Jens Lekman today released his extraordinary new album Songs For Other People’s Weddings via Secretly Canadian, a companion to a book of the same name by Lekman & award-winning, bestselling author David Levithan, out now via ABRAMS, and for which the duo was profiled by The New York Times and NPR’s All Things Considered. The LP and its singles—‘Candy From A Stranger’ and ‘Wedding In Leipzig’—have also been earning great press from Pitchfork (watch Lekman’s My Perfect 10 video on Frank Sinatra’s Watertown), the Kreative Kontrol podcast, The Needle Drop, Stereogum, Brooklyn Vegan, and more. Narratively, Songs For Other People’s Weddings follows the relationship of lead characters J (an unlucky-in-love musician who moonlights as a wedding singer) and V, changing musically as the couple navigates the ups and downs of love. An orchestral, romantic collection, the album traverses through pastoral strings, dreamy pop, soft jazzy saxophone, and sad house beats.
To celebrate its release, Lekman has shared a new video (filmed and edited by Rena Johnson) for the crushing yet dance floor-ready LP standout ‘On a Pier, On The Hudson,’ featuring vocals by Matilda Sargren–a young voice Lekman discovered while touring with youth orchestras in 2022. “While on the first two singles we’ve only heard from the male protagonist in the story, this is the first time we get to hear the perspective of V, the female protagonist, voiced by Matilda. I was thinking of old Chicago house music, The Avalanches and Pet Shop Boys when I wrote this song. I wanted it to be the sort of dance music that feels desperate and melancholy, not plastic,” Lekman explains. “There’s an element of travel on this album. The singer travels through all of these different places–it’s almost like a cat-and-mouse chase. I wanted the music to feel like walking through these different places, with each song taking you somewhere new.”
Songs For Other People’s Weddings was inspired by the beloved Swedish artist’s own surprising side career as a wedding singer, which came about by chance after fans took his 2004 song ‘If You Ever Need a Stranger (To Sing at Your Wedding)’ literally and invited him to perform at their nuptials. “The idea to make a narrative concept album (a rock opera?) felt forbidden. Which, for me, is usually a sign that I’m on the right path. While investigating the genre of narrative concept albums, I realized that one of my all-time favorite albums, Frank Sinatra’s Watertown, was in fact just that–a record that told a chronological story over the length of an LP. Having never been a fan of musicals or rock operas, this album served as inspiration,” Lekman explains. “I wrote the album while the book was still being written and, at some points, I started imagining what happened between the book’s chapters. The book and the album eventually became intertwined but also found their own paths. The book provided the structure of the story, but the album sometimes snuck behind the scenes. Stories from the songs made their way into the book and vice versa.”
Read the full album bio, written by David Levithan, HERE.
Jens Lekman – ‘On a Pier, On the Hudson’
Jens Lekman
Songs for other people’s Weddings
Tracklist:
- The First Lovesong
- A Tuxedo Sewn For Two
- Candy From a Stranger
- Two Little Pigs
- Speak To Me In Music
- With You I Can Hear My Own Voice
- I Want To Want You Again
- GOT-JFK
- Wedding In Brooklyn
- For Skye
- Increasingly Obsolete
- On a Pier, On the Hudson
- Wedding In Leipzig
- LEJ-GOT
- You Have One New Message
- Just For One Moment
- The Last Lovesong
Jens Lekman Links:
