Photo credit: Ellika Henrikson
Jens Lekman
Nobody makes happier sad music than Jens Lekman, the Swedish singer-songwriter with a knack for documenting life’s foibles. Lekman’s breakout 2007 album, Night Falls Over Kortedala, set his wry lyrics to a confetti shower of jubilant pop accompaniments, and his latest album, 2017’s Life Will See You Now, is even more musically audacious, animating his droll songs with disco beats, calypso breakdowns and EDM interruptions.
Ahead of his performance at The Back Room at Colectivo, Lekman chatted with the Shepherd Express from his native Gothenburg, Sweden, about balancing humor and tenderness and coming to terms with Jens Lekman as a character.
How do you tour behind an album like Life Will See You Now? I imagine there are a lot of directions you could take this music on stage.
I’m actually touring solo, just me and my guitar and my sampler. So, I think I’m just going to rely on the songs and the stories. Right now, I’m sort of improvising when I’m playing the shows, because I have so many songs in my head that I can play. So, depending on the mood of the night, I change the set a lot, but it usually goes from quite minimal acoustic to full-on dance party. The tricky thing is making that transition between the two and having that feel natural.
I feel like I’ve been working now for 15 years trying to perfect that. I think there’s a sense of magic in having people come in expecting a quiet acoustic evening, and then end up taking their clothes off and dancing on the tables in the end. I think that’s always been my mission.
You’ve always had that contrast on your albums, too, between really sad songs and really upbeat music.
I think I write often about the darker and sadder aspects of life, but I always feel like I have a responsibility to not just drop that in the lap of the listener. I want to offer everyone some sort of light at the end of the tunnel or some sort of hope. And that’s why I often work with more upbeat and happier music. There’s a song on my last record called “Hotwire the Ferris Wheel,” where a friend of mine—and this is something that happened—looked at me, and she said: “If you’re ever going to write a song about this, please don’t make it a sad song.” And that song is about trying to turn a quite sad moment—my friend just found out her boyfriend had been cheating on her for some time—into this magical, beautiful moment, and turn a sad memory into a happy memory. That’s always been part of my mission. [Pauses] I feel I’m writing a manifesto or something; I feel like I’m ending every sentence with “That’s part of my mission.”
Did you always strive for that balance between the sad and upbeat, or is that something you settled into over time?
These days I think about it a lot. I think in the old days I didn’t think I had a clue what I was doing. I would often get very frustrated when people asked me about it, and people got frustrated with me because they felt like, “Are you sad? Or are you happy? Are you serious or are you joking?” I constantly had to deal with that in the past. It’s taken me a long time to understand what it is I’m trying to do.
I think listeners can get defensive when they don’t know whether an artist is joking. They don’t want to feel like they’re missing the joke.
I feel like that goes for the opposite, too. I think a lot of times if you’re being very, very serious, people will throw up a guard, too. I’ve always felt like humor is a way to get past that shield, to go beyond that and plant a seed of seriousness within someone. I don’t ever start a conversation with a stranger by spilling out my guts on them. You use humor to communicate, to talk about these difficult things.
You’ve been compared to Jonathan Richman so much that you probably get sick of hearing it, but have you ever seen him live?
Oh, I’m not sick of hearing that at all. Every time I go on tour I always try to catch him live or try to watch a live DVD of him. I still feel like his live show is what I want my live show to be about. When I did my last U.S. tour in February of last year, I was really lucky because he was playing in the same town the night before, so I brought the whole band. We were completely jetlagged, but I brought the whole band out to this tiny bar in Houston, and it was great. And I just pointed to that and said, ‘This is what I want the live show to be about.’ And I don’t think they understood at all. They were like, ‘There’s just two people on stage!’ And I was like, just listen and feel it, and tomorrow use that when you’re playing.” I’m not sure if they got it. But for me I always feel like it shouldn’t be about projections and lights and effects and smoke machines. I just want it to be about the connection with the crowd, and the joy of playing, basically.
You did a project in 2015 [“Ghostwriting”] where you wrote songs from stories you collected by interviewing volunteers. Did any of those songs make the album?
Not really. I think a lot of the songs on the album came out of conversations I had with friends and people who are close to me, out of just listening to other people’s stories. But I don’t think there was anything that came straight out of that project. “Ghostwriting” for me was more like taking a vacation from the process of writing about yourself, which can be tiresome. I think I was very tired of Jens Lekman the character, and I just wanted to step into somebody else’s shoes for a while.
It sounds like you’re writing outside of yourself quite a bit on this album, though.
To a certain extent, yeah. A lot of the songs are about other people, and maybe my relationship to these other people, so there’s a lot of other people’s stories on the record. I write emotionally-autobiographically, where I only write about things that have happened to me, but I work much more with fiction these days. So a song like “Evening Prayer,” for example, that came out of my experience of having a lot of my friends being diagnosed with cancer and going through chemo, and my own feelings about that at the time, but it was also inspired by just this random article I read in the paper about a surgeon who used a 3D printer to print out models of the tumors he was going to remove, and I just turned that into a story, basically.
Going forward do you think you’ll be writing more about the broader world, or are you still fascinated with yourself as a character?
I always prefer to write about the broader world, I think, but it’s very hard to disconnect your own relationship to the broader world when you write. You know, when I was writing this record, I had an idea to completely remove myself, because I was so sick of Jens Lekman for a while. And I talked to a friend of mine about some demos that I had made and she commented that when you do that, you lose the sense of urgency, you lose the sense of feeling in the songs. They become like… what’s it called? They become like science papers, or something—like you’re at a university, writing a paper on something.
Did you know going into the record that it was going to turn out quite as festive as it did?
I had a few musical visions for it. I was working a lot with creating my own synthesizers and sounds based on tiny little samples, and I was working a lot with rhythms. But I think a lot of the album came together because I was working with a producer for the first time in my life, Ewan Pearson, and that was a completely new experience for me. After a few weeks in the studio, I realized that if this is going to be good I have to let go completely of the control of this and let him do what he’s going to do. Because you know, the first two weeks he would go, “We should have some trombone on this track,” and I would go, “What? That’s terrible. I hate the trombone.” And we didn’t get anywhere because he would say things and I would say the opposite. Eventually I realized I had to just let him do his thing.
The production really throws out some surprises. There are quite a few sounds most listeners wouldn’t expect from a Jens Lekman album.
There were points, like for example on ‘To Know Your Mission,” there’s this part in the very beginning of the song where it kicks into a first verse with this rising synthesizer—deh-deh-deh, deh-deh-deh—and that was me going, “What do people expect me to do at this point in the song?” and then doing the exact opposite of that. I think at the time there was an EDM festival going outside my window, with really big EDM artists playing. I can’t remember his name; some Dutch DJ. And I just heard that song and thought, “That’s perfect! I’m going to put that in my song!”
Jens Lekman plays the Back Room at Colectivo on Friday, Feb. 9 at 8 p.m. with opener Peter Oren.
