Jens Lekman - A Tongue-in-Cheek Romantic Hero

Jens Lekman is one of the great recent talents of singer-songwriter pop. Swedish, active since 2000, for four years he released his songs on CD-Rs, mini-CDs, EPs, assorted compilations and other adventurous formats. With the breakthrough success of his latest album, Night Falls Over Kortedala, he has risen to prominence in music press around the world. An enfant prodige who has now blossomed into a personal and intriguing reality, able to play a winning card every time, without ever becoming tedious or cloying.

Fucking Kortedala

“The old folks scanning the street with binoculars looking for anything suspicious, the dead cats I keep finding in my garden, hearing someone knock on my door at four in the morning and then voices saying ‘when he opens up, hit him on the head’…”

Kortedala, a suburb of Gothenburg, the oddities and paranoia of a metropolis.

Amid these stories of everyday suburban alienation, Jens Lekman feels rejected, sometimes even gets beaten up, and so he holes up in his studio to record, or in his house with its thick walls echoing with the sound of ghosts and his own voice.

Unease, of course, but also affection for those small things that make life a little more beautiful, faces and situations we cling to so as not to feel different, a love-hate bond with the place where you were born but which makes you feel like an outsider. The mood, in short, is a bit like that of the teenage protagonist of “Fucking Åmål” — fittingly Swedish, and fittingly a fan of Morrissey. Then again, music has long been a faithful companion to Jens, born on February 6, 1981.

At fourteen he was already playing bass in a covers band with friends. But his real talent is songwriting. He wrote hundreds of songs, taking on — much to his own chagrin — the nickname Rocky Dennis (after the protagonist of the American film “Mask”). “Some people thought that was my real name because I had a song about him, then the radio spread the story and I never got the chance to set the record straight,” Lekman himself would later explain.

Lekman/Dennis thus began churning out limited-edition mini-CDs one after another.

The Budgie-Albums is his first CD-R, already showing a considerable talent for writing sugary melodies and arrangements steeped in the finest pop craftsmanship, with just the right pinch of tasty self-irony needed to steer clear of any risk of sappiness. The record passes almost unnoticed, but Lekman doesn't give up: he places his chips on the indie label Secretly Canadian and sends them a collection of songs, which however will sit in the dark for at least a couple of years.

In the meantime, though, a underground cult builds up around young Jens, fueled by music forums and file-sharing.

The Swedish singer-songwriter painstakingly builds his own underground cult with a handful of singles capable of sparking instant infatuation. How? By gradually sharpening his gift for melody and shyly offering simple, delightful ballads for hearts attuned to the emotional nuances of everyday life. Having dropped his curious pseudonym, which he bids farewell to with the aptly titled Rocky Dennis In Heaven, Lekman is ready for his first big leap.

When in 2004 Secretly Canadian decided to release the EP Maple Leaves, the young Swedish storyteller had by then shed his anonymity. And the four-track lineup helped fuel the legend further. Four songs of multifaceted expressive richness, of imaginative, dreamlike tonal variety as ever, reaching for and dreaming of enchanted, golden-lit Sarah-label landscapes.

Memorable swaths of violins, bells, strings and echoing voices in the dazzling title track, which blend into springtime, pristine, translucent rural expanses. Bright colors, fantastical suggestions to follow, explore and get lost in, disbelieving.

“Sky Phenomenon” is a subtly uneasy murmur of the author talking to himself. Inner discovery, a light emotion, a luminous whiteness infused and reflected by piano lines of classical calm. Wonderful. “Black Cab” is again an intriguing, novelistic filigree that inspires endless arcadian wanderings, alongside endless railway tracks leading to forgotten stations, swallowed back up by vegetation. Reminiscent of East River Pipe. The crystalline murmur of “someone to share my life with” carries a distinctly melancholic aura, a nocturnal dampness akin to the already-released “Those Birds Who Are Flying With You”.

Domestic gestures, naturalness, harmony permeate everything throughout these songs. Lekman already seems to belong to that tight circle of people who could never betray us. It's the prelude to his true full-length debut, which arrives just a few months later.

