INDY'S WEEKLY ALTERNATIVE NEWSPAPER HIGHLIGHTING ARTS, ENTERTAINMENT AND SOCIAL JUSTICE
The Acorn, Christian Taylor
The acornThursday, April 24, 8 p.m., $8, 21+
“Your rosy lungs were empty on the day that you were born/And no one thought you’d make it past the morning,” sings The Acorn’s Rolf Klausener in the first verse of 2007’s Glory Hope Mountain. He’s addressing his mother, Gloria Montoya Esperanza, or at least a representation of her in song; the album, a song-cycle, follows Esperanza from her difficult birth (which brought about her mother’s death) through a challenging childhood in Honduras (full of flash floods and physical and emotional abuse) and a life-altering move to Montreal in the ‘70s.
Klausener spent nine months in 2006 recording interviews with his mother with the notion of adding to a family history chronicle dating from the fifteenth century. He decided to turn the interviews into a musical project with the support of his bandmates and a couple cultural grants.
Musically, the record incorporates Honduran folk music as well as more familiar rock instrumentation and textures — Klausener spent several months researching Honduran music and culture, talking with ethnomusicologists and traditional Honduran bands and tracking down ‘50s-era Smithsonian field recordings.
The Acorn, making their first trip to Indianapolis from their home base in Ottawa, will play Radio Radio in a Thursday night show presented by My Old Kentucky Blog and The Monolith Music Festival.
Klausener spoke with NUVO via telephone on a sunny Friday afternoon.
NUVO: What was the interview process like? Did you hear any new stories?
Klausener: Oh god, yeah. It was really eye-opening because my Mom is sort of like an open book in some ways — she’s very open and giving — but at the same time, she’s extremely private, and she’s really good at putting the past behind her… So, she really didn’t feel any need to talk about the more traumatic events that happened in her earlier life, and parts of her were also kind of ashamed as well, for whatever reason. They weren’t stories that you tell at the dinner table, I suppose.
NUVO: How did you start to process the interviews into a song-cycle?
Klausener: I didn’t start writing songs for the record until about eight or nine months after the interviews, and for no other reason than that I just had terrible writers’ block, and I just couldn’t get anything out.
Also, I needed those stories to sink in a little a little bit. The stories hadn’t sat with me my whole life. I knew, I think, deep down inside, that if I had started writing immediately after interviewing my mom, the songs would have been a lot more narrative, maybe a little bit more trite. It might have been an unconscious roadblock — I wasn’t trying not to write, but my brain was saying, “You’re not ready to write, really.” So I had to listen to my brain.