The Tallest Man on Earth on Grief, Breakups, and Leaning into Aging

This is a free post from Larry Fitzmaurice's Last Donut of the Night newsletter. Paid subscribers get one or two email-only Baker's Dozens every week featuring music I've been listening to and some critical observations around it, along with a Screen Memories column every one or two weeks where I write about stuff I watched lately.

Here's what is going down today: I'm a sucker for all things Swedish music, so of course I've long enjoyed Kristian Matsson's work as The Tallest Man on Earth. His latest record, the just-released Just Beyond Endless Mountain, feels like new territory in terms of the raw materials he's working with—and the thematic underpinnings of its creation represent something of a full-circle for him life-wise as well. I hopped on a call with Kristian a few weeks ago to chat it all out, and I was impressed by his candidness and warmth; it was a great convo that I'm happy to bring to you today. Check it out:

You're currently living in the area of Sweden in which you grew up, which partially inspired this new record. Walk me through all of that.
I live in a little farm, and I have a little studio in one of the barns that I like a lot. But I haven't really done anything here since There's No Leaving Now. I moved home during the pandemic. My dad was sick, and he passed away from Alzheimer's two years ago, so I had to go home for that. I don't know if it's a midlife cliché, but when he was gone, mine and his roots took over where I wanted to be. This year marks 20 years of my career, and I've been touring for most of it. I've been in so many places, and I haven't been feeling at home much, even though I've loved it. I'm very grateful for the life I have, but a lot of things in my life made me stop for a second.

I grew up in the epicenter of Swedish folk culture, but in a very tourist-y and polished way. It leads back to the early 1900s, when there were very shady reasons why people wanted to be nationalists. So I always had a problem with that growing up. That fiddle music was very polished, and you were supposed to be from the right fiddle family with really expensive clothing. I was like, "Fuck that. I want to skateboard and become a punk rocker instead." But I also love the tonality of that type of music. My grandmother sang weird, minor-key lullabies to me that are maybe eerie to some people, but comforting to me. I've been marinated in that in many ways, so I decided to lean into that. God knows I've been listening to Alan Lomax field recordings and Bascom Lunsford, but all of a sudden I was a little scared of my own weird folk music. I maybe had too much respect for it, and I couldn't put on the whole costume—I've never had any interest in doing things like that. I didn't dress up like I was in the Dust Bowl when I wanted to play Woody Guthrie songs. I just took parts from that that I really loved.

So now I was here, and I started to listen to field recordings that were made over here—and they're weird and wild. If I drove 30 minutes the other way here, the fiddling is very different. My friend Martin Hederos, who plays a lot on this album, grew up two and a half hours southwest of me, and his fiddling and tonality is something that I connect with so deeply. I'd brushed it off before as this tourist-y thing, but it's so rich, and to be honest, I was probably intimidated by it because it's weird music. So at the age of 41—I'm 43 now—I got myself a fiddle, and I practiced for thousands of hours. I had the music in me, so now I'm a fiddler.

Just listening to those field recordings, it wasn't about national pride, and they didn't even call it folk music. They were just playing fiddle tunes, and I hear the wildness in the recordings. Not to romanticize, but these guys and women were kind of lost, and they found the outlet of being themselves through this strange music, which I connected with. I realized that could be a little more fearless and took some parts of it that I really love. A lot of the songs on the album, I played on the guitar. I started this album in February of last year, and I'm way better at fiddle now—but even though I was writing some of it on fiddle, I wasn't good enough to record with it. "Overboda," which is a duet with Sofia Hultquist Kott, I wrote that last summer. My best friends got married, and they asked me if I wanted to sing something at the ceremony, So I wrote this song on the fiddle, and initially I was singing while playing the fiddle, but I eventually checked myself and switched it over to guitar. That happened with a bunch of songs. I now come up with melodies on the fiddle instead of the banjo.

