Sault Ste Marie musician Kalle Mattson has had a great year already.
He just returned from a three-and-a-half week tour of Europe and now crosses most of Canada.
He comes to Lethbridge, March 15 to play the Owl Acoustic Lounge.
“ It’s been great. Really awesome and exciting. I just got
back from Europe and now I get to see most of Canada,” he continued.
“ I had a lot of sold out shows in Europe and I had never even been there before. It’s been very exciting,” he enthused.
His brand new CD “ Someday, The Moon Will Be Gold” was released in Canada three week’s ago and won’t be released in Europe until next week.
He credited the internet for his success in Europe.
“I was fortunate enough to have a couple videos that have done very well and I put all of my CDs up online for free online.
So people knew exactly what they were getting,” he said adding he couldn’t choose one single highlight from the European tour.
“Music has a different place in European society. People go out to see music on Monday and Tuesday nights. Here it’s like pulling teeth. In Canada Mondays and Tuesdays are usually off nights,” he observed.
His latest album was inspired by his mother’s death when he was 16.
“I wrote the album in 2012. I had come back to my childhood home. I was working at a terrible job and living in my child hood home all alone for the first time and my grandmother passed on after that. And it gave me a chance to deal with things I hadn’t dealt with when I was 16,” he said.
“It really puts it out there. The lyrics are really frank. But there are definitely two sides to the album,” he said adding reviews have been overwhelmingly positive for places like Exclaim Magazine and Pitchfork.
“ There has been great buzz,” he said.
He will be touring with his band — drummer Kyle Woods, bassist Andrew Sowka, keyboardist/ guitarist Rory Lewis and JF Beauchamp playing trumpet, flugelhorn, samplers and percussion.
“I’ve know Rory since we were 13 years old. We’ve been making music together for the past four years. The other guys are relatively new,” he said adding they have been playing with him for two years. He toured with Beauchamp in Europe and will be bringing the entire band back to Europe in April. But first — Canada.
“I’ve played Lethbridge twice. So we’ve got the new record. We played Lethbridge last year. We’d been playing some of the songs, but you couldn’t buy them.
There is no charge for the show which begins at 9 p.m., March 15.
