Jens Lekman Quotes

Everything I see and hear... I will take ideas from anyplace, anywhere, anytime, and life has become a song to me. I'm always looking for a song.

You're just playing, playing, playing, and then an image or something will come into your mind, and basically you're just narrating it with music, letting it move along.

Sometimes I feel like I finish a song, and there's another song that I have to write in response to that song. Each is like its own separate feeling, its own separate universe.

Since I was a child, my whole life has revolved around music. It's often while listening to a song that ideas for my fashion collections formed.

For me, something will come in my head and I'll either end up calling my cell phone to record it, or I'll just pick my guitar up and see what comes out. Sometimes it sucks, sometimes it doesn't. So there's really no set method behind it.

The guitar for me is a translation device. It's not a goal. And in some ways, jazz isn't a destination for me. For me, jazz is a vehicle that takes you to the true destination - a musical one that describes all kinds of stuff about the human condition and the way music works.

It's a big plethora of music floating around in my head all the time, and I'll sit there and write a song.

The first time I tried to write was when I was 14, after I got an electric guitar. I put a song together, and it wasn't that bad! The writing came natural to me.

It is a process of discovery. It's being quiet enough and undisturbed enough for a period of time so that the songs can begin to sort of peek out, and you begin to have emotional experiences in a musical way.

When I wrote 'Mushaboom', I was living in the second verse, but I suddenly found myself in the first.

But I did that, and I created another blues scene, another something I can sing about.

I am a songwriter. I do get to put my personal experiences in song.

Usually, the music inspires the lyrics. The lyrics just sort of fall off like a bunch of crumbs from the melody. That's all I want them to be - crumbs. I don't want to work any kind of fabricated message.

That's what we get to do as songwriters, right? You get to explore stuff.

With our first record, we wrote concept songs but not a concept record.

Lyrically, I've always thought about albums as a record of a period of time.

I usually start with a lyric and see where that takes me.

Each song takes a different path through a different headspace.

When I write music, I know a lot of artists like Taylor Swift or Ed Sheeran tend to write from personal experience. I write from personal experience, of course, but I don't limit myself to that.

I don't even know if I always entirely get what I'm trying to say right away with lyrics. I like a lot of things that are more subtext. I grew up mishearing lyrics my whole life, but somehow there's so much more, too, that's implied in vocal delivery and the music itself and the gestural quality of it.

I said, other people can write songs, let's see if I can. So the first 400 or 500 wound up on the floor somewhere. Then I wrote one called Melissa.

I've always made music that was representative of real life.

Sometimes I feel like I'm taking on a role when I'm writing a song, and it doesn't always have to be true. I'm not sitting in my room crying with my guitar, writing a slow solo about a depressing breakup; that's not me.

It's always a mixture of fiction and your own story. It's more I recreate atmospheres and moods through songs.

Being on the road is a great habitat for creating new music because there's so many different experiences.