'Hello, I'm Jens Lekman': Swedish singer-songwriter's Johnny Cash moment
Jens Lekman last night. Karen Plemons
2:17 pm Oct. 10, 2011
Last night, at the second of three almost-sold-out shows at Brooklyn’s Music Hall of Williamsburg (the third is tonight), Swedish alternative heartthrob Jens Lekman started things with a little modified Johnny Cash.
“Hello, I’m Jens Lekman,” he said in a timbre that recalled the Man in Black's signature opening, having strode to the microphone on the darkened stage and, as with Cash, it felt less like a genuine introduction than a sort of overture.
Lekman shot to prominence in 2003, finding parallel success among indie listeners in his native Sweden and the U.S. alike with a pair of songs: “Maple Leaves” and “Black Cab.”
He was nominated for a trio of Swedish Grammies, had his concerts shown on national television there, and became a fixture on stateside college radio and MTV2/MTU, when those things both existed and showed music videos.
He’s put out a record crate’s worth of E.P.s in the intervening years (including the recently-released An Argument With Myself), but only two real albums. The third is scheduled for release early next year.
Lekman’s music can vary wildly—his rich, heartbreaking voice weaving figure eights with a single guitar, or soaring atop swells of brass and strings, or bouncing on electronic beats—but his songs are always funny, self-deprecating, and astonishingly sincere.
Lyrically, they often take the form of pleasantly rambling stories from his own life (a style not unlike the Mountain Goats’ John Darnielle, but without his sort-of casual pomposity) and tend to be about kissing or being sad or, often enough, both. Lekman’s not inconsiderable Nordic good looks, which are implike and yet substantial, and you've got an indie heartthrob.
Last night, Lekman was in fine form. The general structure of his set will be familiar to anyone who saw his show last year at breathtaking re-purposed Brooklyn factory The Green Building on Union Street. He favors starting slow, playing his more contemplative tracks or re-purposing others to fit that mold; last night, this included a decidedly desultory version of “Black Cab” that was all mournful long notes. He builds the mood gradually, eventually sticking his tongue out in concentration as he starts playing the drum machine balancing on a stool next to him, using that small grey box to send the concert’s mood soaring. He threw confetti into the audience, put his arms out to dance like an airplane, and played a charming bit of air xylophone to the end of “The Opposite of Hallelujah.”
It was a little vexing, then, that the crowd picked the sedate first half of the set to be extremely boisterous, laughing aggressively at the dozens of tiny jokes that dot Lekman’s work. Sure, it’s funny and cute when he sings in his rich voice he can “do a hundred push-ups/probably two, if I was bored,” and it’s interesting when he says of the forthcoming Lars Von Trier film Melancholia, the filming of which he has a song about, “I like end-of-the-world films where you Americans don’t save everyone,” but hearing hundreds of people laugh and holler at these things just seems somehow off. It’s hard to imagine this is the reaction Lekman has in mind when he says them, at least. But then, much of his work is about being alone in a crowd—at protests, parties, the streets of Melbourne, Australia—so why should his own concerts be any different?
Of course, seen another way, these shouts and exclamations are just the audience desperately trying to connect with Lekman, and he's the kind of performer that seems to invite that impossibility. It’s not easy; he writes about leaving people almost as much as falling in love with them. And, leave us he did: after about an hour, he told us that we were “really great,” told us to “have a perfect night” and asked us to “take care of [ourselves].” Just like that, he was gone, and 500 people in Williamsburg got a tiny taste of what swooning teens and twentysomethings from Gothenburg to London have been doing for the past decade: being left by Jens Lekman. The cure is more Jens Lekman.
