Ed Ackerson
The Polara and Susstones leader is in the music game for the long haul.
The Polara and Susstones leader is in the music game for the long haul.
After spending the bulk of the decade as an in-demand producer and head of local record label Susstones, music-scene veteran Ed Ackerson has more than made up for lost time in the past 12 months, releasing two solo albums in addition to a long-awaited full length from his veteran noise-pop band Polara. Both solo discs are self-titled; the new Ackerson 2 furthers his move into acoustic singer-songwriter terrain, while retaining enough out-of-left-field synthesizer squiggles to keep away from folk territory. Ackerson recently talked with Decider about his multifaceted musical life. Ackerson plays both solo and with Polara to headline the Susstacular showcase Nov. 28 at the Varsity Theater, with Susstones labelmates The Mood Swings, Colonial Vipers Attack, and StrangeLights opening, and cameos by Janey And Marc and Farewell Continental.
Decider: You’ve been active in the local-music scene for more than 20 years. How has it changed since its ’80s heyday?
Ed Ackerson: The weird thing now is that there’s less of a center of gravity. In the late ’80s, certain clubs and certain bands were what everyone was into. Now there are very few coalescing points for the scene. It’s lots of little micro scenes rather than one big connected one. The bands don’t know each other as much. You’ll have a lot of scattered scenes that each draw 30, 45 people to their shows. People still get super-involved, and it has all the politics of a bigger music scene, but the scale is sort of small and there’s very little outreach. The grand tradition was everybody knowing everybody and taking notes on what they were doing. It seemed more inclusive, but part of it was that it was just smaller. There’s more bands now than ever, more venues. It’s difficult for people to get a real critical mass around them. For a band to make that jump locally from drawing 75 to 300 people is very difficult now. Back when Polara started, we went from drawing zero to 1,000 people in something like six months. That just doesn’t happen anymore.
D: Between 1999 and 2006, Polara released just one album and an EP. With Ackerson 2, you’ll have released three albums—two solo, and one by Polara—in a year. Why the sudden deluge?
EA: The extremely slow output of Polara material during the early 2000s was mostly a business situation. We were in contractual limbo for three and a half years, so that just kind of muzzles you. I was still writing and recording plenty, but there was just no legal way to put anything out. In [2002] Polara put out Jetpack Blues and Susstones had a national distribution deal, but then our distributor went bankrupt, taking the better part of $100,000 worth of receipts with them, so we pretty much lost all of our cash flow. [Laughs.] We were back to the classic indie-rock situation of having no money, no way to release records and promote them. So we wound up sitting around again. I’ve decided I don’t want to do that anymore. I’m just going to start putting music out whenever I feel like it. The whole notion of a physical release is increasingly less important. The Internet puts things in front of people immediately, and the whole process of retail marketing, particularly on the indie level, just doesn’t make sense anymore. I would rather sell a relatively small amount of a large number of different albums than spend five years pinning it all on one big shot that would have to break big to justify all the time and money. That might be a better business model, but this way is certainly more fun.
D: Do you make a distinction in your songwriting process about whether a song is a solo Ackerson tune or meant for Polara?
EA: It’s usually fairly clear to me early on. The solo thing developed because I was writing material that didn’t feel right for Polara. Polara has a thing we’re known for, sort of a noisy pop-psychedelic thing. I had started writing this stripped-down acoustic material that had more of a personal tone, and I thought if I tried to work that into a Polara record it would dilute what the band was about.
D: If Polara is about the noisy psychedelic-pop thing, then what defines Ackerson 2?
EA: The purpose of Polara is to write giant widescreen pop music, something giant and abstract to be projected on the underside of clouds. This material is much more specific and direct. It’s sort of my inner dialogue digesting certain conversations that have rattled around in my head. A lot of the album has to do with starting to grow up and seeing things turn out how they actually are rather than how you thought they might be. With Polara I tend to write more cryptically, perhaps too cryptically. For whatever reason, it only occurred to me in the last couple of years that my voice could be the primary communicator in my songs. In the past I would leave that to synthesizers or guitar tones. I’ve always tried to write honestly, but I think just as I’ve become more interested in singing it’s led me to focus more on the actual lyrics.
D: Are there moments with the newer solo material where you step back and think, “This is too personal”?
EA: There’s a record that I made in about 2004—really [my] first solo record, but it never came out. It still might someday. It’s a very morose record about somebody I knew dying. A lot of the songs were too raw-nerve for me to even get into after finishing them. A couple of songs from that group made it onto the last Polara record, and you can tell—they’re the super-depressing ones. [Laughs.] Some of it was just a little too much. I’m more interested in introspection than I used to be when I was younger, but I’m still not a navel-gazer. I never want to get too self-indulgent. I’m not into the voyeurism of unscrewing someone’s head and looking at all the worms writhing around in there. I’m very self-conscious about that.
D: You’ve set yourself apart on the local music scene by being actively involved on so many different fronts, as head of a record label, studio owner, musician, producer, and DJ. Why not just concentrate on one aspect of the music scene?
