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.”

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.

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.

“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.

by Michael Barclay