On the carousel of chamber dreams

Twelve songs make up When I Said I Wanted To Be Your Dog (Service, Secretly Canadian, 2004), an unofficial collection of already-released material (with a title that has nothing to do with the fetish connotations of Iggy Pop's original). The young Lekman reinterprets himself here: these are tracks put out in various formats since 2000, often through roundabout channels, now suitably gathered and reread as a single body of work. Anyone who's already heard the originals will notice subtle but perceptible differences in these new versions — greater density, a cleaner sound, and a smoothing of shapes and arrangements designed to bring their bodies closer together, into a kind of mutual coexistence. Like treating yourself to a new outfit, but a flashier one at that: fanciful embellishments added to songs originally conceived and invented as wonderful, impulsive, fleeting reflections.

We can allow the young Rocky Dennis his exploration, his desire for different perspectives, his wandering off without betraying (indeed, confirming, reaffirming) his own past.

Some kind of recognition must have taken place, and it must have weighed heavily over the five turbulent years since our man started releasing music. Innocence turns to cunning, shrewdness, disillusionment. A gradually dawning awareness. Yet this "first" long player can also be granted a less-than-flawless sequencing, a somewhat forced coexistence among the tracks that slightly dilutes the enormous potential and faintly breaks up the fine individual images of stories and music we'd already formed in our minds — though none of it dims or tarnishes the beauty of these showstopping songs, as heard in single form.

Hazy, disoriented chamber pop melodies, unreal, enigmatic drapery that suddenly flares up with dazzling light (think of Blueboy), with colour tones as blinding as we've rarely heard lately. In harmonic accord with them is an exemplary gift for storytelling, the fruit of time spent wandering, of nocturnal streets walked with Stephin Merritt of Magnetic Fields in his ears, unspooling memories of the Sarah Records catalogue without ever sounding derivative or secondhand. Lekman lives and explores these spaces with desperate energy and passion.

"Tram #7 To Heaven", cadenced and crackling, opens the curtain: it has the feel of fresh air breathed in together, strolling through the city, a burst of light in the afternoon, like House Of Love being, for once, humble and devoted to Burt Bacharach. "Happy Birthday, Dear Friend Lisa" sounds as if Stephin Merritt and Roddy Frame wrote it together, and the result feels like a lo-fi version of Roman, but there's a constant teen flavour that keeps everything spontaneous. "You Are The Light" recalls so closely the light of Orange Juice's "Wan Light" that it could be a direct tribute to the old Postcard demigods. "Do You Remember The Riots" is a Beach Boys outtake, caught in the act of Brian improvising it together with some tender surfer girl in his bedroom. "You Are The Light" recalls so closely the light of Orange Juice's "Wan Light" that it could be a direct tribute to the old Postcard demigods. "If You Ever Need a Stranger" sets a very slow piano dancing, while Stuart Murdoch is quoted in the verses, and the song charms with a crooner's manner, exhausted, conceding the last word to the first light of dawn. "Silvia" is a teen-drama scene: as he and she run away together, their gazes draw close and emotions rise to the skin's surface, already carrying a sense of the end, yet with a sea of possibilities on the horizon. And so the songs go on.

You can feel, in every arrangement, a care and an attentiveness that draw their strength from simplicity, and — no small miracle — you find yourself wanting to listen to it over and over, dozens of times. And speaking of his songwriting, Jens has a great gift: staying always just this side of preciousness, thanks to a melancholic character steeped in quiet desolation (stretching the point a little, you could read it as that splendid Swedish desolation of lakes, little houses, forests).

If the samples are used like pastel-coloured brushstrokes, the strong Bacharach-like sensations are dampened by subverting orchestral expectations, stripping the landscape down to an essentialism that pushes you to focus on the contemplative tone of the voice, while it magnifies details of pop life, pop loves, glorious intimacies. Just listen to the closing, imperfect and beautiful "A Higher Power". Jens lets us into a world where nostalgia doesn't just become bearable, but downright desirable.

When I Said I Wanted To Be Your Dog establishes Lekman as the ideal heir to the most precious incarnation of Stuart Murdoch, the early one, and as the clearest rising star of contemporary indie-pop, alongside Sufjan Stevens, Canada's Hidden Cameras and Sweden's Radio Dept.

