Jens Lekman returns with new album ‘Songs For Other People’s Weddings’ and lead single ‘Candy From A Stranger’
Swedish pop romantic par excellence Jens Lekman has announced his new album Songs For Other People’s Weddings, out 12th September via Secretly Canadian.
A whimsical, orchestral concept record inspired by his real-life stint as a wedding singer, the album lands alongside a companion novel co-written with bestselling author David Levithan.
Its first taste, the tender and utterly Jens track ‘Candy From a Stranger’, is out now — complete with a wedding-filled video collage capturing the heartfelt absurdity of singing strangers into matrimony. “This is the moment where the lovers meet for the first time — or do they?” says Lekman.
He continues, ‘The idea to make a narrative concept album (a rock opera?) felt forbidden. Which, for me, is usually a sign that I’m on the right path. While investigating the genre of narrative concept albums, I realised that one of my all-time favourite albums, Frank Sinatra’s Watertown, was in fact just that– a record that told a chronological story over the length of an LP. Having never been a fan of musicals or rock operas, this album served as inspiration.
I wrote the album while the book was still being written and, at some points, I started imagining what happened between the book’s chapters. The book and the album eventually became intertwined but also found their own paths. The book provided the structure of the story, but the album sometimes snuck behind the scenes. Stories from the songs made their way into the book and vice versa.’
Narratively, the album follows a musician named J who writes custom love songs for wedding couples — while struggling to hold onto his own relationship with his girlfriend, V. What unfolds is a lush, narrative-driven work full of sweeping strings, soft saxophones, and aching pop moments that trace love’s strange, beautiful logic.
Songs For Other People’s Weddings is available to pre-order now. A North American headline tour kicks off in November.
Songs For Other People’s Weddings Track Listing:
1. The First Lovesong
2. A Tuxedo Sewn For Two
3. Candy From a Stranger
4. Two Little Pigs
5. Speak To Me In Music
6. With You I Can Hear My Own Voice
7. I Want To Want You Again
8. GOT-JFK
9. Wedding In Brooklyn
10. For Skye
11. Increasingly Obsolete
12. On a Pier, On the Hudson
13. Wedding In Leipzig
14. LEJ-GOT
15. You Have One New Message
16. Just For One Moment
17. The Last Lovesong
💿 Songs For Other People’s Weddings — out 12 Sept via Secretly Canadian
📖 Companion novel with David Levithan out 5 Aug via ABRAMS
