Swedish pop maestro Jens Lekman's latest a 'love song to love songs'

Twenty years ago I was standing near the bar in a downtown Auckland venue called Schooner Tavern, when a man near me picked up his previously-hidden guitar and started to strum. When he began to sing, the crowd realised this unassuming guy, who’d been standing there for some time, un-noticed, was who they’d come to see.

A year prior, Swedish musician Jens Lekman had released his debut album, When I Said I Wanted to Be Your Dog. Mixing vintage samples with original composition, it revealed Lekman as an exciting new storyteller, spinning tales about star-crossed lovers, protests in Gothenburg, and confusing the term ‘make believe’ for ‘maple leaves’.

Lekman has released a new album every five years or so since then, and enjoyed a period of international attention when music blogs were at their most fertile. When I saw him at Schooner Tavern he charmed the whole room, who all turned to face him at the bar, then followed when he wandered up to the stage while playing his second song.

It didn’t hurt that he possessed a head-turning croon, and all these years later, still does. But Songs For Other People’s Weddings isn’t just a new album - and for those waiting for a verdict, it’s a collection of frothy, literate indie pop, as sweet as anything he’s done without getting too sickly - it’s also part of a bigger narrative.

On his debut, Lekman included a self-explanatory song called ‘If You Ever Need a Stranger (to Sing at Your Wedding)’. It’s obviously tongue-in-cheek, but led to requests for him to do just that. And so he did, saying recently, “for the last 21 years I’ve been singing at weddings and writing wedding songs for couples. It’s been a way of supporting my songwriting career financially as well as giving music a purpose in the streaming economy.”

The idea that this side job gives the music purpose is an interesting one. Lekman has always written romantic songs - even when they’re not about love, per se, they sound like they are - so not only is he well-suited to the job, it sounds like the real stories he encountered made the work that much stronger.

The stories on Songs For Other People’s Weddings aren’t real, although I’m sure they draw on fact. They began when Lekman had the idea for a book about a wedding singer, co-written with American novelist David Levithan. Lekman sent him songs about fictional couples, thinking they would comprise the album, then part way through the process pivoted to something more complex: album and novel tell the same story, intersecting at points and informing each other, with one medium sometimes going “behind the scenes” of another.

Press refers to the album as “a lovesong to lovesongs”, and as mentioned it’s often sugary and sweet (insert your own wedding cake analogy here). The crackly samples of earlier albums are replaced with soaring string and brass sections, and Lekman’s voice radiates heartfelt sincerity, even though he’s singing about fiction, and often describing frivolous things like two grooms sewed into one suit, or an art-school fake-wedding in Brooklyn.

At a certain point the album’s narrator finds love himself, a story which winds through the remainder of songs, and allows Lekman to sing lines like “I know you like I know every molecule in my own body”.

Spoiler: this fictional affair doesn’t have a happy ending, and nor does the album, winding up with a run of tracks that are wistful and wise, but never bitter. Even when love is fictional, and even when it doesn’t turn out well, Jens Lekman knows it’s worth it.

A new dispatch from the estimable English dub producer (who founded On-U Sound Recordings in 1980) is always reason to celebrate, and this one, his first non-collaborative effort since 2012, is a particularly heady brew. An array of live instruments are subject to Sherwood’s trademark sonic manipulation, with results as exploratory and boundary-pushing as ever.

One of those songwriters who can operate in traditional folk and classic rock modes while sounding like no one else, Cass McCombs has maintained a remarkably high level of quality during a prolific career. Here he’s as wry and literate as ever, with songs that feel like a mate spinning yarns at the pub, in between flourishes of catchy guitar.