"Jens Lekman turns everything he touches into gold." There's a lot of truth in that statement. Despite the quintessentially classic nature of his musical ingredients, the young Swede's art still manages to disorient, thanks to singular tonal qualities and a distinctive feel for light. Take, for example, the EP The Opposite Of Hallelujah (Thievery/Evil Evil, 2005): four compositions of classic simplicity and disarming purity. Conceived to live together, each in relation to the others, free lives within tight spaces. On the first, prodigious "The Opposite Of Hallelujah" (which would later appear on Night Falls Over Kortedala, 2007), Jens truly flies. There's a fairy-tale aura, a solemn classicism, with a surprising transition into a "strings" swell following the chorus; it stirs the still, candid lake waters that undoubtedly feed and nourish these sounds. The romantic expectations voiced on "This Is No Time For Breaking Us", within that wintry, almost Christmassy aura, seem to find life and purpose as if inside a Dickens tale. If "I Don't Wanna Die Alone" is a madrigal-like ceremony of sax, guitar and cosmic strings swelling with grand vibrations, "Love Is Still A Mystery" offers itself gently, a soul tune that modulates light shades and atmospheric tones, graduating acoustic strings and piano passages.

Jens the silent

A few months later came Oh You're So Silent Jens (Service/Secretly Canadian, 2005). And the irrepressible vein of Jens Lekman (who by this point had become "The 33rd Sexiest Man In Sweden") finds a way, in this new collection of "already-released" material acting as a second album — a compilation of EPs, rarities and even unsold stock (the "Budgie Albums") from the 2000-2005 period — to produce his masterpiece. This already-legendary record showcases the exceptional compositional gift of the young Lekman: a languid expressiveness, hazy, dreamy dynamism and a promiscuous dreamer's unabashed narcissism; the result is a thrill and a triumph for indie-pop fans and devotees.

In Oh You're So Silent Jens, we revisit the glories of his many now long-sold-out EPs, such as Maple Leaves, Julie, You Are The Light, Rocky Dennis In Heaven (reproduced here in full), as well as rare vinyl cuts: the languid, precious "F-word"; the heart-wrenching anthem "Black Cab" with its fateful organ incipit; the festive fanfare of "A Sweet Summer Night's At Hammer Hill"; the inward blues brooding of "Sky Phenomenon" and "A Man Walks Into A Bar"; "At The Department Of Forgotten Songs". Nor is the Morrissey-esque ballad missing, as in "Someone To Share My Life With" ("I just want someone to share my life with/ and you could be that someone"). Unexpected beauties come alive, with sudden, blinding colours, set in motion by a grazing, flickering voice that nevertheless sinks deep into chest and mind. We let ourselves be overwhelmed, defenceless and bewitched by this talent. It's an irresistible carousel of emotions, a rollercoaster of moods and a display of harmonic splendour with no equal today. If we think of Lekman's more direct peers, so to speak, we'd have to bring up genuinely major names like Stuart Murdoch, Blueboy, Cardinal, Stephen Merritt. Or else icons from other eras like Paul Simon, Jimmy Webb, Curt Boettcher. The class is the same, the vein that animates the scene is identical. That the boy makes use of brief samples of other people's work where resources are lacking, or of a homemade, chamber-scale minimalism, only makes his lineage all the clearer and more distinctive. Unlike the debut, here we can find nothing at all to complain about: these songs aren't reinterpreted, idly polished up, or over-sophisticated where there was no need for it. Jens has returned exactly to what and how he was, to a period of existential turmoil and creative splendour, instinct and transparency. A kind of diary, a memoir through which to take stock a little and move on. So to speak: Lekman is always elsewhere, carried along by a mild wind, by a delicate imagination. But ambiguously so: perpetually content yet tormented, lofty yet ordinary, Apollonian yet Dionysian.

"Jens Lekmans' Farewell Song To Rocky Dennis" flaunts an opening glitch straight out of Four Tet, with a baritone voice whispering from somewhere deep. And when the piano phrase kicks in with the lyrics following, we again feel our nerves give way, loosening as if in one last farewell ("I wish I had a proper reason to cry/ A reason not so abstract, more like a broken clause in a contract").

This will probably go down as the record Lekman is remembered for above all, and today it remains the best place to start getting to know him. Not to be missed.

Homecoming

Three years of intensive touring (as much with an eight-piece ensemble as solo with just a microphone and ukulele). Three years spent working on the songs for Night Falls Over Kortedala (Secretly Canadian, 2007). It's a return to his home town, where Jens also has his studio, eccentrically named the Kortedala Beauty Center. And Kortedala also lends its name to a hazy pop sound with hints of tropicalia that has spread through the city's venues in recent years.

