All Songs At 15: When The Tallest Man On Earth Played The Tiny Desk

Bob Boilen — Thu, 28 May 2015 13:08:26 +0000

Every Thursday this year we’re celebrating All Songs Considered‘s 15th birthday with personal memories and highlights from the show’s decade and a half online and on the air. If you have a story about the show you’d like to share, drop us an email: allsongs@npr.org.

A few weeks ago, The Tallest Man on Earth released another deeply personal and strong set of songs on an album called Dark Bird is Home. I saw Kristian Matsson, a.k.a. The Tallest Man on Earth, in Philadelphia a few weeks ago at WXPN and was reminded how enormously intimate his performances are. When this video came out, he was hardly known outside his home country, Sweden. But it didn’t take long for this Tiny Desk Concert to catch fire, in part because of the intensity and intimacy of his performance — qualities that make, I think, for my favorite Tiny Desk Concerts. On YouTube alone, this video has been seen more than two million times.

So today we revisit Kristian Matsson and music from his first album, Shallow Grave, in hopes of igniting your interest in his new music and current tour. He’s a very special talent.

To download video of this Tiny Desk Concert — and any/all of those before it — subscribe to the “Live in Concert From All Songs Considered” podcast here.

First Listen: The Tallest Man On Earth, ‘Dark Bird Is Home’

Andy Battaglia — Sun, 26 Apr 2015 23:03:00 +0000

The Tallest Man on Earth takes folk music as a convention that can be dependable and urgent at once. There is very little to distinguish him from any number of folk devotees with yearning voices and acoustic guitars, but he — a less than especially tall songwriter from Sweden named Kristian Matsson — has a way of upending expectations and rendering familiarity moot.

On Dark Bird Is Home, his fourth album and third on the discerning indie label Dead Oceans, the Tallest Man starts out in a downbeat and doleful mode, with his elemental basics set quietly against occasional washes of sad synthesizer that spread the sound far and wide. By “Darkness Is the Dream,” he’s onto the fleet brand of stomper that is his specialty, with rich open-tuned guitar chords aided by ringing banjo to make for an antic clamor of strummed release. The energy is high but the spirits are low — “a fear of heart and all its turnings / and its never letting go,” Matsson sings, “I’m sure I’ll sleep when all this goes under / but now, will I sleep alone?”

Moody contemplation and intense questioning attend many Tallest Man songs, but they seem to revel in all the mental activation that accompanies such a state. On Dark Bird, Matsson’s voice, reedy and resonant, is recorded raw and seemingly almost inside the microphone. The effect is one of feeling a brain on fire while setting its sights on itself, and the byproduct is a yen for moments of serene relief as a result. In “Slow Dance,” with bright chords ringing and a pretty French horn blowing, he sings, “Get around / this is handsome life / I guess my rhythm grew / through my darker time.”

Matsson’s windings of mind follow circuitous paths that put him in league with acts like Bright Eyes and Neutral Milk Hotel, not so much in terms of content but for the ways his notions and melodies have the patience and fortitude to unfurl over the course of sometimes many lines in succession. It’s the mark of a songwriter who knows what he’s doing enough to go in search of something — even if that something might prove elusive in the end.

The Tallest Man On Earth – Bandwidth

All Songs At 15: When The Tallest Man On Earth Played The Tiny Desk

First Listen: The Tallest Man On Earth, ‘Dark Bird Is Home’