Jens Lekman on the 2010s, Drain Gang, and Reluctantly Revisiting the Past

This is a free post from Larry Fitzmaurice's Last Donut of the Night newsletter. Paid subscribers get one or two email-only Baker's Dozens every week featuring music I've been listening to and some critical observations around it.

I am very much a longtime fan of Jens Lekman; if it was possible to wear out MP3s, I did so when it came to Oh, You're So Silent Jens and Night Falls Over Kortedala, and he's remained a singular and fascinating artist that I've continued to be mesmerized by. His first album in eight years—the highly conceptual Songs For Other People's Weddings—comes out tomorrow, and after several years of trying to get him on the newsletter I finally booked some Google Meet time with Jens at the end of last month. The resulting conversation was provocative and probing when it comes to his own history as an artist and listener—check it out:

It's been about eight years since your last full-length record.
I always think of my other projects as my records—correspondence, reimagining the old records, the internet projects that I did—but you're right.

Tell me about how these songs came together.
After the tour behind Life Will See You Now, I had a meeting with this film director from the U.S. who asked me if I wanted to make a TV show. He said, "Do you have any ideas for what that could be about?" I started talking about writing about my parallel career as a wedding singer, and initially it was me and this guy working on a TV show—like, a comedy-drama, sort of.

TV shows have that problem where 90% of them are killed by producers, so that's what happened to that one. It never saw the day of light. Then the pandemic hit, and I started thinking about talking to David Levithan about it instead, since I've known him for 20 years. In the middle of that, I started realizing that what I thought would be the album, which was the songs the guy writes in the book, would be a really strange record. I realized that I needed to think of a new way of doing this record, and that's when I started making this record as a narrative concept album instead.

I feel like it's a very mid-to-late-2010s thing to get wrapped up in potentially making a television show for about two years. We're kind of in the waning days of that bubble. Talk to me about that period of time for you and your career. There is this notion that, around 2016 or 2017, the door was starting to close on the gold rush of digital media and streaming.
Yeah, there was a much more optimistic feeling about it. I don't know anything about TV or the film business, but I remember having a lot of debates with my record label about streaming, and them being much more optimistic about it and feeling like this was, maybe not the greatest thing, but it was at least better than what we had before and it was going to work itself out. I was highly pessimistic about it and absolutely hated it. Around that time, the few friends I have who made TV and movies were also a lot more optimistic about things.

It does sound like you were something of an early adopter in terms of feeling pessimistic about streaming in general. Were those concerns mainly financial for you?
No, they were mainly existential. For me, growing up in Sweden and starting to release music around the early 2000s, we had the whole Pirate Bay movement and all that here. This is where it all started, in a way. I mean, Spotify was built on the technology from Pirate Bay. So I have this memory of what it could've been. It wasn't like I thought that Pirate Bay was the greatest thing in the world—I was never part of the pirate movement—but I did see the potential in the restructuring of hierarchies, and the reason why I was drawn to indie music was very much because it felt like a blueprint for what society could be. You didn't have to be involved with big corporations that owned you. You could do things underneath that or outside of that.

I'm reading that book Mood Machine by Liz Pelly right now, and she puts her finger on one thing that really has really haunted me with streaming, which is the the the way that music was turned into a scented candle—something that you put on in the background. Everything has turned into a chill Sunday, or "Cappuccino Wednesday" or whatever. What I was drawn to when I started getting into music was that it meant something—that it had a potential to change things. Now it feels like it's just a scented candle in the background.

One thing that's been kind of odd to witness is the devaluing of the album as a format. This album of yours, on the other hand, is also very much conceived as a front-to-back listen in terms of narrative. Talk to me about your relationship to the album as a format.
I've never been super particular about the format in the past. I always saw my earliest records as just, "Here's a bunch of tracks I've been working on. I thought of them as compilations—a bunch of tracks that have been circulating on the internet that I now have to release. For my first records, I think it says in the liner notes, "This is a compilation of tracks from 2004 to 2005" or something.

But over time—and this has to do with the evolution of music—I've become more particular about it. It's almost a reaction to what Daniel Ek was talking about in one of his press conferences, about how musicians need to get with the times, pick up the pace, and release more music on a regular basis. One of my closest kinships I have in in art is the filmmaker Roy Andersson. He's someone who takes decades to finish his movies. I got to visit his studio when I was making the video for "You Are The Light," and I got to see the amount of detail that went into his scenes. I've always felt like I'm working with miniature worlds and polishing tiny little details. Some people call that perfection, and I just think I know when the songs are ready.

