Where: Howard Assembly Room
Leeds
LS1 6NU
United Kingdom
Manchester
What: Jens Lekman @ Howard Assembly Room
When:
Brudenell & Hey! Manchester Presents…
With support from - Family Stereo
Jens Lekman is an accidental wedding singer. But he’s also a wedding singer for a reason. Ever since his 2004 song “If You Ever Need a Stranger (To Sing at Your Wedding)” he has had a side gig fielding requests from strangers to sing at their weddings. For over twenty years, he’s had a particular vantage point from which to see the role love songs can play in our lives. In 2020, he and novelist David Levithan co-conceived a novel-with-music, Songs from Other People’s Weddings. Originally this album was meant to contain the songs from the weddings in the book, but as the novel came together, Lekman began to imagine what happened between the book’s chapters. The book and the album eventually became intertwined but also found their own paths. The book remained 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 result is an exploration of what we sing about when we sing about love – euphoria, doubt, dislocation, tenderness, conflict, playfulness, gratitude, ingratitude, longing, belonging, questioning, answering. It’s very much about a relationship and how it’s reflected through the relationships and weddings of others, but most of all it’s a lovesong to lovesongs.
How Much:
www.bandsintown.com InStockLeeds
LS1 6NU
United Kingdom
Who: Jens Lekman
Indie
Jens Lekman, born and reared in Gothenburg, Sweden, is a songwriter, adventurer and retired bingo hall employee. Traveling our globe as a wide-open receptor of all it has to offer, Lekman repurposes for his own oeuvre the world’s great, lost pop hooks of past and present. He breathes into them his droll senses of humor, romance and melody and gives them newfound buoyancy. Since his 2004 trifecta of EPs (Maples Leaves, Rocky Dennis in Heaven, You Are the Light) and right on through his acclaimed 2007 full-length, Night Falls Over Kortedala and 2012′s touchingly personal I Know What Love Isn’t, Lekman has made hopeless romantics of us all. In a musical language that has roots in the work of Arthur Russell, The Magnetic Fields, Calvin Johnson and Modern Lovers, Lekman’s songs serve as a reminder to look closer at the world around us, to appreciate the beauty when it’s both in and out of context; at its most heartbreaking, its most loving, and its most absurd.