Kalle Mattson has been writing and performing music in Ottawa for a while. You could probably say this city is his home. But it’s not his hometown—and it’s not the setting of his gorgeous new album, small town story, made with long-time friend and bandmate Andrew Sowka.
Mattson and Sowka perform as summersets, and they’ve heard all the folk duo comparisons—mainly the Everly Brothers and Simon & Garfunkel.
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Ahead of their album launch at Red Bird Live on Sept. 23, Apartment613 caught up with the duo to chat touring, the shift from solo to duo, and, of course, small town stories.
summersets. Photo by Cayllan Cassavia/Killbeat Music.
APT613: Kalle Mattson, you’ve been making music solo for a long time. How did this duo come about? How do your two styles mesh, and where is there friction?
summersets: It came about pretty naturally actually. Andrew Sowka has been playing in my live band on my solo records since 2014, and while we were touring my last solo album Youth, we would have a spot in the show we dubbed “the Simon & Garfunkel section”. We would play a few songs stripped down, two acoustic guitars, and sing in harmony the whole time. We both quickly realized that these were the favourite parts of the show for us, so it sort of just made sense to follow that road further by making it its own separate project.
As for styles, Andrew is an amazing singer, multi-instrumentalist and collaborator, and a lot of those things I’ve never had before working on my solo material, so its been great being able to share the “burden” with someone else.
small town story is a narrative song cycle—can you describe that narrative a bit? How personal are the stories to you?
small town story started out with one song, and it was a songwriting experiment, to see if I could tell the story of a relationship, from the moment two people meet until one passes away in six verses. That song ended up being “never love another” on the album, and it was all fiction. I’ve never been married, or have a kid, or own a home, but I was so reenergized by writing in this completely new narrative style, about two fictional characters, that I figured I could expand that one song and that whole relationship out into a full-length album. Sixteen songs later it became small town story.
How has the rest of the tour been so far? You started the tour in your hometown of Sault Ste. Marie—how was that show?
It’s been really great. Truthfully, at a certain point I wasn’t sure if I was ever going to tour again. Leading up to 2020 and COVID, I was pretty burnt out on non-stop touring for almost seven years. I had gotten older, priorities change, etc., etc. But once we had this album I knew we had to book some small shows to promote it and the response has been fantastic. It’s been incredibly fun and rewarding, so I think we’ll keep doing more.
Red Bird is a venue that we’ve been writing about since it opened, so I want to ask: Who reached out to who? How excited are you to be playing a fairly new venue in Ottawa?
We reached out to them. I had seen some shows there and loved that it was a true listening room within Ottawa, something we’ve desperately needed for a long time, and was the perfect size for us to debut this new project and show.
Catch summersets at Red Bird Live this Saturday, September 23, for the release of their debut LP small town story.
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