When my sister introduced me to a song called “A Postcard to Nina,” my senses could only capture the lilt, the sweetest of all saccharine. I was 16 maybe. The brain cells hadn’t come in yet. I did detect the slightly kooky accent of the singer, whom I could tell was singing with both ease and trepidation. But no, I did not get that that song was about some guy whose lesbian friend asked him to be her beard for a dinner with her old-timer Catholic dad.
So for the longest time, I associated the Swedish singer-songwriter Jens Lekman with only that melody. I mean he’d had albums (about 3 at that point), but “Nina” was the only one that stuck; I would listen to nothing else. “Nina” was a gateway to nowhere.
But a few months ago on Twitter, after I’d gone feverish with another one of Jens’ songs “Your Arms Around Me” (where the strings screech the way a beautiful angel would play them), I learned that he would get rid of the album from DSPs where those two songs come from—2007’s Night Falls Over Kortedala. Which was kinda weird, but I guess not that weird for a dude who once ceremoniously buried his records.
Days later, a reworked version of Kortedala came out and I tried giving those two songs a spin. I didn’t really like them — the strings sounded muffled in the mix and the drums were EQ’d louder than they should’ve been — but then I played the rest.
Now I find it hard to listen to anything but Jens. It’s almost like a stupor: Wake up, put on “To Know Your Mission,” do the falsetto bits, wonder why anyone would print out a photo of their tumor, get annoyed by the spoken word bit in “An Argument with Myself,” get legitimately worked up over the strings in “Shirin,” etc etc.
Obsessions man. Gotta feed ‘em always.
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There are probably only four bands or musicians with whom I’ve been truly obsessed: Sleater-Kinney, Radiohead, Belle & Sebastian and now Jens Lekman. Save for Sleater-Kinney, that’s probably as vanilla as vanilla goes. As the ritual goes, I spend weeks, months scouring the B-sides and tracking their random live shows, on top of the daily diet of listening to nothing but their songs.
There’s not really a through-line between these four musical entities except: There’s always that one mid album — One Beat, Pablo Honey, Fold Your Hands Child, and I Know What Love Isn’t — and their songs — knotty, brash as they may be sometimes — tend to lean on the direct immediacy of pop.
Oh and I guess there’s this: It’s fun to go deep on their respective trove, to acquire something new out of old obscurity. And these folks have a shit ton of it. When there’s like a B-sides collection that someone posted on their Blogspot, it goes so hard.
Take Radiohead’s “Lift.” Before it was exhumed onto the OK Computer reissue in 2017, I had found the live version where guitarist Ed O’Brien was singing his name so loudly in the chorus. I loved it so much, and had often wondered if there were many more of these where this came from.
Indulging in this kind of dig is good practice (for a while—then I found Soulseeker) for like irl stuff. It’s a great way to spend pastimes. The results aren’t always come out good, but getting to the bottom of the crate sure is.
Obsessions man. They can be tough sometimes.
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Since I’ve been on the Jens Lekman train, there’s a growing concern that this unhealthy-seeming habit will tire me of these folks eventually. (I should note that the day I’ll learn to just enjoy things will be the day I retire this blog.) Maybe I need to set a limit. I barely listen to Sleater-Kinney now—I’m starting to think it’s because all I did in 2015-2016 was put on The Woods or The Hot Rock and watch that NPR gig where Corin Tucker murders the audience (figuratively; would’ve been funny if literally).
Thinking about whether I’ll exhaust a favorite song doesn’t really intrude with the experience, but at times it feels kinda prickly, you know? I like to think it falls into a pattern of the mind preferring comfort over unfamiliarity. Which is great, that’s what the mind does what she does best.
And besides, I don’t think I’ll tire of listening to songs like this. I mean go put it on.
But uh…yeah I don’t know.
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Anyway, that last song was Jens’ “Waiting for Kirsten.” This live performance will tell you everything you need to know about Jens Lekman: how he tells a story that lays the grounds for a song before singing it (as he often does), his plainspokenness.
This is probably up there with the best Jens songs I’ve ever heard: It has a simple, gorgeous melody, the strings sit comfortably with the thinly-strummed guitar, and the lyrics talk about how Jens’ hometown of Gothenburg doesn’t “have VIP lines,” to either clubs or healthcare for the elderly, pointing at a small town’s glaring regression.
There’s a certain bent to his songs. I could be reading into his lyrics too much, though the song “Not Because It’s Easy, But Because It’s Hard” from his 2019 collaborative album CORRESPONDENCE doesn’t make things easier:
And the slaves turned on their master
Filmed me while they kicked my ass there
And posted it with the caption
“Smash the capitalist system”
There’s also “Black Cab,” the jingle-jangly cut about…overthinking in a cab after a night out with friends. Jens ruins the party for his friends. He’s so silent. The flickering, eye-shutting dread of maybe saying the wrong things and fucking things up with said friends even when they’re fine…I have never felt more represented by a song.
That and “Waiting for Kirsten” can be a capsule of Jens’ entire body of work. It’s dry wit sung directly. And I don’t know why the string arrangements are always good, and I’m a sucker for those (the rerecorded version of “Maple Leaves” almost put a tear in my eyes).
And then there’s these:
'Cause times are changing, Kirsten
Göta Älv is slowly reversing
They turned a youth-center into a casino
They drew a swastika in your cappuccino.
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For the next few weeks, I’ll probably still be listening to “Waiting for Kirsten.”
It’s weird, telling myself I should check out other stuff. But yeah I should — not because it’s easy, but because it’s hard.