It has been a long five years since Jens Lekman’s last full length album, “Night Falls Over Kortedala” and it has felt even longer. Thinking back, I don’t recall exactly how I got into Lekman but I believe that it was around 2009.  I was looking for something fun and I found it in Jens Lekman. In one of the first songs of his that I heard, he took the traditional advice of walking a thousand steps in someone else’s shoes before judging them and made a joke about how he was now one thousand steps away and judging the person anyhow.

Jens Lekman does a brilliant job of covering a wide variety of topics but what he sings about best is love, and at least half of the songs on this album deliver on that beautifully. The big winner in the love department is the song after which the album is named, “I Know What Love Isn’t.” Before I give you my thoughts on the song, here is the official video for it:

In the course of this seemingly silly song, Jens (or the character he is portraying) takes a friend for a ride in the car to check out women from the safety and distance of the car and then goes on to analyze why it is that he may not know what love is, but he certainly knows what love is not.

That theme is somewhat extended in the song “She Just Doesn’t Want To Be With You Anymore” in which the singer explains, in no uncertain terms, that his friend who thinks that there has to be a reason for his love situation is wrong and that his now ex-lover just doesn’t love him anymore. It’s not that she has someone else in her life, she just happens not to love him.

There are many other beautiful songs on the album, some of my favorites right now being “Erica America” and “I Want a Pair of Cowboy Boots.”

The entire album is available on Spotify and I strongly recommend it.

6 Comments

  1. It’s a fun record, Gordon, thanks for the recommendation. It’s pretty cool that while I’m listening to the album stream in the Spotify desktop App, the embedded Spotify player on this review page is reflecting exactly the same song and play time as the desktop — but both are not actually playing sound at the same time — they’re just synched up!

    1. Spotify really has done wonders for musicians whose music would otherwise be not so easily heard. It’s one thing to say to a friend, “I think you’d like Jens Lekman.” It’s another to say, “I sent you a link to his new album that you can listen to for free!”

      1. Yes, it’s great that you can listen to a whole bunch of music on Spotify without having to purchase the music first. I can’t wait for the Spotify web player to debut in October. I’ve always thought it odd to have to fire up a desktop App to stream music.

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