Jens Lekman

What I first notice about Jens Lekman are his shoes. They are a marvel in shiny white leather engineering, tapering off to ridiculous pointyness like a pair of miniature concorde jets. Backstage in Whelans, as Jens speaks about touring in that melifulously well-spoken manner shared by male Scandinavians, they keep distracting me and I wonder if the tips of them are splitting atoms. You might, by now, be asking yourself why this piece is starting off with a digressive observation of the interviewee’s footwear as opposed to the standard snappy relevant quote to get things going. I could lie and tell you that I am a bisexual shoe fetishist and the sight of a dapper Swedish man in patent leather rendered anything he had to say about music completely irrelevant. Or I could admit the sad truth, and tell you that the battery in my recorder ran out after 2 minutes, meaning that the few shreds of actual quoted material I got from Jens are to be guarded jealously and sprinkled sparingly across this piece like dinky bits of white truffle on a posh omelette. But we won’t worry too much about the details of the interview that (mostly) got away, as there is much to relate about Jens himself and the festive gig he played later that night accompanied in part by Owen Pallett and a woman who looked freakishly like a young Britt Eckland.

Jens Lekman is a Swedish singer-songwriter who writes wry, lyrical and heartfelt pop that is polished and meticulously constructed like, yep, those shoes. A few things set him apart from the dreary masses of guitar-toting workmen that haunt this dreaded genre. One is the way in which so many of his original melodies are woven through samples cribbed from the vinyl he obsessively collects in second hand stores and flea markets. It’s something that could potentially be a clever parlour trick, but in Lekman’s hands the samples imbue the songs with timelessness, like he’s selectively dipping his lyrics into the huge collective vat of love and loss that informs so much great pop music. For me, this is best demonstrated in an earlier song of his called ‘Black Cab.’ Here, a heart-rending lyric of alienation from friends is married to the jaunty sounds of a 60s baroque pop song by The Left Banke, creating a finished product that leaves you grasping for suitable adjectives and wishing the term ‘bittersweet’ hadn’t become such a cliché.

There are two other things that mark Jens out from many contemporaries. They are his light and playful way with words and his rich singing voice, which sounds whiskey mellow and often belies his young age. I ask him about the way he plays around with words on his most recent album ‘Night falls over Kortedala,’ whether it comes naturally to him or whether he has had to work hard at it and sweat everything out? He tells me it comes easily to him, that he’s been fascinated by words and language since a very young age, and likes how the one word or phrase can mean many different things, “for example, the words ‘cigarette lighter.’ I’ve been fascinated by those two words for a long time and I think I used it as an image in maybe about five of my songs.” In Jens-speak, meanings of things do not only change across different songs, they often get turned inside out suprisingly in the space of a lyric, like when he describes how a crab crawls out of a shell he holds up to demonstrate his homelessness in the song ‘The Opposite of Halleluiah.’ Now, I’d say that some readers who have never heard Jens Lekman have gotten this far and are thinking ‘Cripes, pass a sickbag, cos this sounds like some sickeningly twee fluff.’ And there is no denying that, taken alone, or even on record, some of the lyrics might seem a tad affected and suited to only the sweetest palates. But when he takes to the stage in Whelans, twee and grating are transformed to dry and funny as he delivers his lines with the easy and expert timing of an old comedian. It’s something that really strikes me during his gig, this mixture of calm charisma and fluent banter that has the audience hanging off his stories and song lyrics. It is exactly like Johnny Cash playing San Quentin prison, but only if you replace the grizzled and murderous cons with fey kids in cardigans and wonky spectacles.

Talking backstage, Jens’ demeanour is as impenatrably calm as it is live. He chats in such gentle and quiet tones that I’d later wonder if my battery died from the sheer strain of trying to pick up his voice. I ask him about how songs which seem to have such complicated arrangements on record translate live? “Some songs I have to change the arrangements a lot on,” he says, “and some I can’t even play live.” I tell him I heard one of the songs he rarely plays is ‘Maple Leaves, (a swooning ballad from an early EP built around a violin sample) which is a shame because it is such a beautiful song. He smiles, and says it will probably get a rare airing later on. Sure enough, about halfway through the gig, Jens announces a guest musician will be joining him, and a beaming Owen Pallett (Final Fantasy) walks into the fray. Together, he and Jens play a wonderfully stirring version of maple leaves. It’s a showstopping turn but more is to come. In a spontaeneous and electric moment, the man who earlier proclaimed “I wish I could have brought [a full band] with me,” leaves me secretly glad that this particular wish did not come true. During ‘Black Cab’ he turns the mic to the crowd and they softly sing the song’s melancholy chorus back to him. He loops it and plays it back to us over the venue’s speakers. The effect is hair-raising and touching. He really didn’t need that band at all.