Jens Lekman
Prophetical songwriting process in tow, the Swede embraces the out-of-control factor of doing interviews
By Catherine Disabato
Published: November 5th, 2007 | 2:51am
The album cover for Night Falls Over Kortedala (2007), Jens Lekman’s second full-length, features the Swedish singer-songwriter/sampler in a portrait of celestial bliss. His eyes are closed and his mouth hints of a smile, as two beatific hands peak out from blue clouds to give Lekman what must be a heavenly haircut.
The tranquility of the singer’s face mirrors the serenity of the album’s vocals. It’s the perfect fusion of delicate instrumentation and light, fuzzy samples that Lekman fills his songs with. In fact, the image of Lekman on his album seems somehow symbolically representative of almost every aspect of himself as a musician, from his touring to his method of songwriting.
Kortedala, a mainly residential district outside of Gothenburg, Sweden, is known for its abundance of trees, a 1950s vibe, and now, as the childhood home of Jens Lekman. “I think it’s just that I’ve identified myself as a person from the suburbs rather than the city,” he says. “Especially in Gothenburg … to get into the city was a big project, because of public transportation and definitely because when you were a teenager, you didn’t know anyone in the city, just hung out with the people out here in the suburbs.” The suburban landscapes that Lekman paints in his songs are less representative of small-town life and more vignettes of relationships unfettered by busy, city life.
Images of suburbia are only a portion of what goes into Lekman’s songwriting. “I always come up with a title first, which can be a word or a phrase,” he says. “After the title, I usually decide what that word has to do with, what the topic is of the song. Then I write the song, and then I make the song happen in real life. I have a way of writing — what’s the word? — prophetically. It’s almost like a prophecy. I write the song first, then I make it happen.”
Though Lekman’s melodies are aggressively upbeat — filled with tinkling bells, light woodblock percussion, choruses of singers in a doo-wop tradition, and softly strummed guitar melodies — he treats his subject matters with a mischievous, last-minute seriousness. “I often start writing songs that are really silly,” Lekman says. “I start writing them as an entertainer because I feel like I’m an entertainer. I wanna sing songs that make people smile and laugh. But then, in the end, I’ve felt a big responsibility for the characters in the song, to not let the joke be on them. I always feel like I have to end the song with a little tear in the eye or with some kind of seriousness to it.”
During the songwriting process, Lekman tweaked one line of the polka-and-piano tune, “Friday Night at the Drive-In Bingo,” to “and all I’m doing here is just waiting for you…” adding a twinge of desperation, and just a hint of unrequited love. “What came out was that I actually started loving that song and [thinking] it was the best song I’d ever written,” he says. “It started meaning something to me.”
Perhaps it’s because of this title-first songwriting methodology that Lekman’s tracks come off as focused stories, with little or no lyrical meandering. This doesn’t mean there aren’t elements of the fantastic in his songwriting, but rather that they come from the writer, not the song itself. “Until a certain point, I did believe everything I wrote had happened and was true,” he says. “But over the last few years, people have said, ‘That’s not what happened.’ [I’d say], ‘What do you mean, of course that happened. I remember it.’ They’d say, ‘No no, that’s not what happened.’”
Lekman’s existence as a musical artist seems partially based on his interactions with not just memory but also interpretation. He used to hate giving interviews, because they would often result in misinterpretation, which he attributed in part to his mumbling and speaking before thinking through his thoughts. Now, he embraces the variations of Jens Lekman that emerge. “Every time I read something about [me], every time someone has a very distorted image of me and tells me about it, these days I just get this warm, giggling feeling inside,” he says. “Like a kid up to no good. I love it, I just love everything that’s out of control.”
And it’s that element of misremembered suburban life, mixed with a nearly perfect ear for melody, and further blended with an application of samples so flawless, that it’s hard to image their life outside of Lekman’s songs. Lekman may not only be one of the best artists to come out of Sweden in the last decade, but one of the most under-known and under-appreciated artists in the music business today.
Issue #35
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