Drive deep into the Swedish heartland, down the single-lane roads dotted with wildflowers and old red barns, and you’ll find the farm of Kristian Matsson, the folk songwriter better known as the Tallest Man on Earth. People mostly grow hardy crops in this part of the world, oats and potatoes and carrots that can handle the soil and the Nordic winters, but Matsson has a richer garden. Lately, he’s been growing herbs, beans, beets, and flowers. A rose bush has sprung up along his driveway.
Matsson greets me out front, a picture of country chic—worn corduroy jacket, weathered wooden clogs, a shiny Speedmaster. We embark on a tour, and he shows me his freshly planted garden, the river a short walk behind his house, the mountain lakes that are perfect for night fishing. He introduces me to his horse, Otto, who is about to start a racing career. His partner, Anna, serves the three of us a traditional Swedish meal: cod, wax beans, and potatoes with dill. Matsson apologizes for not having grown the beans himself.
It’s a fitting place to find Matsson, whose songs are often set in the platonic countryside of the folk genre. For a decade and a half, the Tallest Man on Earth has released some of the best modern folk music of this century. He writes elegant, homespun ballads that draw you in toward the proverbial campfire. This year he released his seventh album, Henry St. It’s not easy to play folk music in this day and age—it risks coming off as cosplay, or a cringey open-mic night—but Matsson has proved time and time again that an acoustic guitar and a raspy voice can still soothe, and maybe even move you.
Matsson has owned the farm for over a decade, visiting for short stints between albums and tours, but it took on a new prominence in his life in 2020. He was based in Brooklyn before the pandemic, but when most of his neighbors left the city for the Hudson Valley or, worse, the suburbs, Matsson went a bit farther—three hours outside of Stockholm. Like most people, he thought he’d be there for a couple of weeks, not a couple of years. And like most musicians accustomed to life on tour, he started to go a little crazy. Matsson didn’t know what to do with himself. He couldn’t write, he couldn’t play, he could barely leave the house. It was unclear how the Tallest Man on Earth could continue. At least until Matsson got his hands in the dirt.
Matsson’s farm is in Dalarna County, a region with a reputation for being the most classically Swedish part of Sweden. “Dalarna means valleys, so I’m a valley girl,” Matsson says with a soft Nordic lilt. Every year there are traditional midsummer festivals (yes, like the movie, except no, they’re obviously nothing like the movie). It’s a popular summer destination for hiking, fishing, and old-fashioned family fun. Maybe you’ve seen those little Swedish wooden horses painted red? They’re called Dala horses, and they’re from here.
Matsson grew up in Dalarna, just across the river from where he lives now. It’s easy to imagine that the music he plays emerged from the rural environment of his early years, but as a teenager Matsson was much more punk than troubadour. He grew up skateboarding and listening to hardcore and DJ Shadow, and before he was the Tallest Man on Earth, he played in a Strokes-ish band around Sweden. “When I was 18, I just wanted to be like Iggy Pop,” Matsson says. It took a few years of playing that music before he arrived at the style of the Tallest Man on Earth, the acoustic folky sound that has been consistently described as “Dylanesque” for over a decade.
All his early influences, whether it was Thrasher or Pete Seeger, were imported. Matsson would check out CDs from his local library and digest them 10 at a time, and by his early 20s he was fluent in American folk music. Given the style of the Tallest Man on Earth, it’s no surprise that his career took off stateside. His first two albums, Shallow Grave and The Wild Hunt, garnered critical acclaim and stood out among the hordes of bearded indie men of the aughts. His first single, still a staple of his live set, was called “The Gardener.”
“Matsson is so natural a songwriter that these tracks feel predetermined, tumbling out of his mouth with an ease and grace that’s increasingly uncommon,” wrote Pitchfork. Another review said that Matsson “represents the highest class in this art form—someone who can make you forget that folk songs have existed for longer than the time since this album began spinning.”
Matsson appeared on the scene at the high water mark for indie folk, in 2008: Fleet Foxes released their first record of vibey Appalachian acapella, the same year Shallow Grave came out. Mumford & Sons were charting. That one Edward Sharpe song was everywhere. As the industry cashed in and artists like Sufjan Stevens and Bon Iver moved in different sonic directions, here was some guy from Sweden writing songs on a guitar that were spare, earnest, authentic. If there’s even a tiny part of you that desires to connect with a less ironic, and maybe even less cynical, version of yourself, the Tallest Man on Earth can help get you there.
After his breakout, Matsson spent much of his time in the US, either touring the country or living in his apartment in Brooklyn. He got the farm to have a place to stay for the few months a year he was back in Sweden. But his life was centered in Carroll Gardens, not Dalarna.
