The Wild Hunt
The Tallest Man On Earth; "You're Going Back"; Amazon Warehouse
We had four CDs for the road trip I almost missed, though I can only name three now: a Crystal Castles mix; The Con by Tegan and Sara; and the first disc of Dark Was the Night. The other one is lost to memory.
I’d been on a bender with friends the night before, and by some twist of fate—or maybe just sheer stubbornness—I stayed up late enough to catch the moment when everyone decided to hit the road. I don’t even know if I was formally invited on this adventure, but I know that if I’d crashed on the couch, I would’ve definitely stayed behind. Instead, I climbed into the car with two other kids, groggy but exhilarated, still drunk, and we headed out toward the West Coast, bound for Salem, Oregon. I think we saw the sun rise as we were driving out of our midwestern city to parts unknown.
Famously, my friend forgot his socks. I didn’t pack much more than a backpack, but I was certain to bring my new prize: an old iPod Nano I’d found in the garbage a few weeks before. I was deep into my trash-picking phase then, scouring for forgotten treasures, and this little relic felt like a jackpot. I loaded it up with folky albums, the kind that felt dusty and timeless, and had it in my wallet while I wandered the alleys, playing rag and bone man. Among those albums was The Wild Hunt.
My friend threw up, maybe somewhere in Minnesota, keeping it in as long as he could, and afterwards the Midwest rolled by in a blur of open skies and flat horizons. I remember driving through the flat expanse of North Dakota, the landscape stripped bare, as Matsson sang about faraway places and the ache of distance. When the cyclone hit and I thought about the morning glory cloud, I couldn’t help but turn my mind to roughnecks working the oil derricks, imagining they were singing their own kind of folk songs inspired by Kristian’s work. Sure, his music isn’t incredibly original—at this point in his career he sings in an early Bob Dylan rasp, writing songs that are a pastiche of murder ballads, Mississippi blues, and trad folk from the British Isles—but it’s perfectly evocative of the revivalism that was happening in that era, much like Dark Was the Night was.
The drive home was marked by more peculiar detours. In Iowa, we made an unplanned stop at a Walmart to throw out a bag of trash that had inexplicably traveled with us. It was recycling we meant to drop off at the community center, maybe? Or possibly just a testament to the lack of foresight that permeated the journey. Call it “dispensing with our baggage”.
In Montana and Idaho, though, the mood shifted. The landscape turned breathtaking—majestic vistas of mountains and rivers, with wind turbines dotting the Columbia River Gorge. It was the first time we had seen real mountains, real rivers, and we were all the better for it.
What I really remember, after all was said and done, was that we had made it to Oregon and left for San Francisco. We ran out of change to cross the bridge and somehow got turned around, taking a wrong turn that put us into Utah somehow. We got pulled over for speeding on the outskirts of Salt Lake City with our out-of-state plates. I was asleep in the back seat as it happened, so waking up with a start to a police officer was not the best alarm clock. I felt like a composite character from an outlaw country song, but we got let off without a ticket.
From the first pluck of Kristian Matsson’s guitar, it felt like a call to adventure, his voice ragged and insistent, full of urgency and longing. There’s a restlessness in that album that matched the mood of the trip perfectly—a feeling of being in motion, of chasing something just out of reach. But as we returned home, and to everyday life, bad luck caught up with us: the car let out one last gasp of defiance and blew a tire. It felt like the trip wasn’t going to let us off easy, as if it needed one more obstacle to complete the story. But we limped the rest of the way back, tired and sunburned, with more stories than we’d ever anticipated.
Verdict: Keep
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