Had you been familiar with the fiddle when you were younger?
I'd been around it. I play a lot of different instruments, but the fiddle was always like picking up a cat that didn't want to be picked up, and it bit you. It just didn't work. But then I had this tour with the Amsterdam Sinfonietta for a month, and I was spending so much time with these string instruments—a lot of violins. I'm a very curious person, and so I was studying them, and after a few months there was something just in me that was like, "Well, it can't be that hard." When I bought a good fiddle, it didn't sound amazing in the beginning, but it didn't sound horrible either. But I really love playing instruments as getting into a flow state and quieting my brain when it's somewhat chaotic. It's a very good place for me to be, to practice instruments. It's great to be a beginner, because then you always get a little kick from getting better and better.

You gestured towards the notion of costume in performance before. When you started out, you were taking the quasi-anonymous route in terms of press photos, but you very quickly became front-and-center as the face of your music. Let's talk about notions of performance and presentation, and what's evolved for you in those categories.
Good question. Big question. Wide question. A lot of things have evolved. I love being on stage, where I have a lot of confidence—but offstage, it hasn't always been that great. I couldn't really believe in what I was doing, and I had maybe a pretentious idea of what I wanted music to be. I didn't really have any interest in that kind of gratification.

In the beginning, I was studying to become a teacher, because I didn't think the music was going to work. I dropped out just before I was going to graduate. I was on tour with Bon Iver in 2008, and I got up at 3 a.m. to log on to university video calls. It became impossible, and then it was like, "Wait a minute, this music thing might work out." But I had to have the slap in my face of, "No, you're playing Town Hall in Manhattan with Bon Iver. It might work out."

With the new album, it hit me—with all the AI talk, and the tools and software we have—how super easy it is to make something that sounds like a good recording these days. During the pandemic, at first we had to do these tiny shows here in Sweden—only 50 people at shows. I was reminded that this is what it's about: inter-human connection. We have all these capitalist ideas of putting out middle-of-the-road bullshit, but this is a time where I need to be as much of myself as possible. And I can be as noisy as I want and record on these really crappy things with no hard editing, because that's what I'm looking for now—something that just feels human.

This album felt like coming back to a good place. God knows that, over the years, I was very comfortable having a career, and when I made albums in that sense, I was probably not fully going for what I loved. I didn't want to scare people away. so I did something that was just kind of good. I've also always had the live shows, where I can always be whatever I want to be. That's my home. But now, for the first time, I'm really loving an album.

You mentioned earlier having to navigate this period of grief after your father passed. Talk to me about that experience was and still is.
My father was a very supportive, amazing dad. Growing up in the '90s in Sweden, whem the economy just super crashed, there were always financial struggles—but he didn't lose his like optimism or his ability to joke about things. He had a very big heart and believed that we're all in this together to help other people unconditionally if someone needs a hand, and to just take care of each other. He was a great role model, and he was a super-fan of whatever I did. He came to Royal Albert Hall when I played there, even though he hadn't been on airplane in a long time.

Losing him to Alzheimer's and Lewy body dementia was not a quick way to go. Just losing a person like that, in some weird slow motion...it had been a long time of grieving someone who was still alive. It was very hard to figure out how to be a human in that. Then he passed, and it became super real. All of a sudden, I'm standing there being like, "I need to fix the radiator in my house"—and, you know, this is a cliché, what everyone does—"I need to call my—no, I can't do that." My sister and I found ourselves being the ones who are supposed to know how it is to be a grown up now. I'm 43, so that's just a wild trip.

Most often, I don't just sit down and be like, "I'm going to write about this thing. I can have an idea." But, for a while, every song was just about him—his life, and my sadness. It was so dark. Then I was thinking about what my dad would've said. He would have made a joke like, "What are you doing, dude? This is not what you want to do." I could chuckle with a memory of my dad. So I kept the first song, "The Wildest of His Dream," as a way of saying, "Bye bye, dude." And then I just dove into the relationship shit that I have to write about. On "Colors," I was a little frustrated about the world around me. But the grief definitely took over the recordings for a while. It's been a journey.