The album brings into focus a few elements that were already present, in embryonic form, in his earlier work. Giving space to his passion for romantic crooners, for Bacharach's refined and complex orchestrations, and for Motown's easy, languid melodies, blending it all with a touch of electronics and dressing it up with his usual witty, original lyrics, Lekman crafts another flawless slice of pop perfection, impeccable in quality and exceptionally catchy. Joining him are two leading names of the new Swedish scene, Frida Hyvönen and El Perro del Mar.

The first four songs alone are enough to steal your heart: "And I Remember Every Kiss" literally takes flight on the wings of strings and timpani before arriving at the chorus's sweeping orchestration; "Sipping On The Sweet Nectar", with its pulsing bass laying down a funk groove into which horns, violins and percussion weave themselves, is irresistible on a rhythmic level; and no less so is "The Opposite Of Hallelujah", where strings echo the chorus on one side while Jens sings languidly over a childlike piano on the other, all held together by a repetitive drum pattern. But it's on "A Postcard To Nina" that Lekman comes closest to perfection (and to Bacharach): the lightness of a triangle's chimes, a hazy guitar, soul backing vocals and a chorus punctuated by horns beautifully paint the surreal account of an awkward dinner with the father of a lesbian friend, for whom Jens has to pose as the boyfriend.

The Swedish songwriter's ability to build orchestrations that are complex yet never overblown is remarkable; just listen to "Into Eternity", a tropical ballad where accordion, flute, timbales and handclapping all coexist… Brazil and Cuba, as seen from the shores of the North Sea.

Night Falls Over Kortedala is an album about love, but the feeling never comes across as mawkish or trite; "I'm Leaving You Because I Don't Love You" and "If I Could Cry (It Would Feel Like This)" could easily have tipped into saccharine territory, but Lekman tempers the former with a drum machine that, together with an insistent piano, cuts through the sweetness of the vocal, while in the latter the Swede uses percussion and a sobbing call and response to give physical shape to the feeling described in the title, as gentle, ethereal violins end up electronically mangled.

The rest of the record doesn't miss a beat: "Your Arms Around Me" is gorgeously sweet, with the ukulele joining the usual string runs; "Shirin", dedicated to his own hairdresser ("when Shirin cuts my hair/ it's like a love affair"), is a dreamy love song in the style of a late-50s/early-60s vocal group; "It Was A Strange Time In My Life" is a bittersweet portrait of the artist as a young man for guitar and violin, made pastoral by a flute and by a sample of a recording of Jens as a child.

The album closes with two tracks that confirm, if confirmation were needed, Lekman's love of old-fashioned melodies: the doo-wop of "Kanske Ar Jag Kar I Dig" and the twist-pop of "Friday Night At The Drive-in Bingo", a melody that couldn't sound more fifties, with saxophone taking centre stage.

Fun and romantic, engaging and rich, a true contemporary classic, Night Falls Over Kortedala is a record that never wears thin, one with which Jens Lekman confirms himself as a name to bank on for pop music in the years to come. The ideal remedy for clearing your mind or mending a broken heart.

"In Kortedala everyone minds their own business. And since I'm slowly turning into one of them too, as soon as I finish the album I'm getting out of here," says Jens.

If the stimuli his hometown provides him with help produce records of this quality, one can only hope the young Swede changes his mind quickly.

After the success of Night Falls Over Kortedala, the Swedish artist disappeared from view for almost four years, coinciding with a deeply troubled period during which his once-sharp inspiration went through a long dry spell. His return to the scene, in 2011, came in the shape of the EP An Argument With Myself, which dusts off Lekman's orchestral, retro attitude, framed by his usual richness of arrangement, which on some of the EP's tracks even turns boisterous, taking on extremely bright shades.

A first taste of this comes from the opening title track, built on tropicalisms that recall the latest Club 8, its melody flowing into a soul-tinged spoken word passage. The fluent songwriting of the thirty-year-old from Angered regains a broader scope on the following two tracks, which nonetheless fail to leave much of a mark even when, as in the case of "A Promise", the sonic backdrop turns calmer and more romantic.

But that's just a brief interlude, since vintage-flavoured trumpet blasts introduce "New Directions", which then unspools into a flurry of syncopated rhythms and female choruses, verging on the most musical-theatre side of Sufjan Stevens, while the closing "So This Guy At My Office" even features a reggae lilt that feels rather out of place.

"A taste of what won't be coming": that's how Lekman himself summed up the content of An Argument With Myself. A sign that his songwriting gift has not yet fully recovered from a long dry spell, and, hopefully, that the EP's five tracks amount to little more than a divertissement, useful above all for letting us hear again the Swedish artist's unmistakable voice and pop instincts.

