verb. It has like fifty-foot high A-frame ceilings. So it made for a really nice snare sound, drummy sound. Every song has its character and I really like using the space to bring it out. I think songs like Restoration and I Made The Law placed on the record really really highlight the cottage’s sound, everything from the bass hits to the smacking of my hand on the guitar, you can really hear the room. I think it does nothing but really bring out the nuance of the song’s mix.