Planklog: He Wants To Be The King Of Spain

Y’know, someone should probably set Kristian Matsson straight. There are two main issues to address; firstly, five-foot-nine does not constitute the ‘tallest man on Earth’, and secondly, any hopes he has pinned on becoming the King of Spain are severely misguided.

To step aside from my misled attempt at humor, in truth the great draw of The Tallest Man On Earth is his hyperbolic storytelling instinct -

“Well, obviously I’m not the crazy killer in ‘The Gardener’. It’s not ‘me.’ But there is some part of you being played out in every song, even in those characters. Hopefully. Maybe that’s what makes you believe the character. We all have something violent in us, something dark or worried— jealousy, for example, like in ‘The Gardener.’ Standing up there singing all about you isn’t all that interesting, I don’t want to just do that. It’s not very fun, and it may be dishonest. It gives people the idea you think ‘you know who you are,’ which you don’t at this point, if ever. So really that’s just another character you’re talking about. Really, I just want to have freedom. You want to be able to make music in a number of different ways. But it’s all ‘you’ one way or another.” - Kristian Matsson, Sound of the City interview.

- the guy is a dreamer, in the loosest, most stirring sense. This is, as best as I can grasp, the reason why I keep on coming back to his music; a desire for the dark, the romantic, the unbelievable. Kristian is not afraid to to grab at the tiniest fragment of humanity and write about it as if it were humanity itself.

Through all this it is remarkable, but somehow inevitable, that his tall tales evoke such a strong, undeniable taste of the truth.

MP3: A Field of Birds - The Tallest Man on Earth (theme song for the Yellow Bird Project)

MP3: The Wild Hunt (live) - The Tallest Man on Earth

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