BEAUCOUP BOUQUETS: HOW JENS LEKMAN BECAME EVERY WEDDING’S BEST MAN
- Bernard Zuel
- Sep 16
- 6 min read
THE 44-YEAR-OLD MAN battling wonky internet connections today has had a music career for a quarter of a century, releasing (and re-releasing) more than half a dozen albums, but that may not be what hundreds, if not thousands of people will remember him for. And Jens Lekman has made peace with that. Then made a book, and now an album with that.
A Swede who has lived elsewhere, including Melbourne, a singer/songwriter who has amused and bemused with droll stories that couldn’t possibly be about him, but it turns out they are, a romantic with an inconsistent track record in romance but a dogged determination to continue, Lekman once wrote a song offering himself quite explicitly, if still theoretically: If You Ever Need A Stranger (To Sing At Your Wedding).
It turns out people did. And sought him out to do so. And he said yes, and kept saying yes, all over the world, even as his career rose and dipped and rose again – and footage shot at some of those weddings appear in one of his new filmclips. “I want to be of service,” he said, sometimes writing a song for the couple, on occasion doing a suite of covers, mostly playing his own old school pop songs, with their Burt Bacharach-inspired melodies and their Jonathan Richman-esque lyrics.
Two decades of this gave him enough stories to form the basis of a book with novelist David Levithan, about a musician who plays weddings, a woman who doesn’t stick around, and the songs he writes for each wedding. Now there’s an album with the same name, Songs For Other People’s Weddings, but a twist: it’s the tale of the two lovers told sequentially in songs, of multiple musical styles, with the weddings as background or inspiration. And it is classic Lekman in every way.
There are so many questions, possibly including ‘are you mad?’, but one that nags at me is what song has he had to say no, I can’t do that, to at a wedding?
“I don’t think I’ve ever had to say no, but there have been a lot of occasions where I have had to say, are you sure? And then, do you know what that song is about?,” Lekman says, a disembodied voice but no less drily expressive for the absence of a picture. “For example, there has been a lot of people who want to hear Maple Leaves at their wedding, and I think for some people they are just thinking well, the wedding is in October and maple leaves, that’s the Fall, that’s autumn …”
(We interrupt this answer to take a sample of lyrics from Maple Leaves, which begins with the narrator walking home in the rain falling hard on him and “every homeless kitty” in the city, and he is unhappy and confused. “Oh please God bring relief/Even if it’s only brief/That she says we were just make-believe/But I thought she said maple leaves.” By song’s end things don’t seem to have improved – “and when she talked about the fall/I thought she talked about Mark E Smith” – and he finishes, repeating “I never understood at all”.
We now return you to Lekman’s answer.)
“While others have said we don’t just want to have happy-go-lucky wedding songs; we want to acknowledge other sides of love as well. So from time to time of had to have this conversation with couples. Fortunately, nobody’s wanted to hear I’m Leaving You Because I Don’t Love You.”
(Yes, that is a real song by Lekman from his 2007 album Night Falls Over Kortedala, now reissued in a different arrangement in the replacement album The Linden Trees Are Still In Blossom. Why replacement album? It’s a longish story, to do with samples, legalities, the disappearance of the original from streamers and more, but that’s not important right now.)
Maybe the next stage of his career sideline would be playing songs for the end of relationships. Could he see himself being hired to deliver the bad news or explain the decision?
(Maybe a song like The World Moves On. Sample lyric: “She said, ‘I wish you just would have cheated on me instead’/And loving without loving is always the worst crime/I know all the signs and signals 'cause now I've been on both sides/The way you choose your words, the limpness of your hand.”)
“I’m at that point right now, when people around me are getting divorced,” Lekman says. “Maybe that’s where the money is. I’m not sure.”
Looking for a little bit of common ground, I recall my ancient uni-days past as a DJ (not the cool club variety, but the decidedly uncool weddings, parties, anything type) and ponder that unlike performing generally, there is something both crucial and inconsequential about being a wedding singer or DJ: you are there to craft the message or create the mood, but you are just as easily that bloke playing the tunes while the table with the drunk cousins carry on loudly. Does he feel freed or weighed down by this responsibility or lack of it?
“Both: it depends on the occasion,” says Lekman. “I often feel this responsibility to be the one who messes up a little bit in the beginning. People seem like they can’t really enjoy a wedding until someone has tripped or forgotten the rings or done something wrong. Because of that I’ve realised that me, as a stranger, I am the perfect person to take that upon me, to go up to the microphone and say ‘oh shit, I don’t remember the lyrics to the song’, or something. And then people relax, they laugh a little bit.”
He is The Fool?
“Yeah, I guess so. The Fool has an important job,” he says. “But I also write songs for [the specific couple] and doing that for me is an amazing challenge I love to take on but also a big responsibility to paint portraits of a couple, to capture them. I also feel like, what you mentioned about being a wedding DJ, there is a difference. I’m not always the guest of honour; sometimes I’m just the singer.
"For a while I did the thing where, like a normal wedding band, I played covers for five hours, and I had my own PA with me, and I have huge respect for people who do that. That’s hard work and a lot of responsibility.”
Preach brother, preach.
This far into the process, with a book and album the most obvious fruit of it, what, if anything, has Lekman learnt about his songwriting from doing these weddings? Does he see some of the songs in a different light now? Does he see himself differently?
“First of all I think it made me feel like I was a really good songwriter. Or I was really good at writing songs,” he says. :But when I wrote songs specific for the couple I realised how quickly I could actually write. It takes a lot of effort to write a really good song, but I can write a pretty good song in like an hour. And that surprised me.
“I guess the other thing is that playing my songs at these weddings made me feel that the songs meant something and made me see the songs from the outside in a way. When people said this song is the one we want to hear on a big day because of this and that, I guess it made me like my songs better. Made me like myself better as a songwriter.”
That’s no small impact for any creative type.
“One reason why I kept playing at weddings was because in the 2010s it felt like music was just becoming something nice to have in the background and I felt that music lost its significance. For me at least. Thinking of where I came from and the reason why I was drawn to music, and the kind of music I was drawn to, it felt like something was lost. Like music became some sort of scented candle or something.
“So one of the reasons I kept playing at weddings is because the music meant something there, it meant something really significant.”
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Jens Lekman’s album, Songs For Other People’s Weddings, is out now on Secretly Canadian.
David Levithan and Jens Lekman’s book, Songs For Other People’s Weddings, is out now from Abrams.
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