Inspiration is a funny thing.

It can spring from the strangest places. Even focusing solely on Canada, Rock Plaza Central’s surprisingly powerful and moving Are We Not Horses? was about robot horses who think they’re real. The Elliott BROOD’s wonderful Mountain Meadows used the slaughter of pioneers by Mormon militiamen as a springboard for a brilliantly dark slice of Americana.

Ottawa’s The Acorn based their second LP and breakthrough album, Glory Hope Mountain on the life of Gloria Esperenza Montoya, mother of frontman Rolf Klausener. Klausener’s mother grew up in difficult circumstances in Honduras and Glory Hope Mountain – the English translation of her name – charts her journey from the Central American country to Canada.

The strongest impression gathered from speaking to Klausener is that he is extremely passionate and enthusiastic about what he does. In conversation, he does not shy away from the ins, outs and difficulties of such a hugely personal undertaking. Rather than paraphrase or dilute his description of how he came to write Glory Hope Mountain, it is probably best to leave it to the man himself.

“My father passed away when I was about 15,” Klausener says, “and he took a lot of secrets with him to the grave. I vowed to myself that I wouldn’t let that happen with my mother. At 15, I still didn’t know an awful lot about my mother’s life. So, around 2005, we had just released the Blankets EP and we were starting to think about what to do next. At that point I’d already decided to interview my mom and record her story. My father passed along this incredible family history that goes back to the fifteenth century and I thought it would be really great to add my mom’s story to that.

“I was telling my bandmates about it and Howie [Tsui, guitar] said that he thought it was a great idea but that maybe I should write songs about it as that seems more what I do, rather than writing a book. I kept that idea in the back of my mind and after I interviewed my mom, the wealth of stories and ideas and themes just really spoke to me and I started thinking that it was something I could do. I spent about eight hours interviewing her and there were definitely some stories that, as she was telling me, I just thought ‘wow, this would make an incredible song’, especially the details that were the inspirations behind ‘The Flood’ and ‘Crooked Legs’.

“Once I had the idea in my head, I thought it would be relatively easy. But when I sat down to write it I got the most tremendous writer’s block and didn’t write a single word for about seven months. I did think about the stories a lot and rather than waiting around, I decided to start researching Honduran folk music. So I discovered Garifuna music. I was really attracted to the rhythms because it was really close to West African music, which I listened to as a kid. My family lived in Mali and my father had all sorts of African music so, growing up, that was the music that was close to my heart. When I heard that Garifuna music, I immediately felt a connection to it.

“By the time fall rolled around, I’d just moved into the house where we recorded Glory Hope Mountain and it all started to fall into place. I just started to write. We spent seven months recording every weekend. It was really gruelling and very stressful in a lot of ways. We were trying to get a lot done every weekend.

“I wanted to make sure that each song really represented the theme or the idea that it was trying to embody. It was a long process of revisiting songs, re-recording them, reinventing them. It was an incredible process and I’m really thankful just for that experience of having all these influences and all these disparate approaches to songwriting come together to form the record.”

Glory Hope Mountain is an outstanding achievement in that it takes a deeply personal story and relays it in a manner that makes it universal, from the themes to the wide-reaching musical influences. Along its northern-bound path, it manages to encounter Latin and West African traditional music and fuse them with an elegant and epic strand of indie rock.

However, to label it is to do it a disservice. Suffice to say that The Acorn’s retelling of this story is as much about Klausener’s metaphorical journey as it is about his mother’s literal one. And all while the band held down day jobs.
The resultant praise and recognition has had more than a few perks for The Acorn. One big perk is a support slot with indie-folk’s men of the moment, Fleet Foxes, currently riding high on the news that their debut album has gone platinum in the UK. Hot on the heels of that is a stint opening for Elbow. This will see The Acorn play Brixton’s little-venue-that-could, The Windmill and then play Wembley Arena the very next night. That’s surely a first of some kind. It’s definitely a first for the band.

“It’s pretty exciting,” says Klausener, “one of the things we really like to do is engage the audience and that will certainly be a challenge with the larger venues. I’m not quite sure how we’ll approach that yet. We want to get in as much music as possible so I’ll have to keep my mouth shut. I do have a tendency to ramble on, much to my band’s chagrin.”

Klausener is completely open about his band’s fondness for playing “harmless” pranks on the main act in these kind of situations, “to break the ice,” he says. When pressed for some of his favourites, however, he says: “If this is going to get to Elbow or Fleet Foxes then I can’t really divulge that.” He laughs: “We’re not planning to pull out some patchchords from amps or anything like that. These bands seem to take their performances very seriously, as they should, so I don’t think that’d be wise.

Although, Elbow might be the first band we’ve toured with that have in-ear monitors, so that could be interesting. Maybe I’ll find the monitor guy and whisper things, like the voice of God, in Guy Garvey’s ear. “Guy, are you sure your guitar is in tune?” or maybe I’ll just offer some encouragement in a really creepy way, like “You’re doing really good Guy. Your music is awesome.”

Another perk, and one that even Fleet Foxes can’t equal, is an endorsement from the great ego himself, Kanye West. West posted the video for ‘Crooked Legs’ by The Acorn on his blog, under the heading ‘THIS IS BEAUTIFUL!’ Now, West’s taste can be questionable but, in this instance, he is right on the money.

“It was very bizarre,” Klausener says. “I was doing errands and I got a call from a friend of mine and he was like ‘Dude, ‘Crooked Legs’ is on the Kanye West blog.’ I’d been on the blog once about a year and a half ago so I had no idea it was that popular. It was really sweet. I imagine it wasn’t him who posted it. It was probably one of his many interns, typing on the internet while lying on a tanning bed. But that’s cool. I’m sure she was very cute and she liked our video. I don’t give it that much weight but it was very cool and it definitely brightened my day.”

The Acorn play the Windmill (020 8671 0700) on 13 March and Wembley Arena (0870 060 0870) in support of Elbow on 14 March.