Description
//Secretly Canadian//
£32.99 – 2xLP, Limited Edition Yellow Coloured Vinyl
Jens Lekman is an accidental wedding singer. But he’s also a wedding singer for a reason.
Ever since his 2004 song, “If You Ever Need a Stranger (To Sing at Your Wedding)” he has had a side gig fielding requests from strangers to sing at their weddings. For over twenty years, he’s had a particular vantage point from which to see the role love songs can play in our lives. In 2020, he and novelist, David Levithan, co-conceived a novel-with-music: ‘Songs from Other People’s Weddings’.
Originally, this album was meant to contain the songs from the weddings in the book, but as the novel came together, Lekman began to imagine what happened between the book’s chapters. The book and the album eventually became intertwined but also found their own paths. The book remained 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.
The result is an exploration of what we sing about when we sing about love — euphoria, doubt, dislocation, tenderness, conflict, playfulness, gratitude, ingratitude, longing, belonging, questioning, answering. It’s very much about a relationship and how it’s reflected through the relationships and weddings of others, but most of all it’s a lovesong to lovesongs.
Tracklisting:
SIDE A
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
SIDE B
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
SIDE C
11) Increasingly Obsolete
12) On a Pier, On the Hudson
13) Wedding in Leipzig
SIDE D
14) LEJ-GOT
15) You Have One New Message
16) Just For One Moment
17) The Last Lovesong
