There is something wonderfully Jens Lekman about releasing an album of songs that, strictly speaking, belong to someone else — even when that someone else is fictional.
The Swedish indie music star describes himself as “an accidental wedding singer.”
Other People, Other Wedding Songs is the (much) quieter companion to 2025’s Songs for Other People’s Weddings, and in some ways I find it the more intriguing of the two. These are the songs from inside the book: the wedding songs written by J for the various couples he encounters. Rather than another grand Jens Lekman album, it feels as if one is handed J’s battered songbook after the last wedding guest has gone home.
And I think I prefer it that way.
The elaborate arrangements of Songs for Other People’s Weddings were often beautiful, but they occasionally threatened to overwhelm the small human stories at the center of the project. Here there is nowhere for those stories to hide. The songs are stripped back, intimate and sometimes almost casually presented. You hear the words differently.
That matters with Lekman because the details have always been the point.
Plenty of songwriters can tell you that love is wonderful, or painful, or complicated. Lekman wants to tell you what somebody was wearing, what they were eating, what was playing on the stereo, and the peculiar sentence somebody said eight years ago that neither of them has forgotten.
That specificity is what makes his songs feel true.
It is also what makes the idea behind Other People, Other Wedding Songs so perfectly suited to him. J is essentially being paid to turn other people’s memories into songs. He listens to their stories, extracts the tiny details that matter, and tries to transform them into something meaningful.
Which is more or less what Jens Lekman has been doing all along.
The lovely complication is that J can never completely disappear from the songs he writes. However while he is supposed to be documenting somebody else’s love story, his own doubts and experiences inevitably creep in. The distinction between Jens, J and the couples becomes increasingly blurred.
That is why the album feels like considerably more than a collection of demos or bonus tracks.
“If You Ever Need A Stranger” is the perfect doorway into this world (“If you ever need a stranger. To sing at your wedding. A last minute choice, then I am your man.”)
An older Lekman song suddenly takes on another life when placed inside J’s story. From there, songs such as “55%,” “Still In Love With You” (my favorite track), “Working On A Script” and “With You I Can Hear My Own Voice” feel less like conventional album tracks and more like things that actually happened somewhere.
Then come the tiny wedding songs.
“Claude & Allie,” “Baseball Couple,” “TJ & Mahogany,” “David & Christopher,” “Thor & Meta” and “Poor Eddie” barely have time to establish themselves before they disappear.
I love them.
They are little musical photographs: a couple of details, a melody, a joke, a glimpse of somebody else’s life. Some are funny, some touching, some almost throwaway. Together they capture something the more elaborate 2025 album occasionally missed — the feeling of actually attending a succession of weddings and briefly entering other people’s private worlds.
You meet these people.
You hear their story.
You raise a glass.
And then you never see them again.
By the time we reach “Advice For The Young” and “The Last Lovesong,” something has subtly changed. After spending an album hearing about everybody else’s relationships, the question inevitably becomes what all these stories have taught the person singing them. “The Last Lovesong” is so stripped down from its original version, but keeps its astonishing beauty, with the lyrics at the end: “And if I ever should write a love song again. I would set a key and a tempo. Leave an empty seat by the piano.
And if someone sat down. I’d whisper low.
“This time, let’s make it up as we go””
That is where the record gets me.
That is where the record gets me.
Because underneath all the wit and eccentricity, Lekman has always seemed fascinated by the enormous distance between the idea of love and the practical business of actually loving somebody. Weddings are perhaps the ultimate expression of that contradiction. They turn something private, messy and unknowable into speeches, photographs, flowers and three-minute songs.
J’s job is essentially impossible.
He has to summarise an entire relationship before the cake is cut.
And yet, occasionally, he gets close.
There is also something rather moving about hearing Lekman at this stage of his career return to such a simple form. The younger Jens often seemed to be desperately converting his own romantic disasters into stories before they could hurt him too much. Here he is older, standing slightly outside the picture and listening to everybody else’s stories instead.
The melancholy is still there. So is the humor. But there is more generosity now.
Perhaps that is why I find myself returning to this record more readily than I expected. Songs for Other People’s Weddings is the more ambitious album and probably the more important one. Other People, Other Wedding Songs is smaller, warmer and less demanding.
I’m not sure it is the Jens Lekman album I would give to somebody who had never heard him before.
But for somebody who already understands what makes his music special, it feels almost like a secret record.
And sometimes those become the ones you treasure most.
My Jens Lekman ranking
- Night Falls Over Kortedala
- Songs for Other People’s Weddings
- Life Will See You Now
- Other People, Other Wedding Songs
- I Know What Love Isn’t
- When I Said I Wanted to Be Your Dog
That fourth place may rise with time.
Other People, Other Wedding Songs isn’t as dazzling as Night Falls Over Kortedala, as emotionally complete as Songs for Other People’s Weddings, or as immediately pleasurable as Life Will See You Now. But I suspect it has something those records don’t.
It feels like an album you discover rather than one that announces itself.
A small, funny and unexpectedly moving record about other people’s weddings that, inevitably, ends up telling us something about Jens Lekman himself.
Rating: 8.5/10
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