2017 album of the year
Alright?
So yes, there were a lot of good albums released this year. Choosing a single favourite has been tricky, but my heart has kept going back to one in particular.
Jens Lekman - Life Will See You Now
For fifteen years, Jens has been wearing his heart on his sleeve. His occasional albums have been hit and miss depending on precisely how he's feeling and how the world is treating him at that time.
2007's Night Falls Over Kortedala showed a joyful, inquisitive, almost impish songsmith engrossed in globetrotting adventures and meeting all sorts of fun and curious people. It's a chronicle of an adventure, and was such a pleasure to listen to over and over again. Five years later, I Know What Love Isn't was a downbeat, largely maudlin album written by someone clearly suffering from overwhelming heartbreak who couldn't see beyond the person he'd evidently lost. Even the track titles - Become Someone Else's, She Just Don't Want To Be With You Anymore, The World Moves On - tell of someone who, clearly, is having a bad time.
Night Falls Over Kortedala made you want to go and party with him. I Know What Love Isn't made you want to pour him a whiskey and let him sob his heart out.
A new album from Jens is therefore not just a hope of some good music but also a sincere wish that he's ok. How wonderful, then, that Life Will See You Now is his best collection of songs to date.
That's not to say that these are ten very happy songs. They're not. Jens has moved on from his heartbreak but sadness does occasionally appear, particularly on the closing Dandelion Seed. But it's a more mature Jens that's written this song, able to understand any sadness in his life and realise that it's merely a facet of who he is and not necessarily the totality.
Standing back, Life Will See You Now is a realisation and an attempt to understand many parts of Jens' experience, written in little vignettes about how he's reacted to other people throughout his life. He sings about friends recovering from cancer, brides with cold feet, friends who hotwire ferris wheels, a best friend he loves platonically. What's astonishing is that all of these songs are about other people (save possibly for when he's describing a scared sleepless version of himself), but every single one is really about Jens: how he reacts to these people, interacts with them, and how he is the sum total of all of these people.
Life really has seen him, and he's now seeing life.
This sounds like an exercise in self-absorption, and while there's every possibility that may be true, Jens gets away with it because he knows how to write catchy, melodic little tunes. And that's where Life Will See You Now really shines: it's a collection of genuinely great songs, most of which are stupidly catchy. There's not a dud on the whole album.
The whole thing peaks on How We Met (The Long Version), a perfect encapsulation of everything the album does so well. Lyrics about someone else that are really about Jens, but written in the context of a much bigger world. An amazing beat. A fantastic string line. It's awe inspiring.
It's been so wonderful to have this album in 2017. It's brilliant that it's such a great collection of songs. And it's such a relief that Jens appears to be comfortable and happy once again.
I can't recommend this album enough. It's a joy from start to finish.