LIFE WILL SEE YOU NOW
Jens Lekman
2017

I can’t remember if I found “How We Met, The Long Version” through Spotify’s recommendation algorithm or Pitchfork’s Best New Music – I read it regularly, having just started my tradition of making seasonal playlists and needing more new music than I ever had in my life prior. It’s an extremely catchy groove, but it’s heavily playing off the sample of Jackie Stoudemire’s “Don’t Stop Dancin’” with a Daft Punk style production (think “Harder Better Faster Stronger” and its relationship to “Cola Bottle Baby.”) What makes “How We Met, The Long Version” a Jens Lekman song is the lyrics, which tell the story of the start of a romantic relationship – dating back to the Big Bang. It comes across as a maybe tongue-in-cheek observation in isolation, to romanticize a love story that starts with borrowing a bass guitar by syncing about trilobites and crustaceans evolving to the point where love is possible – but, I think, to assume that it’s in anyway less than genuine is to misunderstand Lekman’s lyrical project.

Life Will See You Now is, by and large, a series of relatively mundane anecdotal story-songs set to disco and new wave pop. In “Our First Fight,” a song with a tripping samba rhythm, Lekman’s conversational baritone delivers “I love you” and “No, I haven’t finished Season 3” in the same beautiful, neutral vocal tone, though that doesn’t stop a playful “Woo-hoo!” from taking center stage in the song’s climax. On “To Know Your Mission,” Lekman tells a story of meeting a Mormon missionary and telling him that he knows his mission – that “in a world of mouths, I want to be an ear” – that writing these songs and sharing these stories is the highest purpose. I think, for that reason, Lekman generally removes drama from the music and his singing, instead allowing the lyrics to build narrative momentum over music that remains playful and agile.

That’s not to say there’s no musical build-up, though. The way “Evening Prayer” or “Hotwire the Ferris Wheel” (in my book, the two best songs on the album) build from humbler sonic beginnings to their final harmonies overwhelms me to the point of tears. “Evening Prayer” tells the story of two men meeting for beers after a successful cancer treatment, melts me. It chooses the friend instead of the cancer survivor Babak as its perspective character, who sits in deep anxiety about whether or not he and Babak are actually close enough friends for it to not be weird how deeply he worried for his sick friend. The eventual resolution is a tearjerker, and Loulou Lamotte’s harmonies in the final chorus send it home swinging for the fences.

“Hotwire the Ferris Wheel” sounds, more than anything else, like the Wii Sports theme song, and tells the story of comforting a struggling friend by literally breaking into the carnival. It slowly builds up to the title, a chorus which soars as an anthem, and then reaches its real confessional. Feature singer Tracey Thorn comes in to beg Jens, “If you’re gonna write a song about this, please, don’t make it a sad song.” Whether or not this is entirely fictional or, to any degree autobiographical, I think Lekman is once again returning to the confessional of “To Know Your Mission” – whether the stories are true, the feeling of what it means to listen and share stories is intimate, at times uncomfortable.

One of my other favorite moments on the album comes in “Wedding in Finistère” (I should mention, Lekman is Swedish, occasionally apparent from pronunciation more than from the lyrics.) The song tells the story of a somewhat sardonic exchange at a wedding, joking that it feels like getting married is where life ends when it’s supposed to be where it begins. But, then, suddenly, in the chorus, the sense of perspective zooms out, to generations watching the generation prior disappear into reverie.

Five-year-old watching the ten-year-olds shoplifting
Ten-year-old watching the fifteen-year-olds French kissing
Fifteen-year-old watching the twenty-year-olds chain-smoking
Twenty-year-old watching the thirty-year-olds vanishing

This section is sung at almost double-tempo of the rest of the song (hell, the rest of the album,) flying into a propulsive hand clap game. Lekman claims he wrote this the day after a longtime friend told him she was pregnant, which made him feel the weight of time and his own sense of immaturity compared to where she was at in life. This moment reminds me so much of a moment in Genzaburo Yashino’s “How Do You Live?” in which our protagonist, a boy named Copper, realizes for the first time that the hundreds of cars driving back into Tokyo are, in fact, people, who all have their own lives and their own families and their own uncles. That when he and his uncle drove to the building he’s watching from, they may have been watched by someone from that very building, and this sudden sense that he is a part of the world and not its center makes him feel like a droplet in the tide. In the world of drama, the world of music, these are small revelations. 

KEY TRACKS: “Evening Prayer,” “Hotwire the Ferris Wheel,” “Our First Fight,” “Wedding in Finistère”

CATALOG CHOICE: CORRESPONDENCE, The Linden Trees Are Still in Blossom (or, if you can find the original 2007 version with the samples, Night Falls Over Kortedala)

NEXT STOP: American Utopia, David Byrne

AFTER THAT: Why Does The Earth Give Us People To Love?, Kara Jackson