Event and Ticketing Details
Dates & Times
Tuesday 12 February
6:15 PM - 7:15 PM
Swedish indie songsmith Jens Lekman is renowned for his lyrics; his songs are pure storytelling set to music. Pitchfork has called him ‘one of the most distinct and observant singer-songwriters in indie rock today’.
Melbourne – one of his favourite places – provided the canvas for his funny, sweetly sad new album, I Know What Love Isn’t. Lekman lived here while creating it, and the city is a quiet presence throughout his songs, whether he’s taking refuge from the summer heat by lying on his floor cradling frozen peas, or feeding possums in a park.
His album tour will take in the Wheeler Centre, where he’ll share the process of transforming experience into music, in conversation with Karen Leng.
Featuring
Jens Lekman
Jens Lekman, born and reared in Gothenburg, Sweden, is a songwriter, adventurer and retired bingo hall employee.
Traveling our globe as a wide-open receptor of all it has to offer, Lekman repurposes for his own oeuvre the world’s great, lost pop hooks of past and present. He breathes into them his droll senses of humour, romance and melody and gives them newfound buoyancy.
Since his 2004 trifecta of EPs (Maples Leaves, Rocky Dennis in Heaven, You Are the Light) to his acclaimed 2007 full-length, Night Falls Over Kortedala, and 2012’s touchingly personal I Know What Love Isn’t, Lekman has made hopeless romantics of us all.
In a musical language that has roots in the work of Arthur Russell, The Magnetic Fields, Calvin Johnson and Modern Lovers, Lekman’s songs serve as a reminder to look closer at the world around us, to appreciate the beauty when it’s both in and out of context; at its most heartbreaking, its most loving, and its most absurd.
Karen Leng
Karen Leng is a radio broadcaster and TV producer.
A musical tastemaker and influential announcer with Triple R over 25 years, Karen currently presents new music on Triple R’s Kinky Afro every Thursday afternoon.