King of Spain

There is a wry, cockeyed joy to this song that sets it apart from the ascetic folk that surrounds it in the catalog. The acoustic guitar adopts an almost jaunty picking pattern, brighter and more buoyant than the singer's other work, with a rhythmic bounce that suggests a character who refuses to take his own situation entirely seriously. Matsson's vocal delivery here has a theatrical quality — slightly performative, knowingly arch — as he inhabits a narrator who has decided, perhaps absurdly, that becoming the King of Spain is a reasonable ambition. The lyrics are rich with surreal imagery and a kind of romantic grandiosity that is self-aware enough to be funny but earnest enough to be moving. There is something in the folk tradition of the traveling fool, the dreamer who maps impossible journeys onto his own geography. The production remains sparse but feels warmer here, sunlit rather than windswept. It belongs to a lineage of storytelling folk — Dylan's early comic side, early Van Morrison — but filtered through a Swedish sensibility that makes the dreaminess feel genuine rather than performed. You reach for this on an unexpectedly warm afternoon when ambition feels light and possible, when the gap between who you are and who you imagined yourself to be feels like material for a song rather than cause for grief.