Deep Ellum Art Company and At The Helm Presents: Jens Lekman Jens Lekman – Songs from Other People’s Weddings by David Levithan Jens Lekman is an accidental wedding singer. But he’s also a wedding singer for a reason. Our story starts with a track from his first album, 2004’s When I Said I Wanted to Be Your Dog. “If You Ever Need a Stranger (To Sing at Your Wedding)” makes an offer to the listener; since Jens knows “every stupid love song that ever touched your heart,” he’s happy to perform at your wedding. Why? Because he’s “just so amazed to witness true love.” Jens says now, “It was meant to be a bit tongue-in-cheek, but people took it very seriously and started asking me to actually play at their weddings. Which I did happily; it was an honor. In the 2010s, when streaming made it harder to make a living from music, the wedding gigs became a way to get by financially, and also gave new meaning to music itself.” As a wedding singer, Jens has a particular vantage point from which to see the role love songs can play in our lives. The songwriter’s feelings (ecstasy, agony, or any point in between) are put into the song, and then the performer adds their own feelings, and these become the feelings that are amplified within the listener as they listen. Songs help us experience our emotions as bigger than us. So at a wedding, the newly married couple uses music to universalize their romance so it can be shared with everyone else in the room. For two decades, the wedding gigs have taken Jens both close to home and around the world. He’s witnessed joyous moments, high anxiety, delirious dancefloor antics, and more than a few mishaps. Sometimes he’s performed at weddings when his own heart was full . . . and other times he witnessed the couple’s happiness at a cool remove, because love songs can have that effect, too, making you feel left out when you’re missing someone or painfully lonely. This would make an interesting narrative, Jens thought. Which is, I suppose, where I come in. I’m a novelist with an interest in love songs, and Jens and I have corresponded ever since I got in touch with him in 2005, after listening to his album on repeat while writing a book. I wanted to thank him for the soundtrack. We kept in touch over the years, and shortly before the pandemic, he approached me with the idea for a novel about an indie musician who plays weddings. I was intrigued. To make it a true collaboration, I suggested we add a twist: that the wedding singer writes an original song for each couple, based on a conversation with them about their love (which Jens had done before, but not for every wedding.) Half the chapters of the book would be written with me telling the story of the wedding first and Jens having to supply the couple’s song after. The other half would start with Jens giving me a song, and then me having to come up with the story that led to the song. This became our novel-with-songs, Songs for Other People’s Weddings. It is the story of the wedding singer (J), his girlfriend of two years (V), and the things that happen within their relationship when she moves to New York without him. While some of the wedding details are from Jens’s experiences, J is not Jens, and V is not anyone specific. Still, their relationship contains many observations about love that Jens and I have gathered over the years, as both participants and observers. Which leads to this album. The plan had always been to record an album, and we’d assumed it would contain the ten songs from the ten chapters in the book. But the more the story between J and V grew, the more we realized it would be absent to the album listeners who hadn’t read the book. So Jens began to explore the idea of an album that would retell their story from a musical angle, abandoning the third-person narrative of the novel to go straight into the characters’ hearts and minds. Says Jens, “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. “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.” The album changes musically as J navigates his relationship with V, with each new wedding providing its own sonic background. We hear pastoral strings as J ponders what’s at stake outside a church wedding, and dreamy pop as he and V hit a good stretch. A soft jazzy saxophone comments in the background as he interviews a couple in a café, and a brass ensemble follows him down the street when he reaches Brooklyn in pursuit of answers from V. When J pleads with V to stay on a pier overlooking the Hudson, a sad house beat takes over. The character of J cannot keep his own emotions out of his songs, and Jens finds a way to underscore this in ways that will constantly surprise the listener. He is often joined by Matilda Sargren giving voice to V’s feelings and thoughts. Jens discovered Matilida when he played with a youth orchestra from the neighborhood where he grew up (Hammarkullen outside of Gothenburg). Initially she was only meant to sing on the demos, but once she started vocalizing V, there was no question that she would be on the final album. If Jens and I have done our jobs, the novel and the album tell both sides of J and V’s story – and the tension comes from how these sides fit together. Again – that’s love. I will let Jens get the final word here: “While this story is very much about a relationship and how it’s reflected through the relationships and weddings of others, most of all I think it’s a love story about music and its value in a time when it’s been devalued and turned into content by tech companies. Its ability to soothe and connect and its role in the transitional moments of our lives such as weddings. It’s a lovesong to lovesongs.” Deep Ellum Art Company 3200 Commerce Street Dallas, TX