Kalle Mattson

The pseudonym of Ottawa-based, Sault Ste. Marie-reared, Canadian singer/songwriter Kalle Wainio, Kalle Mattson began recording his Bob Dylan, Wilco, and Weakerthans-inspired folk-rock songs at the age of 17. He issued his debut long-player, Whisper Bee, in 2009, followed by the critically acclaimed, Howie Beck-mixed Anchors in 2011, the latter of which resulted in a pair of Northern Ontario Music Award wins for Album of the Year (Group) and Songwriter of the Year. An EP, Lives in Between, arrived in 2012 and yielded two viral videos in “Waterfalls” and “Thick as Thieves.” 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. 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.” ~ James Christopher Monger