The farm isn’t strictly traditional—the buildings aren’t painted the traditional Falu red—but it is really old. “This house was built in the 1800s. The story is that a farmer, who seems to have been a real stand-up dude, gave it to two sisters. But of course they weren’t sisters, they were a couple,” says Matsson. “So they lived here and grew cherries. They would take them down to the river there and go across because there was a market on the other side.”
In addition to the main house, the property has three barns. One is even older than the house, dating back to the 1600s. “These old seed barns are very common around here, but this is the oldest one in this village, so I can brag about that,” says Matsson. There’s an additional old barn that Matsson converted into a recording studio, overflowing with guitars. “But when I had done that I didn’t have a barn to just throw stuff,” he says, so he built a third one from pine wood with a carpenter friend around the back.
When he returned to Sweden during COVID, that third barn was the first project he took on. Some time ago he had picked up an antique organ made of solid oak at a local flea market, and Matsson wanted to move it up the lofted second story of the storage barn. Oak is heavy, though. So he completely disassembled it, moved it all upstairs, then put it back together, piece by piece.
That took two weeks. There were many more weeks to fill.
“That year was a year of going crazy,” says Matsson. Like all of us, he was dealing with isolation and uncertainty. As an artist, he faced the unique challenges of playing music and planning shows while cut off from the world. He was one of the first musicians to try live streamed performances, but he found it unfulfilling. “It was really hard playing to a computer,” he said. He planned a tour, but after sorting all the visas and travel plans, the Swedish government pulled the plug, opting to maintain travel restrictions. “I couldn’t write because I was reminded of my own mortality all the time.”
The few songs he did write came out dark and depressing. “I don’t want to sing those songs,” he said.
Matsson turned to his garden when music ceased to be an outlet. That summer of 2020, it was less about growing anything and more about having something to do. “I could disconnect from my thoughts,” he said. “The physical labor of doing it would get me tired in the right way. Not tired from being anxious.” It helped that the days were long, giving him more time to dig around in the dirt (when I visited in early summer, the sun set at 10:20).
He compared the experience to learning a new instrument. “I play a lot of different instruments not because I’m great at any of them, but because I grab it and am like, What can I do with this? I love to be a beginner, because then you get back from learning new things and you feel great by yourself.”
That first year didn’t yield much. “The carrots were like an inch or so,” he remembers. So when the long Swedish winter came, he split his time between snowboarding and studying up on his garden tactics. He met Anna, who has since become his partner at home and on the road. When 2021 arrived, he was ready to go hard on horticulture.
He collected rainwater. He mixed his own soil, hauling horse manure from Otto’s stable up the road back to his house for fertilizer. He watched the calendar closely and monitored soil temperature. He staggered three different types of potato crop to get a different harvest at different points of the year. Get him started and Matsson becomes a font of garden trivia. If you put your beets in too early, they flower and there’s a lot of stuff growing on top, but nothing underneath. Plant your beans in 15 degrees Celsius soil. In 2021, he grew so much food that he had to call friends and family to give it all away.
After two harvests, travel restrictions ended, and Matsson could finally go back to the studio. But instead of returning to New York, he went to North Carolina, where he worked out of Betty’s, the studio owned and operated by Sylvan Esso’s Nick Sanborn. The first Tallest Man on Earth first album recorded with a full band, it’s Matsson’s biggest, most elaborate sounding record to date. It has the warm and optimistic sound characteristic of Matsson’s work, but there are some jammy flourishes that reflect the bigger ensemble behind him.
It’s called Henry St, named for the street where Matsson lived before returning to the farm in Dalarna. It’s an album that’s deeply informed by a sense of place. There’s an unabashed ode to the US called “Major League” (inspired by the 1989 movie), in which he sings about “waiting on a word from America.” There’s a love song set in Italy. New York stars in the title track, the only song where the uncertainty Matsson held at bay throughout the pandemic slips through.
After visiting Matsson at his farm, though, you start to sense Dalarna’s presence not just on this record but in the entire Tallest Man discography. Sometimes this is laughably literal. Songs like “Slowly Rivers Turn” and “Foothills” take on new meaning when you realize Matsson lives…directly between a river and foothills. More broadly, you realize that the nature-centric lyrics that have suffused Matsson’s work since the start of his career, figurative or otherwise, and grounded in his very real experience, from childhood to present. Fly fishing, farming, or just stepping out of the house, he lives up close and personal with natural beauty.
I ask Matsson, back from an international tour and about to start another, if he considers the farm home after settling into it for two years. “Even the question kind of stresses me out,” he says. “I’ve been trying to get away from that condition, that something needs to be home. Because that’s tortured me a lot over the years. On tour I’d just want to be at home, and then at home I’d want to be somewhere else.”
He prefers to think of the farm as home base rather than home. Home has to be something he can carry with him.
