Jens Lekman

Jens Lekman is a musician writing that rare kind of song that maintains a fine balance between bliss and sorrow. His songs are about life's heavy stuff, packaged with a bowtie and a smile. With an angelic voice and golden ears he seems to be drinking from the same hard waters as Harry Nilsson, the Magnetic Fields, Runt-era Todd Rundgren, Bill Callahan's Smog, the Modern Lovers, Rufus Wainwright, and Belle & Sebastian.

Call it a curse. Jens Lekman's is a world populated by an endless stream of women. But not just any sort of women. No, these are the sort of women that inspire the most joyous of heartbreak in your mild-mannered crooner. There he is: hair mussed & glasses off-kilter, sitting in the corner of the cafe with his journal bookmarked once again; he's being torn in two. Like Truffaut's The Man Who Loved Women, Lekman is a man forever at a crossroads between competing inspirations.

Jens' most recent pop breakthrough, "Night Falls Over Kortedala, illustrates just why many consider him one of the most important of the hopeful broken hearts coming of age in contemporary music. Like a modern day Chet Baker, Jens absolutely loves to sing about heartache.