EA: Rock music is really the only thing I do. I’m not into football. I don’t spend eight hours a week watching sports. Music is what I do for a living, but it’s also my recreation, my social outlet. I’m always immersed in it, whether as a musician or a fan. I like creating, I like producing others. I still like discovering new music. You can get stagnant if your only frame of reference is what initially inspired you to make music. That gets boring really fast. When I was a kid it was assumed anybody over 30 years old was pretty much finished, they were inevitably going to enter the Hawaiian-shirt-wearing, coked-up, self-indulgent-bullshit part of their career. I think that was part of the self-congratulatory culture of baby-boomer rock. For someone like myself who grew up in the ’80s underground scene, a path in music is more about having a continuous dialogue with reality than some star trip. I think that’s an easier thing to sustain.
Ed Ackerson: The weird thing now is that there’s less of a center of gravity. In the late ’80s, certain clubs and certain bands were what everyone was into. Now there are very few coalescing points for the scene. It’s lots of little micro scenes rather than one big connected one. The bands don’t know each other as much. You’ll have a lot of scattered scenes that each draw 30, 45 people to their shows. People still get super-involved, and it has all the politics of a bigger music scene, but the scale is sort of small and there’s very little outreach. The grand tradition was everybody knowing everybody and taking notes on what they were doing. It seemed more inclusive, but part of it was that it was just smaller. There’s more bands now than ever, more venues. It’s difficult for people to get a real critical mass around them. For a band to make that jump locally from drawing 75 to 300 people is very difficult now. Back when Polara started, we went from drawing zero to 1,000 people in something like six months. That just doesn’t happen anymore.
D: Between 1999 and 2006, Polara released just one album and an EP. With Ackerson 2, you’ll have released three albums—two solo, and one by Polara—in a year. Why the sudden deluge?
EA: The extremely slow output of Polara material during the early 2000s was mostly a business situation. We were in contractual limbo for three and a half years, so that just kind of muzzles you. I was still writing and recording plenty, but there was just no legal way to put anything out. In [2002] Polara put out Jetpack Blues and Susstones had a national distribution deal, but then our distributor went bankrupt, taking the better part of $100,000 worth of receipts with them, so we pretty much lost all of our cash flow. [Laughs.] We were back to the classic indie-rock situation of having no money, no way to release records and promote them. So we wound up sitting around again. I’ve decided I don’t want to do that anymore. I’m just going to start putting music out whenever I feel like it. The whole notion of a physical release is increasingly less important. The Internet puts things in front of people immediately, and the whole process of retail marketing, particularly on the indie level, just doesn’t make sense anymore. I would rather sell a relatively small amount of a large number of different albums than spend five years pinning it all on one big shot that would have to break big to justify all the time and money. That might be a better business model, but this way is certainly more fun.
D: Do you make a distinction in your songwriting process about whether a song is a solo Ackerson tune or meant for Polara?
EA: It’s usually fairly clear to me early on. The solo thing developed because I was writing material that didn’t feel right for Polara. Polara has a thing we’re known for, sort of a noisy pop-psychedelic thing. I had started writing this stripped-down acoustic material that had more of a personal tone, and I thought if I tried to work that into a Polara record it would dilute what the band was about.
D: If Polara is about the noisy psychedelic-pop thing, then what defines Ackerson 2?
EA: The purpose of Polara is to write giant widescreen pop music, something giant and abstract to be projected on the underside of clouds. This material is much more specific and direct. It’s sort of my inner dialogue digesting certain conversations that have rattled around in my head. A lot of the album has to do with starting to grow up and seeing things turn out how they actually are rather than how you thought they might be. With Polara I tend to write more cryptically, perhaps too cryptically. For whatever reason, it only occurred to me in the last couple of years that my voice could be the primary communicator in my songs. In the past I would leave that to synthesizers or guitar tones. I’ve always tried to write honestly, but I think just as I’ve become more interested in singing it’s led me to focus more on the actual lyrics.
D: Are there moments with the newer solo material where you step back and think, “This is too personal”?
EA: There’s a record that I made in about 2004—really [my] first solo record, but it never came out. It still might someday. It’s a very morose record about somebody I knew dying. A lot of the songs were too raw-nerve for me to even get into after finishing them. A couple of songs from that group made it onto the last Polara record, and you can tell—they’re the super-depressing ones. [Laughs.] Some of it was just a little too much. I’m more interested in introspection than I used to be when I was younger, but I’m still not a navel-gazer. I never want to get too self-indulgent. I’m not into the voyeurism of unscrewing someone’s head and looking at all the worms writhing around in there. I’m very self-conscious about that.
D: You’ve set yourself apart on the local music scene by being actively involved on so many different fronts, as head of a record label, studio owner, musician, producer, and DJ. Why not just concentrate on one aspect of the music scene?
EA: Rock music is really the only thing I do. I’m not into football. I don’t spend eight hours a week watching sports. Music is what I do for a living, but it’s also my recreation, my social outlet. I’m always immersed in it, whether as a musician or a fan. I like creating, I like producing others. I still like discovering new music. You can get stagnant if your only frame of reference is what initially inspired you to make music. That gets boring really fast. When I was a kid it was assumed anybody over 30 years old was pretty much finished, they were inevitably going to enter the Hawaiian-shirt-wearing, coked-up, self-indulgent-bullshit part of their career. I think that was part of the self-congratulatory culture of baby-boomer rock. For someone like myself who grew up in the ’80s underground scene, a path in music is more about having a continuous dialogue with reality than some star trip. I think that’s an easier thing to sustain.
"Wired Weird," from Ackerson's 2007 album Ed Ackerson:
