Jens Lekman - Life Will See You Now - COMPACT DISCS [CD]

Johannes S e Hansen - Works for Violin & Piano [COMPACT DISCS] date 09/29/2009

Jens Lekman is an accidental wedding singer. But he'salso a wedding singer for a reason. Ever since his 2004song InchIf You Ever Need a Stranger (To Sing at YourWedding)Inch he has had a side gig fielding requests fromstrangers to sing at their weddings. For over twentyyears, he's had a particular vantage point from which tosee the role love songs can play in our lives. In 2020, heand novelist David Levithan co-conceived anovel-with-music, Songs from Other People's Weddings.Originally this album was meant to contain the songsfrom the weddings in the book, but as the novel cametogether, Lekman began to imagine what happenedbetween the book's chapters. The book and the albumeventually became intertwined but also found their ownpaths. The book remained the structure of the story, butthe album sometimes snuck behind the scenes. Storiesfrom the songs made their way into the book and viceversa. The result is an exploration of what we sing aboutwhen we sing about love - euphoria, doubt, dislocation,tenderness, conflict, playfulness, gratitude, ingratitude,longing, belonging, questioning, answering. It's verymuch about a relationship and how it's reflected throughthe relationships and weddings of others, but most of allit's a lovesong to lovesongs.

Casting his mind back over twenty years to his first rudimentary experiments with sampling using his father's old cassette recorder, Jens Lekman recalls an instinct to create music that would set him far apart from his Swedish pop peers InchAll my friends were playing in these bass-guitar-drum bands,Inch he says. InchI'm going to sound like Scott Walker. But I'm going to do it in my bedroom.Inch Works of sweeping, maximalist, orchestral wonder sung in a sumptuous tenor, weaving lifts from obscure flea market vinyl records, telling burningly romantic and mordantly funny true-life tales from the sleepy-shadowy suburbs of Gothenburg, Lekman's early songs come from a different time and place an era when the internet was young, limitless and disruptive, sample culture was turning music inside out, and anything felt possible. After initially finding an audience through peer-to-peer file sharing sites, Lekman signed to Secretly Canadian Records in 2003, and went on to a slew of cherished material, including three cult limited-edition EPs - Maple Leaves, Rocky Dennis and Julie - later collected on the 2005 compilation album Oh You're So Silent Jens. His DIY fantasias found their fullest and most celebrated form in 2007 on his second proper album, the exquisite Night Falls Over Kortedala - Lekman's self-professed Inchdream record.Inch It went to number one in Sweden and was later hailed as one of the 200 best albums of the 2000s by Pitchfork, as well as one of the top 100 albums of the 21st century so far by The Guardian. Now, both Oh You're So Silent Jens and Night Falls Over Kortedala no longer exist in their original forms. Oh You're So Silent Jens enigmatically disappeared in 2011; Night Falls Over Kortedala followed suit in early 2022. Lekman's impulse for giving old music fresh life and context has led him to remake the records under new names, each delicately positi