The Full Length of <b>Jens Lekman</b>

Jens Lekman is a prolific songwriter but not a prolific album maker. In the seven years he’s been releasing his urbane pop music, amongst his several EPs and singles, Lekman has issued only two proper full-lengths, including his latest, Night Falls Over Kortedala. But the decision to release a second album was purely to avoid an unsavoury reputation. "I think I said in one interview three years ago that I would never make another album, and then that became the one thing I was famous for,” he explains. "People would point at me and say, ‘Look, there’s the anti-album man. There’s the guy who’s never gonna make another album!’ And I didn’t want to be famous for that, so I decided to make another album.”

Thank goodness for gossip because Night Falls Over Kortedala finds the suave Swede with the unmistakable croon hitting his stride and re-discovering the joy of making records. The sample-heavy collection of songs marks his finest work yet, establishing the singer-songwriter as a master of situational storytelling that’s as sincere as it is sardonic. The way Lekman tells it, though, he was hardly expecting it to turn out. "The problem in the past is that I didn’t know how to put together albums. I found it extremely frustrating; it was hell, basically, trying to put together the first record.”

The solution? Get someone else to do the work for you. "I had a bunch of friends put together the album for me. They had a little Eurovision song contest. I gave them 30 songs, and they would call me and grade the songs like, ‘Song number eight, that’s definitely 12 points.’ I had a chart to see which songs made it, and then they put together a track listing for me. It worked out great. I think that’s gonna be the way it works in the future, so there will be loads of albums coming out.”