"You don't get over a broken heart, you just learn to carry it gracefully"

Somehow, the lyrics quoted ("The World Moves On") end up ideally summing up not just the thematic universe of the Swedish musician's third album – I Know What Love Isn't – but also his personal, unmistakable approach to songwriting. In the five long years following the release of "Night Falls Over Kortedala", Lekman says he changed his method, using writing almost as a tool for psychological excavation, freed from the need to shape the perfect pop song that, like so many of his peers, he must always have felt was his calling.

During these five years spent mostly in Melbourne – years that, for the Swede, coincided with an openly admitted dry spell of inspiration and clear romantic turmoil – Jens turned into a sensitive, "broken-hearted" man, and "I Know What Love Isn't" – a bit like Stephin Merritt's Magnetic Fields and their "69 Love Songs" – is his gentle concept album about loneliness, abandonment, and the absence of love. And so, after an intro of melancholy piano chords, the first single "Erica America" places right before our eyes a landscape of quiet, bitter solitude ("I wish I'd never met you, like I wish I'd never tasted wine, or tasted it from lips that weren't mine, now every drop tastes more bitter all the time"), while the sensual softness of the sax and the female voice (Australian singer Sophie Brous) lets us picture Jens as a shy, elegant crooner with downcast eyes. A gaze that, however, seems to lift again almost immediately on the following "Become Someone Else's", which greets us (almost) smiling with one of those arpeggios of lethal lightness that have helped build Lekman's reputation. Those nostalgic for unforgettable songs like "Black Cab" will find here the brightest point of the whole album (piano, strings, flute, melody: everything contributes to a pastel-coloured sense of nostalgia, the kind tied to the endless Australian summer evoked throughout the record) but, as Jens himself sings, "it all depends what lens you're looking through". In short, appearances aside, the lyrics still speak of love affairs that have ended, however "sweetly endured", and so it goes until the record's close.

The sequence of the ten tracks that make up the album highlights not only his ability – more evident in the past – to draw in his own way on the best patterns of the most sophisticated and artful pop, from Brian Wilson to Scott Walker and on to certain Smiths-like moods, but also his knack for hybridising them with simpler melodic structures that are no less immediate, such as "I Want a Pair of Cowboy Boots" or the closing reprise of the opener "Every Little Hair Knows Your Name", where we find Lekman utterly bare, alone with his guitar. And it's moments like these that make Jens Lekman's songs what they are: small simulacra of everyday reality, occasionally revisited with imperceptible new details that dress up the mundane events of everyday life as musical adventures, while still managing to leave the listener hanging on his every word.

Taken as a whole, then, "I Know What Love Isn't" can only confirm the sheer quality of Jens Lekman's talent, measurable by now across a career spanning more than a decade, and it is unquestionably his most "open-hearted" work, imbued with an honesty and sincerity of approach that's tangible in every single track on the album. So what's missing compared to his best work? Probably a song or two that leave a deeper mark on listeners' memories (whether or not they're fans of the Swede's pop touch). And, ultimately, that capacity to astonish – through the wit of the lyrics, the clever and wide-open pervasiveness of the references, the boldness of arrangements that in the past genuinely left jaws on the floor – which, like it or not, has been somewhat watered down. Still, even given these limits, there's a common thread running through everything that gives the album its distinctive, charming shading: that underlying naivety, that almost adolescent outlook on life and love, with its intense, sudden bursts of enthusiasm inseparably entwined with deep, lasting, and barely concealed melancholy. A porthole, a small window that uses the technique of exclusion to paint those little patches of non-love that everyone eventually discovers, a record to remind us that we're always at the mercy of the same feelings and the same emotions.

After three years of silence, Jens Lekman took on a curious project (Postcards), made up of as many as 52 songs, released weekly and shared for free on SoundCloud. Alongside it, Lekman made an experimental album, Ghostwriting, built from stories collected among his fans, but it was only in 2017 that the Swedish musician's new proper album took shape. Less introverted and more sun-drenched, Life Will See You Now reveals an artist in great form: Jens Lekman picks up the thread of the adolescent pop of Orange Juice and Haircut One Hundred, injecting just the right dose of underlying unease and letting flow a bittersweet-toned sound that lines up ABC, ABBA and Everything But The Girl.