What are some movies you've seen that you've liked?
I really enjoyed Black Dog by Guan Hu. I watch most of the movies during the Gothenburg Film Festival, and then I just go to a lot of random movies— whatever I can get a ticket to. I went to see Weapons the other week, which I thought was a combination of a horror movie and Benny Hill. I appreciated that it was a good cinema movie. It was a good movie to have two frozen margaritas and go watch.

One song that stuck out to me on this record immediately was "On a Pier on the Hudson. It sounds a lot like something off of Katy Perry's Teenage Dream. You've always engaged with pop music in really interesting ways, and this felt very much in line with that. It also sounds like something you'd hear at a wedding.
The record was influenced by this conversation I had with the Avalanches once. You know the Avalanches?

Of course.
I was supposed to be part of their second album, the long-anticipated Wildflower, from 2016. I remember them explaining that record to me as a walk through the city, where you turn a corner to a new block and there's a block party, or a jazz band playing—something new is happening. There's an element of travel on this album. The singer travels through all these different places—it's almost like a cat-and-mouse chase. I wanted the music to be like he was walking through different places, and then the music would change to something new.

I wasn't thinking Katy Perry when I wrote that song—I was thinking more of old house music, maybe Pet Shop Boys. It's definitely a dance-y song, for sure—but I wanted it to be the sort of dance music that feels desperate and melancholy, not something that felt plastic. I'm a big fan of old Chicago house music, and my idea was that it would reach the point where everything was heightened and tense for a while. It's trying to build up to that moment, and all the songs are calm after that.

What's your general level of engagement with pop music these days?
Oh, I don't know. I take part in music so differently these days. Once a week, there's this big commercial playlist released in Sweden, and I always listen to that because I want to know what's popular. I want to know what humanity is singing right now. But to be honest, I haven't been actively listening to that super mainstream part of music lately. It's more something that I just listen to in the background. It's so hard when you don't have a physical record collection to glance at.

I had the guys from Real Lies on the newsletter recently, and although this didn't make it into the published interview, Kev actually mentioned to me that he heard that you were into their music, which made a lot of sense to me. What is it about them that grabs you as a listener?
A little bit of it is nostalgia, because I think they do capture something that's not necessarily retro. It's memories of being in London or some other UK town in the late '90s. But I think they do it really well, and part of it is also the same feeling I get from listening to Burial—that feeling where everything is foggy, you're on the night bus, you're filled with melancholy when you're going home at 3 a.m. from a party. It also makes me think of some of the sad songs by the Streets, which I also loved a lot when I was growing up—and the Streets were also an inspiration for this record as far as narrative concept albums.

I'm somebody who's always kept an ear to what's going on in Sweden regarding pop and indie music, and over the last five or six years, Bladee and Drain Gang have been doing something similar to what you and the Sincerely Yours artists were doing. What's your level of engagement with Drainers?
I remember an old interview with Yung Lean when he was probably in his late teens, and he was talking about how all the the rappers in Sweden were dissing him and he was like, "I never listened to Swedish rap—I listened to Air France." Just to hear that connection being established and realizing, "Yeah, this was actually the logical conclusion of this." You had these record labels like Service and Sincerely Yours, and what they were moving towards was definitely something
like Yung Lean—you just needed a 16-year-old who was really into making that kind of music. I love it. I think they're great, and they are very connected to the remnants of that scene as well. I mean, Year0001 consists of a lot of people from that scene, for example.

Talk to me more about your memories of SY and Service's heyday.
The one important thing I remember is that bands like The Embassy and The Tough Alliance gave me this feeling like we'd invented the wheel. It's not like they did something completely new, but I remember touring the U.S. the first time and feeling very wide-eyed and humbled by everything—like, "This is where all the popular culture that I grew up with came from." Then, the second or third time I toured the U.S., I was looking around and thinking, "You guys are, like, 10 years behind us on so many levels." It was like I came to the U.S. and was like, "Hello, I'm from the future, how are you?"

Gothenburg was a town that was utterly uncool. There was a saying in the '90s that when you stepped off the train in Gothenburg, if you came from Stockholm, you were supposed to turn your clock back two years because it was just so uncool in Gothenburg. Gothenburg was associated with shrimps, very bad comedy, and bingo. So to have that feeling of, "Wait a minute—we have the answer, we are the answer, we are the future," and to travel the world feeling like that...that self-confidence can lead you places.

