Jens Lekman: The 13th Floor Interview

Today marks the release of Life Will See You Now, the fourth studio album by Swedish musician Jens Lekman. 

It’s been five years since Lekman’s previous album, but he has been busy in the interim with several songwriting experiments including 2015’s Postcards, in which he completed a new song every week of the year and the Ghostwriting project, where he took stories submitted by fans and turned them into songs.

The 13th Floor’s Marty Duda spoke to Jens Lekman just before Life Will See You Now was about to be released. Here is their conversation…

Click here to listen to the interview with Jen Lekman:

Or, read a transcription of the interview here:

MD: You spent some time down in this part of the world: you used to live in Melbourne for a while; is that right?

JL: Yeah, that’s right.

MD: I remember I saw you on one of my favourite TV shows: on Rockwiz.

JL: Oh yeah, that’s right. Was that the one where I was dressed up like the guy in Kraftwerk…? No, it was later than that, right?

MD: I think so. I don’t remember it being ‘Kraftwerkian’. I just loved that show. What was it like to be on it? Did you enjoy yourself?

JL: It’s always absurd and ridiculous when you do those kinds of shows, but I kind of like that. I think… there was Spicks and Specks: that was the other one I did. Because I don’t understand the culture behind these programmes, it’s so absurd for me, as a Swede, to step into…. All my Australian friends were like, “It’s so cool that you’re doing Rockwiz and Spicks and Specks,” and I was like, “I have no idea what’s going on.”

MD: Well, I do know Spicks and Specks was an early Bee Gees song; so, if that helps at all.

JL: Oh, that’s right, of course. I’m just imagining what it would be like for an Australian to be on some random TV show here in Sweden; the kind of family shows that we have here.

MD: You should definitely try it out, just to get even.

JL: Yeah, exactly.

MD: I believe the last time you played… in Auckland, New Zealand, was in 2010; is that right?

JL: Yeah, I think so. It’s a long time ago.

MD: It is a long time ago. Now you have a new album out – or it’s coming out next week – Life Will See You Now; congratulations! It’s been a long time between records as well. I was wondering how you’re feeling about the imminent release of the new record?

JL: I feel good. I don’t really have time to think about it. There’s just so much to do right now – preparing for the tour, and preparing for everything: for leaving my home town for three months – so, I don’t really have much time to think about it. I think I had to do all that thinking last fall, when I finished the record; right now, it’s just minimising, just putting out fires, constantly.

MD: What kind of fires?

JL: Everything is just happening last minute; just preventing disasters from happening, trying to remind the musicians in the band what they should bring and what they shouldn’t bring, and how the songs go; and all that.

MD: I know you tour fairly regularly, but not a lot – as much as a lot of people. I know that you really concentrate on your song writing – and I’m hoping we can talk about that a little bit – but how do you feel about the difference between performing the songs and writing the songs? Is one a chore, and the other something you look forward to, or are they equal parts of the same thing?

JL: They’re equal parts. I do perform a lot, actually: I work as a wedding singer; so, I do lot of weddings that you don’t see on my website, because they’re private shows.

MD: When you say you play weddings, are you doing your own material, or are you doing covers? Are you doing what the bride and groom want to hear?

JL: I do both, but I only play for people that have some kind of relationship to my music. When I do that, and when I play my own songs at someone’s wedding, it’s really a point when I really feel how a song has connected to another human being. I love doing that, because someone’s picked that song for the wedding, and I get to perform it for them at this really big moment in their lives. I don’t think there’s a greater way of experiencing what you’ve done than playing a song at someone’s wedding; maybe playing at someone’s funeral would be the same way; I don’t do that.

MD: Yeah, but you’re not going to get much feedback from them at that point…. I’ve got to imagine it’s much different playing at someone’s wedding, than playing at a normal concert, where you’ve got several thousand people, or several hundred people, sitting there, attentively listening.

JL: It’s made me a much better performer, I think, because usual shows – at least my shows – are quite polite: people come to the show, and they have a glass of wine or a beer, and I play the songs, and people dance, some people sing along, and it’s all very nice; but do weddings: it’s so unexpected what will happen: usually someone’s uncle gets too drunk, tries to beat you up because you don’t play enough Beatles songs; they place you in an impossible location with no PA. I’ve had every possible disaster happen to me at these weddings; and so, I can perform anywhere, with anything, right now, because I’ve done that.

MD: I just DJ’d at a wedding, and had a guy that was insisting that I play Neil Young; and I love Neil Young, but it wasn’t right for the wedding, but he was getting quite belligerent about it. Then I played the Neil Young, and the whole place cleared out while I played it.

JL: Oh no. Neil Young at a wedding! What song did you play?

MD: Well, I played something from Everybody’s Rocking, which is his rockabilly album, but that was fine, except for he didn’t realise that that was Neil Young; so, then he made me play Heart of Gold, and nobody wanted to hear that! Anyway, I’m hoping to talk about your song writing a bit, because it seems like it’s something that you are continually working on and experimenting with, and you must spend an awful amount of time thinking about it. You’ve gone through a few things in the past few years – some experiments: writing a song every week, doing the ghost writing thing – and I’m wondering what is your motivation for doing it? Is it to try and push yourself as a song writer, or are you bored with the way you’re writing, and you just want to try something new? What exactly are you up to?

JL: You mean with Postcards and Ghost Writing?

MD: Yeah.

