It's not unusual for a mother to tell her only son fairy tales. But when the son is a young man, and when the stories are true, things get more interesting.
"Interesting" is one of the words for Glory Hope Mountain, the recently released album from the Acorn, an Ottawa-based indie band led by singer and multi-instrumentalist Rolf Klausener. It was Klausener, disenchanted with traditional sources of inspiration and tired of first-person songwriting, who decided to base an album's material on interviews with his mother, Gloria Esperanza Montoya, a half-Mayan Honduran emigrant whose childhood memories are of dirt floors, flooding rivers and orphanages, not hopscotch, puppy dogs and pigtails.
Special audio: The Acorn's album Glory Hope Mountain was based on songwriter Rolf Klausener's mother Gloria. Listen as she discusses the events that lead to her son's inspiration:
Another word for the album of fluid, atmospheric folk-rock would be "elaborate," though Klausener himself doesn't see it that way. "I didn't set out to be ambitious," he says from Ottawa, "but it turned out to be a relentlessly unending set of tasks to get the record done, beyond songwriting and arrangements. The recording process and the research process were what was needed to get this idea done."
The research involved an investigation into Central American folk rhythms as well as discussions with his mother about her often perilous early years. Those recollections inform the surreal, poetic narrative of Glory Hope Mountain (the album's title is a literal translation of the words of his mother's name): A baby is born struggling ("Your rosy lungs were empty"), a surge in the river almost sweeps children away ( Flood Pt. 1 and Flood Pt. 2) and a young girl runs away from an abusive father ("as far as these crooked legs will take me").
The lyrics, some addressed to his mother and some in his mother's voice, are image-laden and fanciful — "Lift your head from wild and wicked sleep, where seven-headed serpents hiss soliloquies." And although it was Klausener's boredom with self-centered songwriting that triggered the album's concept, he isn't disdainful when it comes to more confessional works. "I don't think this album's any more valid than somebody's breakup record," he says. "I was just pretty tired of the soul-searching that comes on when you start writing songs about yourself. I've done of it plenty of times myself, and I've loved the results."
The Acorn, in a nutshell, began as a solo electro-acoustic vehicle of Klausener's in 2002. As albums came out (2004's The Pink Ghosts and 2005's Blankets!), the project picked up members and moved from Ottawa's Kelp Records to Toronto's Paper Bag Records, which issued the EP Tin Fist earlier this year. The band now has six members.
The new disc isn't the only recent Canadian album inspired by a songwriter's parent, but it's unique in that the parent was an active participant. While Greg Keelor's Seven Songs for Jim and Emily Haines's What Is Free to a Good Home? are tributes to deceased fathers, Klausener's mother is able to listen to a record based, in the most part, on the early years of her life.
"Proud, just amazingly proud," is how she feels about Glory Hope Mountain. "For him to be able to write about my life, and then make it into music is just wonderful."
As her son listens on the phone line, an upbeat Montoya speaks in broken English, richly rolling her "R's" as she recounts some of the more harrowing events that made their way lyrically into songs.
She lived in an orphanage until the age of 6, when her white father retrieved her, taking her back to a farm outside the Honduran capital city of Tegucigalpa. A near drowning when she was a child left her fearful of water to this day — "it gives me goose bumps" — and a "brutal event" involving her father sent her fleeing from home at age 11. Eventually, as a young adult, she made it to Montreal. "It brings me happy memories," she says of the album, "even though that part of my life was fairly rough."
The album's closing track, Lulla by (Mountain), sung by Ohbijou's Casey Mecija in the voice of Montoya, is sweeter, with lines about a mother's blood running through a child's heart with every beat. Because young sons are not always the most communicative when it comes to their feelings towards their mothers, the tender song was a revelation. "Very deeply," Montoya says, when asked how it affected her. "I cannot explain how happy it makes me, that Rolfie has been able to show how much he loves me."
Ironically, Klausener says, his attempt to avoid introspection in making the album became intensely personal anyway. "A lot of these songs ended up relating back to my own life," he says. "You end up reflecting on choices you've made, and choices your family made, and how they affected you."
One choice Klausener had initial regrets about was the album's title. He considered Glory Hope Mountain too literal, too bucolic, "too Will Oldham."
But in the end, "You can't really change it," he says, quite rightly. "It takes on a life of its own. It's like trying to rename a child after they've lived with the name for a few years."
The Acorn performs Glory Hope Mountain tonight at Toronto's Horseshoe Tavern, 370 Queen St. W. (416-598-4753).
