SFBG: What is that golden thread?

JL: You know, the way songs fit together in a sequence. And I can never really see that because I wake up one day and want to write a disco song, and I wake up the next day and want to write something completely different. So for me it's very hard. I always have this voice inside of me saying, "You can't do this - you can't write a disco song one day and then the next day write a calypso song. It doesn't work like that." But then I have the other voice in my head that says, "No, that's fine - as long as you just write honestly and what you really feel, there will always be the Jens Lekman in the song and that will be the golden thread." But I'm so close to the songs, I can't really see the Jens Lekman in them.

SFBG: I read online that the latest album was inspired by a first kiss from a lesbian friend. Is that right?

JL: Uhhhh - I love it! It sounds like someone has put together all these different things...

SFBG: I think that might have been on Wikipedia.

JL: I love Wikipedia! That's so funny. Every time I come into the US and i cross customs or border control, they always check my passport and I have a work permit now for the first time - I never had it before and I always had to sneak in before - and they check me and say. "Oh, you're an artist." There's always a guy behind the guy saying, "Check him on Wikipedia."

That's so funny that the American authorities would use Wikipedia as a trustworthy source! Anyone can change anything. A friend of mine usually goes into my Wikipedia and writes all this bullshit, just changes things. I think the last thing she wrote was that I was the son of a bear trapper.

SFBG: So pay no attention to Wikipedia?

JL: I think they should! The thing with all these, I always encourage journalists and people in general to make up stories about me, because I really like that. I think those stories always say more about me than my own desperate attempts to explain who I am and what I'm trying to do. I think all these stories that people make up just form this big universe where it's easier to focus on what is important. It's what they tell boxers when they see triple, "Just hit the one in the middle," y'know.

SFBG: What's the best story that's been made up about you?

JL: So many actually. There were some pretty awful ones. A long time ago, I actually quit making music for a little while because I couldn't handle the stories in the beginning. There were some stories that were kind of saying that I was dead for a little while. I went on vacation for a week, and when I came home, all my friends thought that I was dead because I never told anyone that I was going away, and there had been a car accident somewhere, and it was in the newspapers, and it started affecting my family and friends for a little bit so I didn't know how to handle that. Now I just love it. I want to force people to make up stories.

SFBG: Why did you stop making music?

JL: I just didn't know how to handle it - i didn't want it to affect my family. I was very paranoid and I thought media and people were out to get me or something. I always requested to proofread every article. It turned into such a day job actually.

You can't have that when you're an artist, I think. It doesn't work like that. Then I started realizing that misunderstandings are very much a part of my music and in my life - it's what I write a lot of songs about, my first single that I ever put out on a little vinyl 7-inch was "Maples Leaves," and the main line in that song was, "She said it was all make believe, but I thought she said maple leaves." It's a story about a very simple, beautiful misunderstanding, and I think a lot of my songs are about that: misunderstandings, mishearings, and misinformation. So it's not something I should fight. It's something I should embrace.

The only thing is that, I always say to journalists, "Make up stories" - I know all journalists have a little creative writer in them - and I always encourage people to go wild! And then they write, "He's 24," like they change my age or something. It's so boring. They don't take me seriously - I'm very serious. [Smiles]

SFBG: I'll keep that in mind. Is it true you moved to Santa Fe?

JL: Wow. No.

SFBG: Your MySpace page had that.

JL: I don't have a MySpace. That's another thing I love - I actually had a MySpace page but I thought it was so stupid - such an insult to everything that was personal about pop music. Just the communication you had with people there was just so meaningless. It discouraged you from going deeper than "I love you" or "I hate you." Why do you love me or hate me? "Oh I don't have time to go into that now." You couldn't develop any kind of deeper discussion.

I have my e-mail on my Web site so people can write to me and I correspond with people and I really like that but with MySpace there was just no time or space to actually go deeper into anything, but as soon as I quit MySpace, all these clones started popping up. I think have about 500 on MySpace and Facebook y'know.

I met some of them. People come up to me and say, "Yeah, I'm that Jens Lekman," and I really like them - they're like a little army of Jens Lekmans, going in their own directions and creating new stories.

I live in Melbourne, Australia, now. It's a long story but basically I have friends there. I'm not too fond of the Australian culture or things like that. People seem to stay there unlike Goteborg in Sweden where I lived before, where people just come and go all the time. I came back to Goteborg about a year ago and had no friends left.

SFBG: Isn't Goteborg cool and happening?