Tell me about navigating some of the relationship stuff you were writing about on this record, too. You've also written songs in the past about a prior divorce.
My corner of the industry is built upon of dealing with breakup songs, and I was in a relationship that didn't work out. But as I was making this album, a lot of things hit me afterwards what songs like "Deliver Me From Trying" are about. "The Village" is a love song to someone that I don't love, just to be like, "We weren't right for each other." I'm getting very personal, but it's what I want to hear in music sometimes.

My discography sounds like I've just been going through breakups—and, it's been a few, but it's what people do. With my live shows, I then connect with the crowd, because someone got dumped last week and they're listening to someone who's just like, "Yeah, it is really hard." I get that from listening to other people's breakup songs, too. But there's also a celebration of love, which I love having too. I'm a stubborn romantic—an optimist. Romance is a great thing. It's nothing complicated. It's just life and what it looks like for a lot of us.

That's real. Let's talk about the album cover, which is a striking image from Anton Corbjin.
I wanted something that was me, but I didn't want anything pretty. And I guess it is pretty, but I wanted it to be dirty. The whole process of getting Anton to shoot it started as a joke from me in a meeting with the label. But, thank God, a bunch of them are Dutch people, and they don't really get Swedish jokes, which are irony. I'm such a fan of Anton, so I just said him as a joke, and then they made it happen. I thought he was going to squeeze this in 15 minutes somewhere but he'd been out location-scouting for three days straight to look at the light. I came down there and we had this amazing day together. We had some Zoom calls first— which was also like trippy because, you know, I'm a fan—and I was like looking like total shit that day. I'd let my beard grow out, which I'd never done before. He was like, "I really like the beard," and I was like, "Okay, I will never cut it."

I really enjoy being in the age I am—and that's probably because the world was designed for 43-year-old white men [Laughs]. I'm way more comfortable in being gray-haired and a little wrinkled, which I haven't liked that the past at all. Just by being with him, being super professional, keeping in an amazing mood all day, and allowing me to look weird—I think I was just dancing around, I don't know what models do—we knew straight away what the cover was.

Talk to me more about being in your forties and how that feels for you.
If it's not added confidence, it's less fear of making mistakes or making a fool out of yourself. I can go around and do tours, and there will be people there, and [the crowds] will get smaller and smaller, but I can do this for a while. There are many downsides. If you get a bruise or back pain, it will take a little longer to heal. But I'm starting to let my shoulders down, and then you see straight away that it's way easier to interact with people when you're a little more relaxed—and, I mean, how you can be relaxed in this type of world. But I feel a lot more gratitude for what I have. It's a calmer age, but I also have more energy to be eccentric. I mean, I live on a farm on the countryside, and I play this kind of music. Yes, I'm the weirdo of the village, but I have a lot of friends in the village. I feel less fear of making a fool out of myself, because it's fine to be the fool.

You've had a career for quite a while at this point. Talk to me about about your experiences within the music industry, both in and outside of Sweden. Jens Lekman was telling me a bit about the Swedish music industry a while back.
Sweden is a very small music industry. There's not a lot of people, and I don't know why I'd be in Stockholm, when I could aim higher. So I bypassed that in the beginning—and I wasn't overly loved. My first album got a two out of ten in the big music magazine. Then, of course, I played with Bon Iver, and the next one got ten out of ten. They sound exactly the same! It's a small country, it's great, and I do love it here, and how much great music is still coming from here every day. There's a lot of space to run around, and a lot of time to write songs, so you don't have to worry too much about healthcare, and you can go to university for free and stuff like that.

What really reignited my whole career is my label Anti-, because I come from listening to punk and garage rock—and with Epitaph, those ethos are there. So it felt like coming home when they told me, "Make a bad record, man. That might happen. You can make an album, because it's about you. Make a bunch of albums, and some work and some don't." I've never heard that. I've just only heard, "Well, it's good to have one single at least. And couldn't you please try TikTok?" And I just bought this huge vintage theater from 1904—10 minutes from my place—where I can have this crazy big workshop for myself and others, so I'm already working on the next record.