“The Opposite of Hallelujah“
from the album Night Falls Over Kortedala
2007
iTunes
Three years ago, Jens Lekman was voted the 15th sexiest man in Sweden by Elle magazine. OK, that’s not exactly bachelor-of-the-year status, but it’s not bad. Not bad at all for a droll pop singer with what was, at the time, a small but devoted following for his achingly lovely songs — songs with wit and heart, about philosophy and Rocky Dennis (the disfigured teenage boy in the film Mask); about using your one phone call after being arrested to request a song on the radio; or about pretending to be your lesbian friend’s boyfriend to keep her father happy.
Three years on, Lekman’s new album Night Falls over Kortedala — more classic pop in the mould of Burt Bacharach and Jonathan Richman with dance rhythms — has made it to No. 1 in his homeland. Has that seen his “sexiest man” ranking change?
“It should have, yeah,” Lekman says, sounding a little hurt at Elle’s evident failure. “I look better now than I did back then.”
Where would he rate himself, then, on the sexiest-man-in-Sweden table?
“I’m not the sexiest man, but somewhere in the top 10,” is his considered opinion. “The problem last time was the whole (Swedish) football team was in there. But most of those players now are quite old and are dropping out.”
Lekman is an amusing man, made more so by a deadpan face and a dry delivery. It can make it hard to know when to take him seriously. Like his audience, Lekman wasn’t sure what was serious and what wasn’t, until “Hawkeye” Pierce and friends made it all clear to him. Seriously.
“When I started writing songs and performing them I had this feeling that maybe I was comically retarded,” Lekman says.
“Each time I sang a song that was very serious to me, people would laugh and when I tried to make people laugh with a funny song, people started to cry. At some point last year I stopped listening to music for a long time and I listened to a lot of comedy. I loved all the comedy records I got and I watched every single episode of M*A*S*H and that last episode — you remember, it’s very serious and not a single joke, quite a dignified look at life — when I came to that episode I realized what I had been trying to do with my songs.
“I think a lot of my songs are very silly and very stupid, written to entertain people, but, in the end, I always come to that last line and I feel that I have to wrap this up with a bit of dignity and a little tear in the eye otherwise the joke would be on the characters in the song.”
It is possible to laugh and cry a number of times across Lekman’s album and sometimes within the one song. The thing is, he’s not afraid to go there because, as an undoubted fan of the pop song and its conventions, he understands that being passionate about something doesn’t mean you can’t see the silliness. After all, there is nothing sillier than being in love.
“Some very silly songs can have an almost melancholy feeling when you put it in a different perspective,” he says. “Like (his new song about a job he had during his year off from playing music) ‘Friday Night at the Drive-In Bingo,’ for example. That was definitely just a silly song I wrote so that people could dance to it and sing along, but, in the end when I heard it, it was a very pretty song and almost made me cry.”