In the producer's chair sits Ewan Pearson (M83, The Chemical Brothers, Goldfrapp), the perfect architect for a clear, bright sound that focuses the author's new soul, funk and disco leanings without distorting the confidential, delicate tone of his songwriting. The dance and exotic touches in the arrangements give Jens Lekman the chance to tackle stories of love and friendship with his usual lightness and irony ("What's That Perfume You Wear?"), addressing thorny subjects like coming out to friends about a relationship ("How Can I Tell Him") over banjo, percussion and orchestra; or recounting a difficult personal relationship with a friend suffering from cancer ("Evening Prayer") over soul and disco cadences straight out of "Lexicon Of Love".

While indie-pop chases the mirage of the philosopher's stone of perfect pop in a politically-correct key, Jens Lekman sails past everyone else's ambitions with ten perfect hit singles, first and foremost the gorgeous duet with Tracey Thorn, "Hotwire The Ferris Wheel", one of the saddest funk-pop songs ever written, and not just because of its subject matter (depression), but also for that delightful balance between joy and melancholy that has always defined the most intense and memorable pop songs.

The miracle repeats itself with "Our First Fight", a delicate, exotic ballad in the vein of Paul Simon's "Graceland" era; another small delight is the already-known "Postcard#17" (a track previously released as part of the year-long series of 52 songs), with its soul-jazz stride built on a sample of Charles Mingus ("Myself When I'm Real"), propped up by a dark, penetrating rhythm that leaves no room for wandering thoughts.

In the manner of Morrissey, the Swedish musician lays bare ancestral, pagan feelings (love, friendship, life, death) with a disenchantment and an effervescent, ever-relevant language; the music flows bright and almost danceable, without ever celebrating the ecstasy of fun and surface pleasure. Life Will See You Now is, in the end, a perfect pop album, moving between Motown-style references in "To Know Your Mission", Afro-funk inflections for the irresistible "Wedding in Finistère", disco-beat touches à la Deee-Lite in "How We Met, The Long Version", Champs-Élysées atmospheres ("Dandelion Seed"), and even jazz and calypso for the single "What's That Perfume You Wear?", which draws on a Ralph MacDonald sample for a quirky steel-drum-driven pop-soul.

Some may raise an eyebrow at Jens Lekman's choice to entrust such sun-drenched sounds with bitter, complex reflections, but sometimes the only real way to reach the heart and mind is through plain honesty; Life Will See You Now is an album that strikes right at the heart, and for once you'll be glad to be mortally wounded.

If you ever need a stranger to sing at your wedding, a last-minute choice, then I'm your man.

After a collaborative project with Annika Norlin (Correspondence, 2019) and a reimagining of his second album Night Falls Over Kortedala (retitled The Linden Trees Are Still in Blossom, 2022), Jens Lekman returns with an unusual project. Songs For Other People's Weddings (2025) is not just an album but also a novel, a collection of songs devised by the Swedish singer-songwriter together with writer David Levithan, aimed at setting to music his side gig as a wedding singer, born almost as a joke. With an openly declared nod to Frank Sinatra's atypical album Watertown, Jens Lekman steps into the role of romantic crooner. The eight years since his last album, Life Will See You Now, have not gone to waste: Lekman has assembled the most lavish and sharp-witted puzzle of his career, alternating aching gospel-country ("I Want To Want You Again") with funk-pop backed by horns and keyboards ("Wedding In Brooklyn"), swinging between frivolity and noir tones on the ironic "Walking In Leipzig", through to elegant soft-disco atmospheres ("Candy From A Stranger") and richly promising pop-rock ideas ("With You I Can Hear My Own Voice").

Lekman also keeps the album's sugar content in check; exemplary in this sense are both the melodramatic sway of "The First Lovesong" and the heartfelt piano-and-orchestra ballad "Speak To Me In Music". What's surprising about "Songs For Other People's Weddings" is the care Lekman lavishes on each of its seventeen songs: the fine acoustic phrasing of "GOT-JFK", the almost theatrical arrangement of "Two Little Pigs", the vocal performance on "Matilda Sargren" ("You Have One New Message") and the retro finale of "The Last Lovesong" are moments that even rock purists will find interesting and compelling.

Contributions by Davide Ariasso, Eleonora Grosso, Raffaello Russo ("An Argument With Myself"), Andrea Cornale and Luca Pasi ("I Know What Love Isn't"), Gianfranco Marmoro ("Life Will See You Now", "Songs For Other People's Weddings")

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