IS TRUTH WRITTEN ON THE FACE OF JENS LEKMAN THIS WIND BACK WEDNESDAY?

The thinking woman and man’s second favourite Swedish pop songwriter, Jens Lekman, returns in September with his first album after a long absence. It’s called Songs For Other People’s Weddings, which it turns out is actually is. Of course it is. And it will be preceded, next week, by a book from Lekman and David Levithan, which will serve as a companion piece.

Which makes sense when you realise the songs and book were the fruit of a sideline in wedding singing Lekman undertook when fans took him up on the offer in his 2004 song, If You Ever Need A Stranger (To Sing At Your Wedding), and booked him for their weddings. Because of course they did.

This rang a bell in the Wind Back Wednesday file room, and sure enough that song features in this 2005 interview with Lekman, then new to most of us, when his bona fides as a songwriter were clear but his seriousness or otherwise as a lyricist and storyteller was up for debate.

Having heard some of the album already, I can confirm it is pure Jens Lekman, and yes you can take that how you wish – though fans will know it is a ringing endorsement. But while you wait for September 12, enjoy this early burrowing into the Lekman mind.

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LIAR, LIAR PANTS ON fire. Jens Lekman is a liar. A self confessed one at that.

Maybe it is one of those late night confessions: the body’s weakness overcoming the mind’s defences. It is after all well past midnight in an outer suburb of Gothenberg in Sweden when Lekman answers his phone.

But given young Lekman is what your grandmother used to a call a dirty stop out, for whom the wee hours are the productive hours, that explanation won’t wash. Nor will any claim to language difficulties, for Lekman, in the way of those infernal Europeans, is not just fluent in English but, as his lyrics show, is capable of nuance, depth and wit. And rather good rhyme.

He puts that facility to exceptional use on When I Said I Wanted To Be Your Dog, his debut album of acoustic, mid-tempo, hook-filled songs which echo both Bacharach and Belle and Sebastian and are sung in a fetchingly lugubrious style. This is a collection of sad/funny and funny/sad songs dotted with precise, real life details about meeting the Queen of Sweden (Silvia), scratching obscenities on a girlfriend’s father’s Mercedes to impress her and then being caught by the police (You Are The Light), briefly finding God when smitten with a seriously Christian girl (A Higher Power) and breaking up with a girl after realising, in the middle of a riot, that it’s all come to nothing (Do You Remember The Riots?)

That’s some kind of life he’s had and he’s only 23.

“There are actually a few lies on the album,” Lekman breaks down and admits under the unrelenting pressure of this Camp X Ray-like interrogation. “I counted them recently, there are three of them. The first one is that I never got busted. I did all the things I said in [You Are the Light] but I never got busted for it. I do know a lot of power ballads but I don’t know any songs by Bacharach and David, or didn’t when I wrote [If You Ever Need A Stranger (To Sing At Your Wedding)]. And also I never met Silvia, the queen of Sweden.

“I thought I did,” he says plaintively. “But my mum called me up after I released the album and said ‘you didn’t meet Silvia’. I said, of course I did, she was at my school when I was seven. She said yes she was there but you never met her. [My mother] got upset then and said ‘don’t you know what happens to celebrities when they lie?’”

As if to placate mothers everywhere, Lekman adds: “There are lot of other things people think I lied about on the album but they’re true.”

What’s also true it seems is that while he may sound as if he grew up on a diet of Morrissey and Marr and other purveyors of songs for sad but articulate boys, it was Austrian Eurodisco which claimed him. His explanation is the “upside down” nature of pop fandom in Sweden. And the fact that Morrissey fans used to beat him up. Really.

“I was looking for someone I could relate to and of course I would probably have loved Morrissey if other people weren’t listening to him. His fans were the popular people, the good looking people so since they took Morrissey I had to take something completely different. I listened to Eurodisco [he laughs throatily] the most hideous Eurodisco I could find.”

As Che Guevera could probably confirm, sometimes being a rebel can be tough. Probably why Lekman’s songs sound sad at first, until you realise he’s resolutely optimistic and romantic - or taking the piss.

“The songs are about things that have been really hard for me. So many songs are about the same girl,” says Lekman. “I used to write songs that were extremely dark and hopeless, about giving up on life completely until four years ago when I realised that when I wrote those songs they were just making me more depressed. I realised that music controls me more than I control music. I had to write songs that were convincing me that things would get better.”

So, do people come up to you and ask why are you so sad?

“Sometimes people come up to me and ask me why I’m so happy,” he retorts cheerfully. Swedishly.

READ MORE

Jens Lekman – Oxford Art Factory, March 13, 2018: live review 

Jens Lekman’s Songs For Other People’s Weddings is out on September 12 through Secretly Canadian.