The Tallest Man On Earth shares the new song ‘Overboda’ from his upcoming album ‘Just Beyond Endless Mountain’, out October 9 via ANTI-. “It’s where you / drift onto my / little gravel road of time,” Matsson lovingly sings in repetition on the track, while simultaneously driving his ATV down a verdantly lined gravel road in the song’s new video. Listen and watch below.
Listen + Watch ‘Overboda’
“My friend Rolf, who’s also my fly-fishing buddy, was marrying Ida, so I wrote the song for their wedding,” Matsson explained of the song’s origins. “It was a beautiful day in northern Sweden, but I could barely get through it because I was crying so hard for half the song. In the studio the Swedish folk singer Sofia HK sings the duet with me, and our voices really melt together. It’s a true love song.”
Kristian Matsson was born and raised in Dalarna, Sweden, a quintessential Swedish locale surrounded by fiddlers and folk dancers, timber cabins and flower-clad Midsummer poles. As a young man, however, Matsson rebelled against that tradition, as many young people do when reckoning with what to embrace and what to leave behind from the place that they call home. He started indie bands, hurled himself across the stage like Iggy Pop and spent his winters snowboarding. Then came the breakthrough: extensive tours, festival stages, steadily growing audiences, increasingly ambitious recordings, and the move to New York City. Twenty wild years have passed since he released his first EP.
But something changed when he finally stopped moving. A new chapter began, and Dalarna became home in the truest sense. Matsson’s farm became his fortress, and the home studio, that had sometimes stood silent, once again became a place where inspiration could rush in—and where freedom opened new windows. He started a garden, bought shares in a few horses, and picked up an ATV to clear the snow from his driveway. And then he bought even more instruments. The fiddle — an instrument he’d had a complicated relationship with since childhood — found its way back into his life.
Swedish folk music takes many forms. There’s the polished, crowd-pleasing version. And then there are the old fiddlers whose music survives on weathered field recordings — recordings that are, in fact, strangely reminiscent of the old American songs preserved in the Smithsonian archives. That’s where you’ll find the polkas, with their lopsided triple meter and melodies that drift effortlessly between major and minor.
“Those field recordings have made me less afraid,” Matsson said. “People play too fast, out of tune, or in these really strange ways. But sometimes they’re out of tune in exactly the right way. They’ve made me brave enough to be more dynamic — to whisper, to scream, to let things be ugly.”
He’s still singing about what he sees around him—the rivers, the forests, the birds, and the doubt that still catches up with him from time to time. However, the influence of Swedish folk music on ‘Just Beyond Endless Mountain’ is unmistakable—at least if you know what to listen for. “More than anything, it’s the melodies that have changed,” Matsson said. “A lot of them come from fiddle phrases. They’re so beautiful. This album wouldn’t sound the way it does if I hadn’t been listening to Swedish folk music. It rewired something inside me.”
The Tallest Man On Earth
Just Beyond Endless Mountain
1. The Wildest of His Dreams
2. Colors
3. We Got The Pony
4. Scully, It’s Me
5. Just Beyond Endless Mountain
6. Overboda
7. Deliver Me From Trying
8. Times
9. The Forest Keeper
10. In The Silver Wire Up The Hill
11. The Village
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