Kalle Mattson
Ensemble Director: Singer-Songwriter; Contract Instructor; Performance Instructor: Singer-Songwriting
| Email: | KalleWainio3@cunet.carleton.ca |
Kalle Mattson is a Juno & Polaris Music Prize nominated singer/songwriter based in Canada. Since 2009 he has released four full-length albums & two EPs to critical & commercial acclaim. His first music video for ‘Thick As Thieves’ gained over 1,000,000 views & was covered by Time Magazine, NPR & The Huffington Post. It was followed in 2014 by Mattson’s third full-length studio album, the Polaris Music Prize-nominated ‘Someday, The Moon Will Be Gold’, which was inspired by his hometown on the Canadian/U.S. border and the death of his mother five years prior. It received glowing reviews from Pitchfork, Pop Matters, Rolling Stone, & Exclaim called it – “simply, a benchmark in fearless songwriting.” It was promoted by multiple tours across Canada, the US & Europe.
August 2015 saw the release of a new EP, ‘Avalanche’, which Mattson described as a mini-LP concerning the twenty-something miasma of “anxiety, nostalgia, the past, the future.” The music video for ‘Avalanche’ received widespread media attention & was nominated for a 2016 Juno Award, a 2016 Much Music Video Award & won the 2016 Prism Prize. On 2018’s ‘Youth.’, Mattson set out to make a coming-of-age album about the in-between days of post-adolescence and pre-adulthood. It was released to rave reviews with Dominionated saying – “file it under instant classic.”
His newest project ‘summersets’, a duo with longtime collaborator Andrew Sowka, debuted in 2020 with a collection of narrative driven songs set in small town Northern Ontario centred around two characters who meet as summer is coming to end. Their debut full-length, ‘small town story’ was released in 2023. Mattson currently teaches at Carleton University.