#15 - The Tallest Man on Earth - Dark Bird is Home

The Tallest Man on Earth - Dark Bird is Home

Dead Oceans, 2015

As I mentioned in the write-up for The Mountain Goats’ Beat the Champ, 2015 was a particularly rough year for me. My thyroid cancer diagnosis in January of that year thrust me into a dark spiral where all I thought about was dying, leaving my wife a widow, and leaving my 6-month-old baby girl fatherless. Even though the doctors assured me that thyroid cancer was very treatable, I didn’t trust them. And I was right! Because what was supposed to be a relatively simple treatment (Step 1: Remove Thyroid and any other affected tissue. Step 2: Take Radioactive Iodine. Step 3: Cured) ended up taking a thyroidectomy, two full treatments of Radioactive iodine, and a modified neck dissection that put me in the hospital for a week and left me looking like I was the victim of a Columbian Necktie. 

Radioactive iodine ablation therapy requires you to stay in isolation for a week, so I holed up in my old bedroom at my parents house. “This is ok!” I thought. “I’ll play video games and watch movies it’ll be ok.” Even though you’re not supposed to get sick, I got sick (it might have been that my old room was basically untouched and very dusty and could have just been allergies) and I was miserable for the first few days. But then I started feeling better, and I started listening to Dark Bird is Home a lot. It’s my favorite The Tallest Man on Earth record and that’s saying something because all of those albums are outstanding. Per Wikipedia, Kristian Matsson says this album was inspired by the death of a close family member and his divorce from his wife, and that helps explain the melancholy that runs through this album. It’s definitely the most lush of Matsson’s albums, and the most evocative. While the sparse recordings on Shallow Grave and The Wild Hunt, the orchestration on Dark Bird is Home elevates the songs and makes them almost otherworldly. I would sit out on the back patio in the morning drinking coffee and listening to this album, and I would feel the weight lift a little bit. I tried to imagine the radioactive iodine attacking the cancerous thyroid cells in my body, even though I was still dubious that this was the end of it. It certainly wasn’t the end, but when I took radioactive iodine again following my neck surgery in October, I brought Dark Bird is Home with me again, and again it was a huge help to my mental well-being.

The longlist for this list had THREE Tallest Man on Earth records on it, and while The Wild Hunt and There’s No Leaving Now are both rock-solid contenders, there’s an emotional depth to this one that isn’t necessarily lacking in the other two, but man this one just hits you in the gut. It’s a divorce record, but instead of the bitterness of Blood on the Tracks you get the heartbreaking sadness of acceptance. It’s more melancholy than any of the previous records, but never gets bogged down in sadness. Everything is just so measured, and it’s one of the things that makes Matsson such a compelling songwriter. His melodies, voice, and guitar work are all tremendous, but his songs portray a real point of view that you don’t get from lesser artists. There’s a vibe to these Tallest Man on Earth records that just feels like home.