soundtrack at dusk

Remember that Nick Drake-Volkswagen commercial from a few years back? Yeah, well, a couple Thursday evenings ago I experienced the real thing, only I wasn't driving a Cabrio and "Pink Moon" wasn't playing on my car stereo. Instead, I was driving an xB and listening to The Wild Hunt by The Tallest Man on Earth. (Twenty-seven year-old Swede Kristian Matsson is The Tallest Man on Earth, and The Wild Hunt is his second album.) Don't get me wrong, it's a little early in Matsson's career to make such a lofty comparison, but like Drake, his voice and guitar strike the purest of pitches, which is not a sound, but an emotion, a feeling that reminds us of life's common yet strange experience.

And this is music that will bind experience to memory. Somewhere, a young couple will fall in love, and this album, years later, will be their document of that summer romance. For me, I will forever remember my first experience with The Wild Hunt on that aforementioned Thursday. Countless stars were beginning to shine through the embers of a dusk-lit sky. Under the panorama, I was driving by swatches of farm land, driving to be by the side of the lady I love. With the malty taste of a Taddy Porter on my tongue, I heard a man, accompanied only by his acoustic guitar, sing about sighing senoritas, a blind man who'll drink his water when it rains, and the hope that someplace exists where troubles will be gone. The sounds coming out of my stereo seemed to wrap my surroundings in an aural glow that was, well, perfect.

It's easy to pin The Wild Hunt on the music map: his Dylan-esque howl makes him a folk singer straight out of central casting, but dismissing The Tallest Man as "just another folk revivalist" would be a mistake. The Wild Hunt proves that a modern troubadour doesn't have to pen stabbing songs about war and lost love to be memorable; sometimes it isn't about conveying a message – it's about transmitting a feeling. "There's a palace a fallin'/There's a smoke in the sky/There's a boy running downhill to the lowlands tonight/And he's catching the train to where he's heard you have been/He's a fool now among us, a dreamer within" he sings in the delicate "A Lion's Heart." The wild imagery of Matsson's songs evokes a fairy-tale land based not in fantasy but in plausibility, because unlike a fairy tale, the hero is flawed, haunted by things we cannot see. "The dark in what I've always been, it will never go/No it will not ever go" he sings in "Thousand Ways." Like a storm cloud ripped open, Matsson's words burst from within. To say he "sings" wouldn't be accurate; instead, he delivers his words with a raw immediacy that seemingly acknowledges the impermanence of the moment (listen to "Love is All" and note how Matsson delivers the line "Here come the tears"). A camera is limited by what it can capture, and a songwriter is limited by what he can record – Matsson utilizes every second of The Wild Hunt to leave his raw, unrefined mark.

In Chronicles, Volume One, Bob Dylan wrote that "most other [folk] performers tried to put themselves across, rather than the song, but I didn't care about doing that. With me, it was about putting the song across." For The Tallest Man on Earth, it's about putting the ineffable peculiarity of the human experience across – and it's a wild hunt worth experiencing, even if the hero doesn't always win. After all, the best heroes are the ones with whom we can share our imperfect experience, raw and unrefined.

xx

The Tallest Man On Earth will play The Dome House in Bloomington on May 26. (Don't ask me about The Dome House because I've no idea where it is!)