Jens Lekman is a Swedish songwriter who started putting out his homemade songs in 2003, a time when the music industry was in turmoil from illegal downloading but social media and streaming services hadn’t yet seen the light of day. Through poorly encoded mp3s spread through file-sharing programs, his songs, which were often collages made up of samples from crackling vinyl, made their way into people’s hearts.
Over six albums and countless EPs, singles, projects like ’Postcards’ where he wrote and released a song per week on Soundcloud for a year, mixtapes, collaborations with Van Dyke Parks, Drew Barrymore and Tracey Thorn, he’s painted a portrait over his hometown of Gothenburg, Sweden and shown us through his often humorous storytelling how close the infinitely tragic is to the absurdly funny. His latest album, Correspondence, is a musical communication between him and his friend Annika Norlin, a beloved songwriter in Sweden, where each song is a letter to the other and an answer to the previous song. An epistolary novel in the form of a folk album.
