Who's Affraid Of Rolf? | The Acorn's principal songwriter wonders just how many albums would remain unreleased if federal arts funding weren't available.
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The Acorn
w/ Ohbijou, Team Building. Oct 11 (8pm). The Pawn Shop (10551-82 Ave). Tickets: $13, available through Ticketmaster.ca or at the door.
“I quit my job two weeks ago,” says Rolf Klausener, songwriter and frontman of Ottawa’s The Acorn. Now, it’s hard to describe what a shit-eating grin sounds like over the phone, but I’m pretty sure I heard one coming through the receiver with that statement. Though the energetic Klausener quickly mentions that the communications firm he worked for afforded him a lot of flexibility for musical pursuits over the past two years, he admits this fall was the right time to “take the plunge.”
“We can certainly pay the bills when we’re touring,” he explains. “I mean, not as much as a full-time job — at some point you kind of have to pick your battles. In the meantime, I need to focus on the band.” And quitting the day job might not have been possible without the funding granted to The Acorn to produce and promote their acclaimed debut full-length, last year’s Glory Hope Mountain. The album — which garnered the band a spot on this year’s Polaris longlist, a U.K. label’s interest, and a U.S. booking agent and tour — is a sentimental yet poppy folk-romp, written as a tribute to Klausener’s Honduran-born mother. With the federal election looming over the heads of many an artist (who’ll complain about the outcome no matter the result, because that’s the job of the artists, just ask Margaret Atwood), Klausener admits he’s feeling grateful at how good his band’s timing was.
“We got a tremendous amount of really generous funding for that record,” he says. “We got funding from City of Ottawa, the Ontario Arts Council ... Working with Paperbag, they received funding from FACTOR and the Government of Canada — so the promotion, production, making of that album was almost completely funded by the Canadian people. I’m never hesitant to acknowledge how incredibly invaluable that was.”
In light of Prime MInister Stephen Harper’s comments regarding arts-funding initiatives, Klausener admits he’s got mixed feelings about the future. “Artists will find a way,” he says, “but that said, we wouldn’t have been able to promote it as well. Of course, word of mouth makes a big difference, but just the promotion funding alone was essential.”
He goes on to note that the rich cultural scene in Canada is part of what makes our artists stand out internationally. “When I tour in other countries, all I ever hear about is all these other musicians talking about how jealous they are of Canadian artists. It’s common knowledge in the United States that Canadian musicians get funding for their art. Never mind that they can’t go to the doctor without putting their whole family into bankruptcy; they just can’t get funding for the arts. That sort of thing brings up the cultural profile of the country in ways that something like a transparent financial plan doesn’t.”
Indeed, one wonders how many albums would never have seen the light of day if it hadn’t been for a few pennies dropped in from the feds: “I’d love to look at the list of records that really made a mark over the last 10 years and how many of them were funded publicly, or had some sort of public funding,” Klausener says. “Interest in the Canadian arts has exploded since 2001 — that was definitely a big boom in 2001 with Arcade Fire coming out and Broken Social Scene. ... That boom in Canadian music, it brought up Canada’s profile so high — you know that the outside world has this newfound interest in Canadian independent music, stronger than any other time in history. It’s tragic to think that’s something they would want to yank. It doesn’t compute. There’s a lot of momentum right now in Canadian music; the thought that they might want to damage that seems counterintuitive.”
Though for every album that does get funding, there are buckets of bands that produce entirely on their own dime. It all comes down to individual determination. “I think by nature artists are creative and will find creative ways to produce their art,” Klausener says, “but you know — I don’t want to complain — it’ll be a lot harder. That’s the plainest way to say it. I mean, when you compare how much money is spent on the arts compared to something like the military, the arts is a drop in the bucket.”
And poor Rolf would probably have had to hold on to that day job.
