Old Music: Jens Lekman - "When I Said I Wanted To Be Your Dog"

Photo by elchicodelaleche

There's nothing wrong with Jens Lekman's When I Said I Wanted To Be Your Dog. Most of it, in fact, is all kinds of right -- so right that I couldn't get past the first track for months. "Tram #7 To Heaven" is as angelic as songs get, and I was worried the rest of the album would suffer by contrast. Finally, on the subway the other morning I managed to listen to the whole thing and immediately had to play through it again. Twice. If I'm lucky, albums that good come along 2-3 times a year. But just as I started enjoying the full gamut of Jens' semi-serious Magnetic Fields-y lo-fi, the title track grabbed me by the neck and started throttling me mercilessly until I listened to it 25 times. In a row. Rough brutes, these moonlight ballads.

"When I Said..." reminds me of any number of my favorite songs -- Burd Early's "Phonecall Away," or the slower numbers from One AM Radio's A Name Writ In Water. Lonely, nocturnal, wistful ... if anyone can point me in the direction of more songs as good as these, I'll be eternally grateful. The fact that it made #2 on the Swedish pop charts boggles the mind; what do they know that we don't?

Jens Lekman - "Tram #7 To Heaven": mp3
Jens Lekman - "When I Said I Wanted To be Your Dog": mp3

(When I Said I Wanted To Be Your Dog was released in 2004 by Secretly Canadian)

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