Last summer, Kristian Matsson lamented that steady touring had slowed the arrival of I Love You. It’s a Fever Dream., his fifth album as the Tallest Man on Earth. “I can’t write good stuff on tour,” he complained. “I can’t write about life on a tour bus.” Ironically, Fever Dream arrives as a focused and frequently lovely rumination on life lived on a tour bus. Songs unfold in hotel bars, on open roads, beneath vast blue bowls of rural sky. The rhythms of perpetual travel pulse beneath acoustic melodies that lie somewhere between Dylan and Sufjan—a few gentle, a few forceful. With depth and delicacy, Matsson explores the banalities and oddities of tour, like the phenomenon of performing for an adoring audience to whom you are a stranger.
If Matsson’s last album, 2015’s Dark Bird Is Home, was a sharp, urgent diegesis of divorce, Fever Dream represents the dull aftermath of separation. How, he asks, should he now move through the landscape of his life? Is it best to remain in familiar places, where painful reminders mingle with the comforting residue of what once was? Or is the answer terra incognita, where familiarity can neither sting nor console?
Matsson engages with these questions on each of Fever Dream’s 10 songs. He turns his history over and over in his hands, and he relays his findings, tactile and intangible. The record is rich with observations of the world beyond his windows. “Hotel Bar” spans from Brooklyn to southern Africa, where he imagines himself as a cheetah, scaling a “shaky tree” in search of friends on the savannah. Sometimes, he is trapped beneath the sky; sometimes, he imagines, he is the sky. He stumbles through a featureless dark on “There’s a Girl,” and recedes “deep into the forest” on “I’m a Stranger Now,” wondering if anyone else feels “just like a map of where you’ve been.” To end a partnership is, in effect, to depart from the home you made in another person. The daily churn of the tour bus only compounds the problem. Constant travel makes real the emotional disorientation of divorce.
We hear, too, of the less perceptible effects of this lifestyle. On the stand-out “I’m a Stranger Now,” Matsson sings of himself as such; on the following song, he becomes a ghost, expanding the anonymity of road life past alienation and towards something more like death. “Why do the hours disappear when I speak so loving of where I have been?” he sings on “Waiting for My Ghost.” Even in his present, he seems captive to fond recollections of the past. He yearns, more than anything, “for my ghost to return”; failing that, he hopes to learn from his suffering. On “There’s a Girl,” he aches for a new love to liberate him: “She will find me in the dark, where I used to stumble/And then I won’t be there no more.” The slippage in tenses is an impressive lyrical feint, gliding from future to past to the final, subtle admission that he is still, presently, in the dark.
Matsson’s music mirrors his lyrical themes. Though he remains devoted to sparse arrangements of guitar, banjo, and harmonica, these songs begin to veer into more adventurous territory. “Hotel Bar” introduces a horn section, and “The Running Styles of New York” is bookended by momentary blips of electronics. These new elements are deployed sparingly and selectively, a sprinkle of salt to draw new flavor from familiar sound. Tempos vary, too, from raucous stomping to slow, plaintive fingerpicking—as if he’s stretching, sprinting, growing fatigued, slowing down. As in his words, he wrestles with the question of where to go, and how quickly.
Listening to Fever Dream recalls Joanna Newsom’s observation about the moment she decided to marry Andy Samberg. “It was a very heavy thing, because you’re inviting death into your life,” she said. “The idea of death stops being abstract, because there is someone you can’t bear to lose.” Real love, she said, “contains death inside of it,” and death, in turn, “contains love inside of it.” Divorce is not death, but it is a weighty loss—of home, of partnership, of personal identity—that must, somehow, be borne. On Fever Dream, Matsson awakes to a world that has re-formed seamlessly around his loss. The task of laying down roots, of building a new, stable identity, seems unfathomable when the very architecture of his life is one of impermanence. Perhaps Matsson isn’t up to writing about life on a tour bus; perhaps the spinning wheels below make him seasick. But he has written about life on a tour bus, and in so doing, located the love contained within.
