‘You’re either getting punched or going skinny dipping’: Swedish indie star Jens Lekman on playing 132 weddings of his fans
On a video call from his Gothenburg apartment, Jens Lekman is contemplating the 132 weddings at which he has performed. “When you play a normal show, everything follows a schedule. At a wedding, you never know if you’re going to get punched by someone’s uncle or go skinny dipping with the couple.” He pauses. “And that’s what I like: putting myself in weird, awkward situations.”
These include passing out inside a large but poorly ventilated wedding cake. “It was a small wedding and a lot of stuff was DIY. It wasn’t fun to realise they had forgotten the air holes.” Or a man nearly dying on the dancefloor. “Yeah, that happened, too. But he made it.”
You may know Lekman as the Swedish indie star whose forlorn love songs can simultaneously break your heart and make you laugh. You may not know that, ever since his 2004 song If You Ever Need a Stranger (To Sing at Your Wedding), he’s been taking requests to do just that. In the beginning, “it was just random people who had heard the song,” he says. But, after an Australian couple shared a video of him playing their wedding in 2013, he was suddenly inundated with requests: “I owe them a lot of gratitude.”
In retrospect, he’s always been made for the job. Since the early 00s, Jekman has made records defined by wry yet kind-hearted observations about romance and heartbreak. He named his 2012 album I Know What Love Isn’t and, on To Know Your Mission, from 2017, Lekman tells us he just wants to listen to people’s stories. He says the weddings have only underscored this purpose: “I want to be of service to the people who the music means something to.”
With streaming making it ever harder to make a living from music, playing weddings also became a way to get by financially, as well as providing inspiration for his own songwriting. Lekman recounts a story about the director, John Waters, getting picked up while hitchhiking through the Nevada desert. “What the hell are you doing out here?” the driver asked. Waters replied that it helped provide inspiration. “That’s what the weddings are for me,” Lekman says with a smile.
His new album is called Songs for Other People’s Weddings, and comes with a novel of the same name written with David Levithan, author of books including Nick and Norah’s Infinite Playlist. They’ve been friends for 20 years; just before the pandemic, Lekman reached out with an idea for something about “my parallel career as a wedding singer”, having wondered whether it could be a TV show or musical.
Levithan was all in. “The situation was so tantalising,” he says on the same call. “The idea of writing about these weddings from the point of view of the wedding singer was something I would never have thought of in a million years.”
The result is a “novel-with-songs” formed from what Lekman calls “a dialogue between me and David about love and relationships”. It tells the story of the romance between a wedding singer called J and his girlfriend V, through 10 weddings at which he performs. Lekman’s accompanying album imagines what happens in between the book’s chapters: he was inspired by albums with stories running through them, such as the Streets’ A Grand Don’t Come For Free and Frank Sinatra’s Watertown.
The result is “purely fictional but, at the same time, emotionally very much both of ours”, as Levithan puts it. Given that it’s the story of a Swedish singer who plays weddings, it blurs art and life: “I love the confusion – and I don’t think there’s really any way around it,” Lekman says, though they decided to change the main character’s name to J: “In the first chapter I wrote, he was named Jens and that was too confusing,” says Levithan.
It’s part of the fun in Lekman’s storytelling, wondering how autobiographical his hapless and hopeless romantics really are. Levithan says he explains Songs for Other People’s Weddings to friends as: “I’m writing somebody else’s autofiction.” Lekman, meanwhile, says it’s “definitely David’s story”, but admits Levithan “asked me for anecdotes – what it’s like to jump out of a wedding cake, for example”.
Lekman was also able to channel the breakup he was going through at the time into tracks like Wedding in Leipzig – with its darkly droll lines, “So this is the singles table, these are my people / Does anyone have cyanide, a razor blade or a pistol?” The track, he says, “is about what it means to be alone. I’m 44 now, so that’s definitely something I thought a lot about during that time.”
Working through these feelings and writing the songs made him consider his lifelong relationship with music. “I realised J was describing something to me that I hadn’t formulated for myself yet,” Lekman says. “I was at a point in my life where I was searching for purpose. In this era of streaming, music has become like a scented candle. And singing at weddings is reversing that for me. I began playing weddings because I just thought it was a fun, weird thing to do. And then I realised that these moments were the most important point in these people’s lives. You’re not the reason people are there. Your job is to be a midwife, delivering these people into the next phase of their lives. It was that connection that I was searching for.”
One couple he “delivered” was Rich Thane and his wife, Grace Goddard, who both work in the music industry. “We’ve been mega fans for as long as we can remember,” says Thane, so having him play was “equal parts the most surreal and most natural thing in the world”. Watching on was “a mixture of our friends losing their minds and family members who had no idea who he was but were visibly thrilled it was happening. The entire room just shared in a collective joy.”
This shared delight exemplifies Lekman’s purpose. Yet he’s surprised at how often people want to hear songs that don’t seem “suitable for a wedding, like Maple Leaves – these sad breakup songs. But they tell me they don’t just want a bunch of happy, lovey-dovey songs, they want the ones that acknowledge the other side of it. And I think they’re on to something.”
As a wedding singer, Lekman has seen all kinds of ceremonies. “It’s always fun to play at a billionaire’s wedding, when they come riding in on horses and there’s fireworks,” he says. “But I’ve always been really touched by the very simple ones where it’s, ‘Meet us at this hill at this very particular point which is important to us’, and it’s just a small gathering and a beautiful little ceremony.”
In the novel’s dedications, Lekman says he hopes his presence at these occasions “turned out to be a blessing and not a curse”. The video for the album’s lead single, Candy from a Stranger, features footage from Lekman’s various wedding performances. “I got in touch with a lot of the couples. Of course, some have divorced, it’s been a long time,” he says. “But, percentage wise, it seems to have been a blessing.”