JL: I think I was just stuck. I made some sort of ‘almost finished’ album in 2014, and I sent it to some friends, and I sent it to the label; and no one really liked it. I think I realised, at that point, that I was kind of stuck, and I needed to let some fresh air in. That’s when I decided to do Postcards, to give myself some creative freedom; to just write without the pressure that comes from releasing an album, and also with the pressure of actually finishing something; instead of sitting around polishing it until there’s nothing left of it. I was inspired by the way that Trey Parker and Matt Stone do Southpark – where they write the episode the same week it comes out – because then you’re able to catch something that is only significant that particular week, and not very significant if you wait and put out an album a year later, when everyone’s forgotten about it, or it’s just not a current topic anymore. That opened up a lot for me. It taught me that I needed to let go of control, because a lot of the best material came when I was just having fun and I was trying new ideas, and I wasn’t sitting down with the thought in my mind that I was going to write an amazing hit song – a classic, brilliant, epic track – instead, I was like, “There’s this thing that I’ve been thinking about, and it’s kind of funny; and I’m just going to write something about it, and see what happens.” Two of my favourite tracks on the album came from Post cards.

MD: I assume one of them is Postcard #17.

JL: Yes, and also number twenty nine, which turned into How We Met, The Long Version.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D5y4g8i0MyE

MD: Would you say – with that perspective of having written the album now and recorded it – that your song writing, overall, has changed – that the method has changed – since the previous record; thanks to all this interim stuff that went on?

JL: One choice I made after doing Postcards was working with a producer, which was something I had tried before; but every time I tried it, it ended in disaster.

MD: Was it a control thing, that made it end in disaster?

JL: Yeah, exactly. I just couldn’t bear having someone else fiddling around with my song; I couldn’t trust them. And in this case, I just made a decision that I wanted to work with an old friend, Ewan Pearson, who I’d worked with when I worked on Tracey Thorn’s album, Love and It’s Opposite. I just made a decision that I would hand the songs to him, in their current state, and say, “Here you go, now do your thing with these songs,” and then I would just let him do what he wanted to do with them. And he was super happy; he was like, “Cool! Let’s put some trombones here,” and I was like, “Don’t put trombones there. Don’t screw this…” you know: panicking. But then I knew what was going to happen if I tried to interfere: it would just be this boring compromise; so, I bit my tongue really, really hard, and I just let him do what he was going to do.

MD: I noticed that on Dandelion Seed, there’s an accordion sneaking in there. Is that one of the things that he put in, that you wouldn’t have thought of?

JL: No, that was my idea…. He works mostly with electronic stuff; so, most of the electronic parts are his.

MD: Oh, I see. You seem to have some kind of affinity or relationship with string sections as well; in fact, you even sing about it a little bit. What is that all about?

JL: I’ve just always loved string sections. I used to sample string sections in the past, because I didn’t know anyone playing strings, and I felt like this is something you can afford when you have a big budget. I don’t think that I particularly have a thing for string sections. I’ve worked with strings in the past, because I’ve had string arrangements; because they sound beautiful.

MD: They do indeed! Now, you also have a little contest cooked up for fans, to help when this tour goes under way, called ‘Jens will loop you now’. What was the motivation behind that?

JL: I’ve been rehearsing with this new band for the past weeks, and there’s been so much to cover, so much to fix – especially with the samples, because there are a lot of samples in my songs – and I had this one person in the band, Emily, who plays the samples, and we were trying to come up with this part for one of the songs, and we never really had time to fix it. I wasn’t really sure what was going in there – I think it just used to be some sort of beat, the way that we performed it in the past – and then I started thinking that there’s a lot of people writing me about how they make music and they’ve been inspired by something I’ve done, and they want to show me their stuff that they’ve produced or written. And I thought this would be a beautiful thing: to just have people send in little snippets, and then we put it into that song, into that part – mix it into that song – into our set, and they get to win a ticket, so that they can be at the show and hear their competition be woven into my music.

MD: That’s pretty cool, actually.

JL: Yeah… I don’t know if you ever did that when you were a kid: where you draw a head, and then you fold the paper, and you just do these two little lines, so that the next person can draw the body; and then that person draws the belly or the chest, and then the next person gets to draw the legs; and then you fold it out, and it’s this person that you’ve drawn without seeing the other people’s parts. It’s sort of like that. They would send me a little snippet, and they have no idea how it’s going to be used; and I have no idea what the part is that they’re going to send to me. It’s a little element of chaos and uncertainty being inserted into our sets every night.

MD: Have you been getting any responses yet? Have people been sending you stuff?

JL: No, I haven’t actually checked that….

MD: I have one more question for you, because I think I’m running out of time. I  did notice on your website that you have a journal that you write up every once in a while – the last entry was January 4^th – and you said you’re still in the process of trying to figure out what you’ve done, relating to the new album. I’m wondering – a month later – if you’ve figured out anything yet, or if you’re still in the process?

JL: I’m still in the process, definitely. I think the interviews that I’m doing are helping a lot, because, through the questions I get, I start to understand what it is I’ve done. But I think the real response – the real answers – will come when I start touring the record, and I get to see the response in people’s faces; so yeah, I still have no idea what it is I’ve done.

MD: Well, you’ll find out eventually, I’m sure.

JL: … It’s like with the last record that I did, I Know What Love Isn’t: it wasn’t until last fall that I understood what that record had meant to people.

MD: Oh, it took you that long?

JL: Yeah! I played some shows, and I played some songs from that record, and all of a sudden, people got really emotional and sang along to every word. And I was like, “Ah! So, it was one of those slower records that took a little while, and it’s actually made it into your hearts now.” That’s really beautiful; that made me really, really happy.

MD: It’s got to be pretty rewarding when you get a response like that.

JL: Yeah.

MD: Well, thank you very much for talking to me. I appreciate it. And hopefully, you’ll make your way down to New Zealand again, at some point in your travels, and we’ll get the chance to see these songs in the flesh

JL: Yes. I hope so.