Jens Lekman
Postcards (Independent)
Swedish troubadour Jens Lekman had a busy 2015 it seems.
The ever-earnest songwriter (and Scandinavia’s answer to Jonathan Richman) managed to write and record a song every week for the course of the past year, collecting all 52 of the audio “postcards” in a single album, available online through his SoundCloud page.
Postcards is that resulting collection, a concept album so ambitious and delightful, it bears comparison to the Magnetic Fields’ seminal pop opus 69 Love Songs.
(What’s even more impressive is that Lekman was able to pull this off while not only touring, but writing and recording an additional 17 songs that became Ghost Writing, a collection of narrative songs he released in November. Anyways, back to Postcards…)
Every song in the collection opens with Lekman reading the date the song was recorded. “This song is a time machine,” he sing-splains in “Postcard # 1”. “A bookmark in time, a breadcrumb, a chance to undo what you want undone.”
There’s 52 of them, so as you’d expect, the songs vary greatly in quality, both in terms of songwriting and production. “Postcard # 8” features sprawling string arrangements and lush harmonies, while the instrumental “Postcard # 41” is nothing but looping patch cord static with a spacey synth over top. Many of the songs rely on samples and electronic drums (though many have no drums at all) and few feature a full band backing him.
The songs are adorably small and intensely personal (as one would expect from Lekman), but here they take on the role of diary entries, with the mundane juxtaposed against the extraordinary. Tales of missed flights and shout-outs to friends’ fundraising efforts exist alongside ruminations on lost loves and recollections of dead relatives.
More often then not, the songs on Postcards hit the mark, and as a collection it represents something greater than the sum of its parts: a beautiful sketchbook by a talented artist, a journal of a natural-born story-teller.
“I’d just like to say thank you for listening this year,” Lekman sings on album closer “Postcard # 52”. “I’m not taking you for granted / Thanks for just being here.”