Also, around the early 2000s, most bands sounded like the White Stripes or something. Then there was this other movement with The Embassy and all that, which was like, "We hate guitars, we hate authenticity, we're just gonna perform karaoke and have this woman lip-syncing to our songs while we're in the audience dancing. We're gonna go completely KLF on everything." And that was interesting.

It's funny you describe that music as being against authenticity, because that music, as well as what's coming out of Sweden today, feels realer to me than anything else still. Obviously, the American perspective on what indie is has changed quite a bit, to the point where it's more like what it's been in the UK: a marketing term. Maybe around the mid-to-late 2000s, you could've said indie was representative of a sound or a pocket of bands in a specific area, but in the 2010s it felt like indie became more codified in a corporate manner. But, also, now it does feel like we're back in that mid-2000s area again post-pandemic, where there are more people coloring outside the market margins and not being as obsessed with careerism.
I definitely see an interest now in the early 2000s, which is natural. You look two decades back, and that's when it becomes interesting. But I do think that there's a reason for that as well. I think we're still feeling the effects of the 2010s, which I hated. But right now, there's a lot of people writing books and making documentaries about that scene in Gothenburg, with Service and Sincerely Yours.
I've been doing three or four interviews the last half-year for those, and I see a lot of new labels and artists coming up that are saying that they want to do something similar to that.

Most of it becomes a reflection of what that was. If you're just starting the Tough Alliance today, I don't think it would be the same thing. You have to come up with what the Tough Alliance would be in 2025. But there's something about how the 2010s just became so much about hoping that Red Bull would give you some money, or that Spotify would include you on one of their sessions or playlists. It became so career-focused. A lot of Swedish music went from Gothenburg indie amateurism to Stockholm, where it's always been about being an accomplished musician and playing correctly. Nothing wrong with that—I like polished pop music ,as we established before. But it was like it was in the '80s here as well, when the yuppies were on the rise and all music just sounded like a reflection of that. The 2010s felt like the '80s to me, and now we're in some sort of reaction towards that. That's why people are reaching for what was going on here in Gothenburg in the early 2000s.

I've never thought of your music as nostalgic, even though you've been able to weave the past and the present together a lot in terms of your approach to sampling. You did the re-recorded albums a couple of years ago. What was it like to engage with your older music in that form and rebuild it from the ground up, so to speak?
Well, it wasn't nostalgic. I felt like it was something that I just had to do because of the issues that I was facing. I don't think that I would've reimagined or re-recorded my old songs if it wasn't for the fact that Night Falls Over Kortedala was going to be taken down. I came to a point where I either let it drift off into obscurity—I have no idea what kind of fate it would face in these times—or I do this completely insane thing where I reimagine or re-record the songs, which feels like sacrilege. But I like sacrilege, so in a way it just felt like doing the forbidden.

I still haven't really come to terms with it. It was really hard to let go of Night Falls. I'm not a person who usually clings to the past. It was hard to have to sit with those songs again, and as a person who wants to move forward, I always hated the concept. My booking agent asks me every year, "When are you going to go out and do Night Falls with a symphony orchestra or something?" And I'm like, "No, I got this narrative concept album. It's 17 songs." I've never been much for revisiting the past, so that was hard. But the absurdity of the situation, and the solution, felt interesting to me—and looking at it as a portal to a time when things were different.

How do you feel about touring lately?
I mean, financially, it's a disaster. There's this idea that streaming gave way to show fees going up, but I just had a meeting with my booking agency, and that's definitely not the case. But I love touring so much. It's the ultimate mindfulness exercise for me, where you're in an eternal beautiful way, in the tour bus looking out the window at these landscapes. You're visiting strange gas stations in the middle of nowhere, and then at the end of the day you have one task, and that's to do a good show and connect with the audience. That's all you have to think about that day. You're not thinking about what's going to happen next month or next year. It's absolutely beautiful. I love it so much.

I mean, it is super hard, and I'm not making any money at all from touring. I built the U.S. tour that I'm doing in November around playing weddings, because they're the only things that are paying for me. Without the weddings, I wouldn't be able to do the tour. But the touring itself, I really hope that I can keep doing in some way.