Jens Lekman Revises His Old Songs

Earlier this year, the Swedish musician Jens Lekman reissued two beloved albums from his back catalogue: “Oh You’re So Silent Jens,” from 2005, and “Night Falls Over Kortedala,” from 2007. Normally, this sort of repackaging wouldn’t be remarkable—trotting out a puffed-up rerelease of a past album, often on an anniversary, has become nearly de rigueur in recent years—except Lekman remade certain tracks from top to bottom, left some alone, added archival material, gave the reissues new titles (“The Cherry Trees Are Still in Blossom” and “The Linden Trees Are Still in Blossom”), and officially discontinued the original version of “Night Falls Over Kortedala,” scraping it from streaming services and halting all physical sales. Lekman’s label, Secretly Canadian, hosted a wake of sorts for “Night Falls Over Kortedala,” streaming the record for one final listening party and inviting fans to “join us as we lay this album to rest by sharing your condolences in the YouTube chat.” While the songs played, a video ran featuring the album’s cover art, a drawing of a small white dove, and the words “In Memoriam.”

Lekman’s career is built around weaving hazy bits of looped sound, often plucked from obscure dollar-bin LPs, with exquisitely finespun melodies. His voice is mild, sweet, and lilting, and, much like Scott Walker or Jacques Brel, he can make the most rough or devastating lyric sound delicate, even winsome. Lekman was urged into reissuing his early work in part because the original versions featured uncleared samples—Lekman had never anticipated finding a sizable audience, and so, at the beginning of his career, he was cavalier about acquiring the appropriate legal licenses. (“Night Falls Over Kortedala” went to No. 1 in Sweden, and was later named one of the greatest albums of the twenty-first century—so far—in a critic’s poll hosted by the Guardian; upon its release, Pitchfork called the record “globe-conquering.”) The re-recordings were intended, in part, as a corrective to copyright woes. Yet Lekman continues to find value in the idea of repurposing lost sound: “I still go to flea markets and buy old vinyl singles, the cheapest ones, the ones that are about to be thrown out,” Lekman told me recently. “I still see that as some sort of humanitarian mission, to save these collected thoughts.”

Over time, the reissue project began to take on an existential component. Lekman wondered whether music should deliberately be given space to evolve. For Lekman, re-recording his early songs became a way of reanimating his music and, in a sense, setting it free. “I’ve never wanted my music to be stuck in a museum somewhere,” Lekman said. “I wanted the music to be alive. I wanted it to be allowed to change. To me, it felt like the music on the streaming services were like butterflies dipped in chloroform. The songs felt a bit dead somehow.”

In “The Art of Revision,” a short but clarifying book on the practice of polishing fiction, the writer Peter Ho Davies describes revision as “the sum of what changes, and what stays the same, and the alchemical reaction between them.” For artists, that fission can be transformational, if not electrifying. At first, Lekman simply found the project onerous. “It was quite dreadful. I really wanted to move on,” he said. Eventually, Lekman, who is forty-one, discovered that being placed in conversation with his younger self could be edifying in unpredictable ways. Rather than looking back upon the questions central to his early music—who and how to love—and feeling a sense of accrued wisdom, he discovered that he was still wholly befuddled. “When I was twenty-one, I sang a lot about love, but I had really no experience of love at all. I had barely even kissed anyone by then,” he told me. “I was imagining what a person in love is like. Is this what it feels like to be in love? Is this what it feels like to be jealous? Is this what it feels like to be heartbroken?”

On “Maple Leaves,” a song from 2002, which was included on “Oh You’re So Silent Jens,” Lekman sings of feeling confused and desperate. The song is about mishearing something a lover said (“make believe” as “maple leaves”), and languishing in a kind of dazed sopor. “When I was re-recording it, I was thinking a lot about Joni Mitchell’s re-recording of ‘Both Sides, Now,’ when she was in her fifties. The original version is a nice little folk song, but it doesn’t carry the same weight that the re-recording does. I think about the line ‘It’s love’s illusions that I recall / I really don’t know love . . . at all.’ ‘Maple Leaves’ ends with ‘I never understood at all.’ When I was twenty-one, I thought that by forty-one I would know what love was. But we never know exactly why love sparks up, or why it dies, or what the other person likes about us—and they don’t, either,” Lekman said. “Love is always a misheard word.”

The original version of “Maple Leaves” is rhythmic, pulsing, almost jaunty. The new one—which I have gradually come to prefer—is resolutely melancholy, opening with a stretch of mournful strings. Lekman’s voice is fuller, thicker, more certain. This time, he is not trying to transform his sadness into something else. Twenty years brought him the presence of mind to simply accept a broken heart for what it is.

