SUMMERSETS, THE DUO OF KALLE MATTSON AND ANDREW SOWKA, ANNOUNCE DEBUT LP, SMALL TOWN STORY, OUT JUNE 9, 2023
WATCH / SHARE “AFTERALL” HERE
BUY / STREAM “AFTERALL” HERE
PRE-ORDER SMALL TOWN STORY HERE
Photo Credit : Cayllan Cassavia // DOWNLOAD HIGH-RES
September is when summer sets. It marks an end and a beginning. When Kalle Mattson was growing up in the small northern Ontario town of Sault Ste. Marie, the melancholic dawn of the school year always felt like it should be a calendar reset. It was that feeling that infuses the debut of Mattson’s new project, summersets, on its debut album small town story.
summersets is the duo of Mattson and his childhood friend and long-time bandmate Andrew Sowka, who sing together in Everly-esque harmony throughout small town story, a 16-track narrative song cycle. “Most people go the opposite way: they have a band and then they go solo,” says Mattson. “But it’s great to have another voice and share the burden.”
Today, the pair are sharing the new single off their upcoming LP, “afterall”. "As a record, small town story follows the story of two fictional characters set in small town Northern Ontario and the arc of their relationship, spanning decades,” says Mattson. “Chronologically, ‘afterall’ brings the characters full circle after their breakup, years apart from each other, and hints at their reconciliation. We wrote it near the end of the recording process, at a point where I had the plot of the whole album storyboarded, what needed to happen story and character-wise in each song, but still needed to make this song fit tonally and musically within the context and track listing of the album. It felt like I was backed into a corner, trying to figure out a 3D puzzle of my own making.
“Ultimately, it ended up being one of the easier songs to finish in the studio with Olivier Fairfield (Andy Shauf, Leif Vollebekk) and our producer Jim Bryson playing alongside us. Summersets again.”
WATCH / SHARE “AFTERALL” HERE
BUY / STREAM “AFTERALL” HERE
MORE ABOUT SMALL TOWN STORY
Kalle Mattson has won or been nominated for every major prize in Canada for his three consecutive albums 2014’s Someday, The Moon Will Be Gold, 2015’s Avalanche and 2018’s Youth.. For someone who had almost exclusively written personal material — including an acclaimed breakthrough about the death of his mother when he was a teenager — the singer-songwriter on the cusp of turning 30 was ready for a new challenge.
That’s when he wrote “never love another”, detailing the arc of a fictional relationship inside six verses, inspired in part by songwriters who put short stories to melody: John Prine, Bruce Springsteen, and Kathleen Edwards (the latter from Mattson’s current home of Ottawa).
Mattson wanted to sing and record the song as just a duo with Sowka, who had played in his backing band for years. While touring Youth., the two of them would do four songs in the middle of the set, calling it “the Simon and Garfunkel section” of the show. The first song they then co-wrote was “fake flowers”; that and “never love another” were released on a six-song EP in 2020, credited to a new name: summersets, a reference to the opening line of “fake flowers” and a recurring theme throughout small town story.
WATCH AND SHARE “AFTERTHOUGHT” HERE
The story in question follows one couple from the moment they meet as teenagers through various tribulations, including a breakup when one them receives an “acceptance letter” for a college in another town. “afterthought” concludes the first half of the album, flipping perspective between the two characters after their breakup and when one gets into a car crash. The first single, “afterall” brings the characters full circle after years apart and hints at their reconciliation. Closing track “small town story” is the final letter written to the one character who has passed away, a song for a final-credit sequence.
Mattson wrote all songs in first-person. “I always find it interesting when a songwriter can write from the opposite gender, and be able to sing from someone who’s not your own age,” he says. The couple in small town story are “a lot younger in the beginning, and at the end they’re adults who are parents. To write from all those perspectives, I’d never done that before. I didn’t realize the parallels to my own life until it was done. I’ve never been in a car crash. I don’t have kids. But the emotional core of a lot of it is true.” It was also around this time, in 2021, that Mattson took a job teaching songwriting classes at Ottawa’s Carleton University, espousing the brilliance of Tom Petty and Gillian Welch to his students.
small town story was recorded in short bursts of a song a day, spread over a three-year period, with producer Jim Bryson (Kathleen Edwards, Weakerthans, Tragically Hip), who is one of only a handful of players on the record. After years of Zoom, “I wanted it to sound like people playing together in a room,” says Mattson. Simplicity was the goal, as was starting anew.
WATCH AND SHARE “PASS ME BY” HERE
“I had been ‘Kalle Mattson’ since I was 19 years old, and I had successes but wasn’t successful,” he says. “I wanted a blank slate. I hope there will be people who listen to this and have no clue about my prior records. It was freeing to not only write in this new style and have this snowglobe of a record, so contained, but to have it not be just my face and my voice and have someone else to share it with.”
As one season sets, another begins.
PRE-ORDER SMALL TOWN STORY HERE
SMALL TOWN STORY TRACKLIST
01 fake flowers
02 anywhere you go
03 christian scientist
04 pass me by
05 except (for you)
06 borderline
07 acceptance letter
08 afterthought
09 only you
10 (over now)
11 afterall
12 before you & i
13 unbelievers
14 never love another
15 more less
16 small town story