Jens Lekman
When I Said I Wanted To Be Your Dog

THE REVIEW

Imagine setting off for Sweden as a guest of a 23-year-old guy named Jens Lekman. Imagine this guy in his first own home in the center of Gothenburg starts telling you, lying on the bed, eyes fixed on the ceiling, music in the background (Morrissey, Nick Drake, Jeff Buckley, Beck), about his adolescence, his little love stories, the demonstrations. Imagine he opens his heart to you, confiding his past experiences, so painful when they were lived, now only to be retraced with a smile on his lips, clues of a just-ended adolescence whose value is beginning to be understood, only now that it has slipped through our fingers.
There you have it, Jens Lekman's songs are these stories, melancholic and smiling, spontaneous and sincere: he will tell you about his adventures with Julia, with Silvia, his friendship with Lisa, the clashes in Gothenburg between the new globalists and the police...

The album strikes from the first listen: the voice of Jens is striking, his talent, the disarming spontaneity, the arrangements and melodies: everything is perfectly curated, strings, winds, choirs contribute to create a harmonious balance that feels like it is from another time, making the pieces even deeper, fragments of lived life that reach the heart.

Jens' songs are melancholic author ballads, love songs that fall between indie pop and folk, following the path traced by Kings Of Convenience, Sondre Lerche, and other Nordic songwriters, they surprise with their immediacy, with the grace, the skill of a young and brilliant composer, with the charm and attention that a friend's story deserves: Jens speaks to you as a friend, listen to him. You will be fascinated by this talent.