Since the invention of the phonograph, in the eighteen-seventies, recordings—fixed, static, immutable—have gradually supplanted live performance as the way most listeners engage with music. Though our relationship to a piece of art might evolve over time, recordings are rigid—we change, but the song remains the same. The idea of revisiting and revising an old work is not new, exactly (Kate Bush and Joni Mitchell have both formally released re-recordings of old material), and many artists play new versions of old songs while on tour. (Bob Dylan, in particular, is both lauded and scoffed at for aggressively reinterpreting his own songbook onstage.) But the prominence of streaming means that it is now possible for an artist to effectively—surreptitiously, even—revise or update an entire recorded discography. When music lives online, in the ether, it can be transformed at will and without notice.

In the past few years, Taylor Swift and Kanye West (who now records as Ye)—two of the most ubiquitous pop stars in the world—have either purposefully or inadvertently challenged the idea of recordings as permanent and inflexible. For Swift, the decision to re-record her earlier releases was likely born from vengeance and mercenary instinct: in 2019, the label that owned the masters for her first six albums was sold to the music manager Scooter Braun, with whom Swift has heatedly clashed in the past. She has since re-recorded the albums “Fearless” and “Red,” adding the pointed appendage “(Taylor’s Version)” to the new releases. For West, revision feels like an extension of his overwhelming ambition. In 2016, mere hours after releasing his seventh LP, “The Life of Pablo,” West famously announced, on Twitter, “Ima fix wolves,” a reference to an apparently unfinished track. Ultimately, he uploaded new or tweaked versions of more than a dozen songs post-release. In another tweet, West referred to the album as a “living breathing changing creative expression,” adding the hashtag #contemporaryart. Last year, West announced the release of the Stem Player, a beige, cookie-shaped device that is designed to allow users to disassemble a track into constituent “stems,” individual musical components that make up the song. His eleventh album, “Donda 2,” was released exclusively to the Stem Player, and, in an Instagram post about the decision, West wrote, “It’s time to free music from this oppressive system.” (In the end, the Stem Player received middling reviews.)

As music grows more ephemeral, at least from a consumer standpoint, it seems likely that we’ll witness more and more artists reimagining the album as something less locked and inflexible. Of course, I can see why some people might find this idea horrifying. It’s easy to become moored in the quicksand of one’s own mind, caught in a state of perpetual irresolution, second-guessing everything, flailing, panicking, cooking and cooking but never sitting down to eat. Perhaps there’s a moment in the creative process where a work gets very close to being “right”—when an artist’s intentions for a piece and a bystander’s experience of it briefly coincide—and tinkering after that point merely pushes the work out of alignment. Yet I still tend to think of revision as a generative and undervalued practice, one that’s been stymied and marred by the damaging yet enduring idea of art as a product rather than a process. Students cocooned in craft-focussed creative-writing programs are repeatedly told that “writing is rewriting,” with the idea being that the actual labor—the work—is in the meticulous honing, the refining, the worrying over, the picking apart, the making beautiful. This is also, for many artists, where the pleasure is; one chisels and scrapes until a face emerges from the stone. Perhaps, as the poet Paul Valéry wrote, a work of art is never really finished, merely abandoned. Maybe it’s important for an artist to let the work change as the artist changes—to progress, to actualize, to double down on itself. It’s a way of reclaiming music as something more complex, dynamic, and human.

This past spring, in support of the reissues, Lekman toured the U.S. and performed with local youth orchestras. “I wanted these things to happen at the same time, because it feels like they’re tied in together in a way,” he told me. “I want the songs to be in motion, I want them to be allowed to change, I want to see what these young musicians will make of them.” While out on tour, Lekman has been selling a book of sheet music titled “Jens Lekman Miniature Art: 9 Songs for Guitar, Vocals, and Sometimes Strings,” with the hope of opening the work up to more revision and interpretation. “When I was writing the foreword to the book, I put in a couple lines about how, if you’ve never heard these songs before, don’t bother listening to them before you play them,” he explained. “Just pick up an instrument and see what comes out when you do them like you do them.”

I recalled part of a line from William Least Heat-Moon’s “Blue Highways”: “The nature of things is resistance to change, while the nature of process is resistance to stasis, yet things and process are one.” As discombobulating as it is to think of albums as inconstant, there’s also something powerful in the idea that music—like the natural world, like our bodies, like our lives—is forever in flux. ♦