Jens Lekman turns other people's weddings into a 17-track record
Seventeen songs, 80 minutes, a cast of guests and a 10-minute centerpiece. Jens Lekman's wedding record is ambitious and a little uneven, but it holds.
BY JOLT Staff · JUL 3 2026 · 2 min readJens Lekman's Other People, Other Wedding Songs, out July 3 on Secretly Canadian, is a 17-track wedding album without a wedding party at the front. The title sends every song to someone else's ceremony, and Lekman stays in the background, collecting a first lovesong, a tuxedo sewn for two, candy from a stranger, two little pigs. It is a big, generous gesture, and like many long receptions, it starts to blur around the eightieth minute.
The structure is the draw. The record opens with 'The First Lovesong' and closes with 'The Last Lovesong,' matching brackets around 17 tracks and a runtime just past 80 minutes. In between, place names and airport codes carry the itinerary: 'Wedding in Brooklyn,' 'GOT-JFK,' 'Wedding in Leipzig,' 'LEJ-GOT.' Matilda Sargren appears four times, Peter Oren joins on 'I Want To Want You Again,' and the features keep the focus on other people rather than a single narrator. That bookend shape gives a long album a reason to exist.
The song titles do actual work. 'With You I Can Hear My Own Voice' is a thesis disguised as a toast. 'I Want To Want You Again' names the fear under every marriage. 'Increasingly Obsolete' sounds like a late-night doubt. Lekman treats commitment as an ongoing negotiation, not a single ceremony, and that gives the record more weight than a standard wedding song would carry.
The length cuts both ways. 'Wedding in Leipzig' runs 10:33, the only track that breaks the four-to-five minute shape around it. On paper it looks like a centerpiece; in the sequence it arrives late, after 'On a Pier, On the Hudson' and before the 1:36 interlude 'LEJ-GOT.' By then the album has already made its point. A tighter edit could have given the final stretch more air, and a 17-track concept album needs that air.
Other People, Other Wedding Songs is easy to get wrong: too long, too polite, too many fillers. It mostly avoids the polite part. It treats other people's ceremonies as material for sharp little songs, and when it lingers, it lingers on purpose. The reception runs long, but the good parts are worth staying for.