JL: It is - or it used to be. I'm not really hanging out so much with the cool people in the town. I lived outside Goteborg in the suburbs, and all my friends have moved to Stockholm or London or something.

SFBG: Were you ever touched by the city's metal scene?

JL: I wasn't too much into that Goteborg metal. I remember as a kid or teenager being really fascinated by the Norwegian death metal scene because that was really beyond something. It was just sooo brutal. I remember walking into the record store and seeing one of those records - I don't know if it was Burzum or something like that - and thinking, wow, that almost scares me.

SFBG: What made you start to write songs?

JL: Um, I don't know. I've been writing songs since I was 5. I have a recording of myself as a 5-year-old, just making up a song. I sampled it actually. I'm basically singing a song about some cats doing all these naughty things - yeah, they were copulating, basically. Copulating cats, in other words. On the recording you can hear my parents in the background cheering me on for singing this song about copulating cats. But there's a part where the words start morphing into new words and I sampled that in a song. I sampled a lot of those tapes from when I was a kid.

When I started recording I think that's when I started really working on it, when I got a 4-track tape recorder. I guess I was 14.

SFBG: Literally in the bedroom?

JL: I'm still doing that. Maybe a hotel room since I'm traveling so much right now. I'm trying to record while being here actually. The Hilton Garden Inn - I think that's where my next record is going to be recorded. If you want to find it, it's the room where the sweet music is coming from.

SFBG: Not a very inspiring hotel, though the waterfall pool is slightly unusual.

JL: Yeah, but that's something I need, I think. I don't want to be in an inspiring environment. I want to be somewhere that's really boring. That's why the record was made in Kortedala where I lived before because it was such a miserable and boring place. The record has nothing to do with that place. It's just where I lived for the last five or six years because the situation in Goteborg when it comes to houses is just so hard. I was in line for two years, and I know people who've been sleeping with people to get an apartment. That's how tough it is. It's just expanded a lot, but they're not building new buildings or new houses.

I got the officially worst apartment in all of Goteborg - that's what the landlord told me. The guy who lived there before me lay dead in the bathtub for three months before they found him. Kortedala is just a place where, when they closed down all the mental hospitals in the early '90s in Sweden, they placed a lot of the mental patients in apartments. It's a suburb in Goteborg.

The reason why the landlord told me that was because he thought I would be happy. He was like, "But I thought you'd be happy that we had to renovate the whole place because of the water damages!" "Did you change the bathtub?" "Oh, yeah!" "Oh..."

SFBG: Doing anything special on this tour?

JL: Well in San Francisco, I have two shows. I'm doing one with a full band at Bimbo's, and one solo at Bottom of the Hill, and I haven't at all decided what to do there yet. I'm very excited because I want to make up something new for that. I want to do something special there.

SFBG: What's the weirdest show you've ever done?

JL: I did my first tour here three years ago and I ended up playing a lot of small towns in a lot of places where nobody had heard of me at all. I played a lot of shows here where it was two people. and I'm not just saying that. It was really two people in the crowd. Sometimes there were animals as well. I did one show where there were two people and a dog - and the dog walked out half way through the set.

All shows are very special though. I remember every show I've ever done, very specifically. I have a memory that reconstructs everything as soon as it happens. It reconstructs it the way I want it to be. That's why when people ask me if my songs are autobiographical, I say, "I don't know. I think so." I don't trust my memory.

SFBG: What do you think of Americans' fixation on Swedish rock and pop?

JL: I think that whole exoticism is kind of tiresome in one way. People are like, "Oh, you're from Sweden," and they don't know anything about it - it sounds exotic. I really like this band from Turkey, Kim Ki O - and for me, listening to them, I felt their exoticism and I definitely felt like they were a band from Turkey, and I really had to get over that and just listen to the music, I think.

I don't see myself as very Swedish.

SFBG: What do you see yourself as - a citizen of the world?

JL: I don't know. Homeless, I would say. That's what I am right now. I moved to Melbourne but I'm going to have to move again, and I like that a lot.

SFBG: What usually triggers a song for you? Copulating cats, misunderstandings?

JL: Dialogue is very inspiring to me - I've been watching a lot of comedy. I've been very inspired by using comedy and humor in a dialogue and making it flow in a better way. I would really love to do something one day like "Trapped in the Closet" - that R. Kelly opera. I loved that one. He's one of the few that actually use dialogue in a song. I think more music should be more like a play or a film - I want the characters to come alive.

JENS LEKMAN

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