ONE
Jens Lekman is a sardonic-romantic singer-songwriter from
Gothenburg, Sweden, who records for the indie label Secretly Canadian
in the U.S. He’s 27 years old. Last October 9, he released Night
Falls Over Kortedala, the third CD he’s issued in America, after
2004’s When I Said I Wanted to Be Your Dog and 2005’s Oh
You’re So Silent Jens, a collection of odds and ends. Night
Falls got a shower of critical praise upon its release, finishing
17th in the 2007 Idolator Pop Critics Poll, a survey I conducted. He’s
funny and dreamy. My girlfriend, like many indie-rock fans, has a huge
crush on him.
TWO
I was on the tail end of an all-nighter the first time I put on
Night Falls Over Kortedala, and I hated it instantly.
I’d likely have hated anything that particular Sunday afternoon, but
certain artists are especially hateable in this condition, and when you
play the most bountiful Jens Lekman album for the first time under
those circumstances, he becomes one of them. But I’d seen the 9.0
rating on Pitchfork that kicked off the critical fusillade, and I’d had
the promo for a week. So why not listen to it right then, the precise
moment it would sound worst?
It’s not as if I wanted to like the record. I’d already sifted
through his prior albums and found his cutesy-windy titles and weedy
voice off-putting. In my half-assed way, I’d come to regard Lekman as a
menace—too winky, too smirky, too affected, too knowing. There
were a zillion other albums to get to, and even if the guy had a card
up his sleeve, what was I really missing by not exposing myself to it?
Sure enough, Night Falls Over Kortedala sounded in
that instance like the most grating album imaginable. But I also
noticed how instant, how thorough this response was, and I knew I had
to play it again at some point, just to see if I was right. I waited a
month, got plenty of rest, and played it again one afternoon. Not bad.
I kept putting it on. Within a week, it had landed in my Top 10.
THREE
Lekman is such a dazzling soundsmith you can pretend that his lyrics
are completely beside the point. He loves letting the aural seams
show—it’s his favorite sonic trick. The split-second silence that
marries the ends of the piano loop forming the backbone of “I’m Leaving
You Because I Don’t Love You” gives the song a hesitancy that the
piled-on piano cascades, synth bass, handclaps, squealing maiden ooohs,
and fake strings take good musical advantage of, as well as buoying the
lyric. There are lurching tonal shifts everywhere, with backing tracks
suddenly speeding up or slowing down; “Sipping on the Sweet Nectar”
features a jolting key change. The most dizzying of these tricks is
when he stutters a second of the final verse of “Kanske Är Jag
Kär I Dig,” opening the arrangement into a cornucopia of strings,
guitars, and glockenspiel that prefigure a spectacular, jazzy brass
coda, its echoes of WWII-era standards like Glenn Miller’s “In the
Mood” and Duke Ellington’s “Take the ‘A’ Train” thrilling to hear in
this context.
The kind of intricate thinking Lekman does as a composer doesn’t
necessarily translate beyond the songs. “I’m terrible when it comes to
putting together albums,” Lekman tells me over the phone from his hotel
room in Austin, Texas, whose popular annual trade convention is covered
elsewhere in this issue. “My solution was to bring a couple friends
together and show them about 30 songs. They saw the connections so much
more clearly than I do, though I knew ‘And I Remember Every Kiss’ and
‘Sipping on the Sweet Nectar’ [Kortedala‘s second track]
worked together; I threw that key change into ‘Sweet Nectar’ so they’d
fit.”
FOUR
Night Falls Over Kortedala was recorded in Lekman’s tiny
one-room apartment, where he lived for five years. “The landlord
officially called it the worst place in Gothenberg when I moved in,”
Lekman says. “He told me that the previous tenant died in the bathtub.
I asked why he told me this, and he said, ‘I thought you’d like to hear
it.’ There’re a lot of mentally sick people there, a lot of unemployed
people. When they closed down the mental hospitals in Sweden in the
early ’90s, they moved a lot of them into apartments. I basically
stayed inside; I’d gone out and been attacked, mugged. I didn’t like
that place very much, but it definitely made me focus on the music for
sure. Every time I had a piano tuner they complained about the
acoustics, but when I recorded, everything sounded perfect.”
Lekman often works from titles. “They give me a way of working with
music so that it comes together [with the lyric]—I like to work
with two sounds that aren’t supposed to meet.” Take “And I Remember
Every Kiss,” the album’s opener: “For that, I had a lyric written
down,” he said. “At first it sounded completely different [from the
album version]. I think I had a sound in my head, but it took a long
time before I found that string sample. When I found it, everything
fell into place.”
FIVE
The problem with concentrating solely on the musical aspects of
Night Falls Over Kortedala is that—duh—the lyrics
are totally the point. “I’m a prisoner of this moment with you in my
arms,” goes the clincher of “Into Eternity,” and then, “I have a
love-for-this-world kind of world/That will break my heart/A kind of
flaw/That reconstructs and remodels the past.” He loves you, he lives
in his own head too much to entirely trust it; he’s the thing, he
stands outside the thing.
The album’s most tender love songs are, respectively, an ode to a
lesbian friend he beards for over dinner with her father (“A Postcard
to Nina”) and a hymn for his
hairdresser (“Shirin”). If that
screams overquirk, it’s understandable. But Lekman is old-fashioned in
one crucial way: He doesn’t waste big musical drama on mundane
emotions. Every musical turn matches its lyric. The clip-clopping
rhythms and faded-luster clarinet part on “Friday Night at the Drive-In
Bingo” are precisely the soundtrack you’d expect of a song with that
title; “If I Could Cry (It Would Feel Like This)” piles its simple,
melodramatic title phrase (the entire lyric) atop endless string surges
until it crescendos to the sun.
SIX
Over the phone, Lekman answers each of my questions graciously, even
when he’s heard the question a zillion times. “I hear that a lot from
journalists,” he said when I told him that I’d hated Kortedala at first but grew quickly to love it. “A lot of times, interviewers ask
me about that. That might be a part of evaluating a record, I guess.” I
thank him publicly for not even having a yawn to stifle. 