I remember being pretty stressed out. It was sometime in the first months of the year. Sander from V2 Records send me a link to listen to some LA-based songwriter’s record. I promised him I’d listen to Gregory Ackerman’s And Friends, because why not? Sure enough, thirty minutes later I was a bit less stressed. Thanks to Ackerman’s songs, that somehow radiated calmness and joy. That’s exactly what I got from Gregory and his brother Eric when we met in Hilversum to film I Keep Falling, and covers of Jack Johnson and Neil Young.
‘I’ve been writing music since I was about fifteen, but I wrote my album songs over a period of a year with the specific intentions of have those songs work together in a cohesive album. I was thinking a lot about humanity and the shifting landscape of American politics as Donald Trump was coming into his presidency. I felt disconnected and lost and I wanted to put all those themes in the album. I was an art history major in college and found that art always reflects the current socio-economic and political landscape in which it was made, and I wanted my album to more or less function as a piece of auditory art that did just that.’
Thank you very much, Nick Drake
‘Jack Johnson and Neil Young have always been big influences, along with Nick Drake – my dad constantly played the Way To Blue compilation through our house. All of Crosby, Still, and Nash were a heavy influence. I went through a huge Pink Floyd and Radiohead, or a progressive rock phase in high school too. Way To Blue by Nick Drake probably was my favourite album, though I didn’t know it by name when I was young. Nick Drake had such an amazing finger picking style that I immediately wanted to be able to replicate. When I first started playing guitar I started finger picking from the start. I wanted to get good at it, and I have Nick Drake’s talent to thank for that. Is This It by the Strokes was the first album I owned, and that album blew my mind. I thought rock ‘n’ roll was back in a great way when I first played that album. I got it for a Christmas present when I was young and played it nonstop that year.’
The Ackerman brothers grew up in South Pasadena, a suburb of Los Angeles. A great neighbourhood, Gregory tells me. ’There were tons of kids on my block and we always played outside during the evenings and