Life though a Jens

Jens Lekman doesn’t believe in half measures or empty gestures.
“I’m definitely a romantic,” says the 26-year-old Swede. “The thing is – and I’ve been thinking about it a lot – I can’t really see what the opposite would be. Someone, I can’t remember who it was, said: ‘If you’re not a romantic what are you? You’re probably dead’.”

He isn’t kidding. Last year Lekman wiped his MySpace site, fearing it had become a “way of collecting friends, like stocks and shares”. Aghast at internet rumours of his death, he once abandoned music for a year and took up a job as a Gothenburg bingo announcer. In a few months he will, in pursuit of a girl, abandon his native Sweden and move 12 time zones east to Australia.
“I think everybody feels that way,” he says, reclining backstage in Whelan’s, Dublin. “I think the difference is that they don’t write songs about it.”
Listening to Lekman’s latest album, Night Falls Over Kortedala, a hyper-literate bedsit weepy that has drawn comparison to Magnetic Fields and Belle and Sebastian, you may experience the curious sensation of eavesdropping on an intimate conversation or flicking through the pages of a diary. Against a backdrop of swooning synths, re-constituted '60s string sections and do-woop beats Lekman pretends to be a lesbian penpal’s boyfriend (‘Postcard For Nina’), slices off his thumb (‘Your Arms Around Me’) and ditches a girl upon concluding she isn’t the love of his life (‘I’m Leaving You, Because I Don’t Love You’).
“Everything is real,” he insists. “For 'Nina' I was almost thinking, maybe I shouldn’t even take credit for that song because I’m basically re-telling exactly what happened – I’m just making it rhyme. Sometimes I feel like I’m ripping off reality.”
Back in Sweden, Lekman is a bone-fide pop star. He first came to prominence in 2001, self-releasing tinny CD-Rs he’d put together in his apartment. By the time Kortedala – named after the Gothenburg suburb in which he grew up – saw daylight he’d transcended his cult fanbase: the record romped to number one in the charts (a feat Lekman’s inclined to play down: “In Sweden nobody buys records, so it doesn’t mean so much”).
This, of course, pales compared to his ranking in a magazine poll of the country’s sexiest men.
“I was 15th the first year it came out,” he says, with a rueful shrug. “Then I dropped down to number 33. Before me it was the whole Swedish soccer team, because they were very popular at the time.”
He’s also been taped to perform on the Conan O’Brien and David Letterman shows. Alas, his scheduled appearances fell foul of the US screen writer’s strike. Letterman’s people asked him to tape a spot in any case – but there was a sticking point: “They wanted me to come back for Christmas Day. I guess they were expecting the strike to be over by then. But I promised my mom to be home for Christmas.”
Technically Lekman is homeless at the moment. He left Sweden for good several months ago and is currently living out of a suitcase. “Homeless – I guess it’s not a very good term. It’s not as if I’m sleeping on the street. I wouldn’t call myself homeless, at least not if I’m talking to an actual homeless homeless person. I’m moving to Melbourne. I actually have more friends in Australia than in Sweden. It will give me some perspective I think.”
Lekman clams up a little when conversation turns to his “lost year”. Clearly, it’s still a sensitive topic.
“I was obsessed for a while. I was trying to control everything, because there were all these weird rumours circulating about me. I thought the media was sort of conspiring against me or something. It was starting to affect my family and my friends. There was a rumour I’d died in a motorcyle accident and lots of other ones I don’t really want to go into.”
So he put his guitar in the cupboard and went on hiatus. But why take a job as a bingo announcer?
“Bingo is something that Swedish culture revolves around for some reason, I don’t really know why. It’s the only job you can get like that. I just walk in and said are you hiring and they said, ‘Of course we are’.”
Turns out Swedish bingo halls are a little like Ken Loach movies: populated by the drunk, the old and the desperate.
“They're quite depressive places – a lot of alcoholics go there, they sit there and drink vodka. I don’t like to see old people pay up all the money they have and crying because they couldn’t afford to eat. It’s kind of grim. After three weeks I walked out because it was so depressing.”
What persuaded him to return to music?
“The conclusion I came to was that I should embrace those stories because my whole music and my whole life seems to be about misunderstandings. Misinformation seems to be some kind of central point in my music. I should try to embrace that instead of trying to control it. When I decided on that everything worked out.”

Night Falls Over Kortedala is out on Secretly Canadian