Jens Lekman - Life Will See You Now

Pitchfork 80

“Postcard #17” is the penultimate track on Jens Lekman’s fourth album Life Will See You Now, and also its darkest. A morose Mingus-sampling piano ballad with handclaps and a disco backbeat, there’s no cute story to unfurl, no quirky character to imbue pearls of wisdom. The tune follows the internal monologue of a writer struggling to believe in himself (“If I just put this pen to this paper/If I just change the labels on the salt and pepper shaker/If I just trick myself into pouring it all out”), desperate to conquer the demons gnawing at his own sense of self-worth. Arguably the most fully formed track from his 2015 Postcards project—the album version is nearly identical to the original—“Postcard #17” is a window into the headspace Lekman was in when he resolved to write and release a new song every week that year. It’s a portrait of an artist, confused and fearful, trying to climb out of a hole of his own construction.

Lekman’s descent into darkness can be traced back to 2008, when he sat in his teenage bedroom in Sweden to pen “The End of the World is Bigger Than Love.” It was the first time he’d managed to write about the woman who had broken his heart that year, and it became the starting point for 2012’s I Know What Love Isn’t, the followup to his 2007 breakout Night Falls Over Kortedala. The album would eschew the sample-heavy chamber pop pastiche of his oeuvre to date in favor 10 sparse, “aerodynamic” takes on heartache. The subsequent tour was rough on Lekman—performing the most painful songs he’d ever written, night after night, to half-empty rooms waiting to hear the hits. His new songs were dark, and devoid of hope.

Lekman conceived the Postcards project to work through his despair. Only two of the 52 songs would make this album (#17 and #29, which became “How We Met, The Long Version”), but the songwriting bootcamp helped lay its foundation. When the project caught the ear of the Cincinnati Contemporary Arts Center, he used its commission to turn other people’s stories into songs. “There was a part of me that was really sick of this Jens Lekman character, and I wanted to write myself out of my songs,” he said. The Ghostwriting project scratched that itch, but ultimately confirmed what Lekman’s friends had already confessed to him: It’s easier to become emotionally invested in a Jens Lekman tale when he’s one of the characters.

It’s fitting that Lekman would find himself through narrating the lives of others. His best work has always been defined not by fantastical tales of intrigue, but tender moments observed with an empathetic eye. On Life Will See You Now’s opener, “To Know Your Mission,” a teenage Lekman relates to a Mormon missionary that all he wants out of life is to listen to people’s stories. When he sings “…in a world of mouths/I want to be an ear/If there’s a purpose to all this/Then that’s why God put me here,” it feels less like a prescient self-assessment from a precocious teen than it does the wizened perspective of someone reflecting on their life.

The bright, joyous tones of “To Know Your Mission” permeate Life Will See You Now, which marries the cohesion of I Know What Love Isn’t with the diverse palette of his sample-driven chamber pop. The lush production may be thanks to Ewan Pearson, whose work on the LP marks the first time Lekman has used an outside producer. Each of the album’s 10 tracks are fully formed pop songs, absorbing elements of disco, calypso, and samba, with upbeat rhythms that often belie the ache at their core. Bouncy bossa nova horns soundtrack a bride’s existential crisis (“Wedding in Finistère”), a cancer survivor consoles his distraught friend amid a barrage of sunny “doo doo doo”s (“Evening Prayer”), and Ralph MacDonald’s steel drums flutter as Lekman tortures himself with the olfactory nostalgia of an ex-lover (“What’s That Perfume That You Wear?”). He plays with the dissonance, softening emotional blows with melodic confection. As a friend (Tracey Thorn) begs him to avoid a melancholy retelling of their nocturnal mischief on “Hotwire the Ferris Wheel,” he indulges her: “Okay, if I’m gonna write a song about this I promise I won’t make it a sad song/You’ll go like this: ‘Woo!’”

A recurring theme of vulnerability dominates Life Will See You Now. Lekman’s narrator explores the way new lovers slowly reveal themselves to each other (“Our First Fight”), and the emotional distance he creates by expecting the worst to happen (“I couldn’t really see/How I built a bomb shelter under every dream,” he sings on “Dandelion Seed”). But the most striking relationships depicted here are platonic ones among men, stained by toxic interpretations of masculinity handed down from generation to generation. On “Evening Prayer,” he wants to tell his sick friend that he cares for him, but isn’t sure that they’re close enough. On the crushing Kings of Convenience-esque “How Can I Tell Him,” Lekman wonders if it’s possible to tell his best friend he loves him. The song is a crash course in what makes Lekman so endearing: the mundane anecdotes and intimate moments that colorfully illustrate why he loves his friend, the elegant arrangement of an infectious melody and timeless croon.

The album’s title imagines its characters—the tentative bride, the nostalgic ex-lover, even the young Lekman—as patients in a waiting room, waiting for their lives to start, for the nurse to pop in and say, “Life will see you now.” Lekman knows that waiting room well. It’s the place he was trapped when he wrote “Postcard #17,” stuck inside his own head, paralyzed by fear and self-doubt—feelings most writers can relate to. But the triumph of Life Will See You Now is how it suggests that the 36-year-old Lekman has never been more skilled at his craft, or had more stories to tell.