photo by Nickolai Hammar

Even if you had earplugs in, the unpredictability of Kristian Matsson’s face was captivating. The maw of the singer’s raging open mouth could become a grin in an instant and devolve back into chaos. Eyes like slits would open into whites as he lunged toward the front row.

Matsson’s dynamism, known onstage as The Tallest Man On Earth, has everything to do with the artist’s momentary idiosyncrasies and attention to detail.

Yes, no single song was drastically different on Monday night at The Waiting Room than on the Swedish folk singer’s three full-length albums. Sure, the vocal tones have become fuller in recent years and diverge a bit from the always-lingering Bob Dylan comparison. And because the records seem to deliberately open up to achieve the live sound of a one-man band, the concert performance might sound like a live carbon copy to a person smoking just outside the window.

If you weren’t paying full attention, the rompy, veiled murder song “The Gardener,” Matsson’s breakout tune from 2008, could have resembled its corresponding track on the debut album Shallow Grave. The reverb-heavy opening track, “To Just Grow Away,” from TMOE’s most recent album, might also sound the same as the record.

If you weren’t paying attention.

photo by Nickolai Hammar

In the physical and emotional moments, Kristian’s reinterpretation of his own work made each song something of a curiosity. With their scores of natural images of the northern Swedish plains — calling to mind many a horse and bird and open field — Tallest Man pieces can lyrically run along like a stream. But live, they’re more of a flex-and-release waterway, a current that pools for a second and rushes on.

On Monday night, Matsson bit hard onto certain lines, only to whisper the next lyric and then growl the next from somewhere deep in his ribcage. A song like “Revelation Blues,” the second track from his latest album There’s No Leaving Now, takes on a new kind of presence when it’s sung with the stark dynamics of a man making his revelation right there under the hot lights. It’s as though he were articulating the song’s difficult messages for the first time.

And as Matsson cycled among five different guitars — each tuned in advance by his touring stagehand who Matsson rightfully praised for his work — a friend made an important point about Monday’s performance. Another performer might be able to technically replicate Matsson’s open-tuned super-strum on tracks such as “The Gardener” or “King of Spain,” or the brilliant picking complexity of 2012 songs such as “Leading Me Now” and “Criminals.” But this hypothetical musician could never play Goliath like the slight Swedish man did on stage.

Matsson acted as his own ragdoll at The Waiting Room, sometimes hurling himself into the rearmost curtain of the stage as though he might not come ever back from those shadows. And when he inevitably did make it back to the microphone, people cheered him on. When he finally cleared the stage after 17 songs and an encore, it was littered with picks he’d thrown into the ground liked spiked footballs at the end of a dozen triumphant conclusions.

photos by Michael Todd

And you don’t need to crowd surf if you can exert stage command constantly and simply by locking eyes with fans. Matsson’s eyeline could be seen making the rounds, with everyone in front third of the audience taking his or her turn. Matsson would pick a face, melt it while punctuating the air with his sandpaper shrieks and move on to the next one, opposing all performance convention that dictates looking over the heads of the crowd or closing your eyes to feel the music.

Eye contact, as intimidating as it could feel when it occurred unexpectedly, might have been the primary mode of sharing and stage-to-floor interaction for Matsson, whose disdain for crowd banter was communicated through half-joking, half-bitter requests that people let him do what he came to do.

“Is it OK if sometimes I just tell you guys to shut up?” Matsson asked when he moved to his piano for the only time that night to play the title track from There’s No Leaving Now. He adjusted himself on the piano bench, noted the between-song chatter of the crowd, leaned into the mic and mumbled, “Shut up.”

The honesty, the clarity, the discomfort of the not-so-subtle request got a few laughs and a little more silence, and was alleviated by a small, thin smile and Matsson referring to himself as a “Swedish asshole.” On another occasion, when a voice from the audience came above the intro to “A Thousand Ways,” Matsson glared and somehow added an ad-libbed bassline to the song, actually playing at someone, and saying more with his right thumb than he could with his mouth.

But only a few times did Matsson have to ask for the audience respect he wanted; most of the time he got it on principle. Phones were relatively scarce. The audience even treaded lightly around Matsson with its singing along. There was a particularly eerie moment early in the night during “Love Is All” when the crowd only made itself known by hissing the esses of the culminating chorus lines just a half-second longer than the singer: “Oh, I said I could rise from the harness of our goals / Here come the tears, but like always / I let them fall.”

Matsson closed the show with “The Wild Hunt,” which transformed into a cover of Paul Simon’s “Graceland.” He’s covered the 1986 song for years, including a recorded release on the B-side of his 2010 “King of Spain” single. For an artist with such apparent adoration for his own work, Mattson showed his affection for Simon’s famous deliverance song by letting it ring in the air.

In an interview with Hear Nebraska last week Timothy Showalter (Strand of Oaks), who’s touring as Tallest Man’s opener, described Tallest Man’s fanbase as one of the best and most genuine in music today. Showalter pegged TMOE crowds as gathering to share a secret love. Even surrounded by other fans, it’s a personal relationship to the music that they’re simultaneously willing to disclose and keep from the others around them.

photo by Nickolai Hammar

Monday night supported that sentiment. A few hundred people gathered to see one man pluck his many guitars and to sing along under their breath for fear of giving away too much. And though we could ostensibly acknowledge we just shared him with an entire Omaha club, in a few hours’ time we could return to our albums and our headphones and the secret of knowing that at some point, The Tallest Man On Earth had stared right into us.

Chance Solem-Pfeifer is a Hear Nebraska intern. This show was easily top five all time for him. Reach Chance at chancesp@hearnebraska.org.