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Jan 04, 2018 Jens Lekman By Christopher Roberts

Swedish singer/songwriter Jens Lekman released a new album, Life Will See You Now, last year via Secretly Canadian. It was one of our Top 100 Albums of 2017. Now he has announced a new project, Correspondence, in which he will be trading songs back and forth with fellow Swedish musician Annika Norlin (of Hello Saferide and Säkert!). There will be one song a month throughout the year, with six songs from each of them. “Who Really Needs Who” is the first offering in the project, in which Lekman writes about it being a new year and also when he first met Norlin (“Remember that first time that we met/That fall in New York that I want to forget). Listen to the song over at the website for the project.

The Correspondence website also includes an about section with quotes from both Lekman and Norlin on the project. Lekman had this to say: “I came up with the idea to do a similar thing as a correspondence with another songwriter, where the storytelling is central and each song is an answer to or somehow inspired by the last song, a pile of letters building on top of each other to form a picture of the year 2018. I went to the library to do research on correspondence in literature and was struck by how you had to be dead and declared a genius for your correspondence to be published. That’s sad, I thought. I talked to Annika about the idea and we decided this would be great to do together while we were still alive and before we were declared geniuses.”

Norlin had this to say: “2018 seemed like a good year to do that: it’s election year in Sweden. Will Trump blow something up? Will a comet hit the earth? Will either of us go on a fun cruise? We actually have no idea what this project will end up being except for that we decided to use one instrument only. Which is something we may or may not stick to. The recordings will be pretty low key but because we are trying to impress each other it might actually turn out to be worth listening to.”

Read our 2017 interview with Lekman on Life Will See You Now.

Read our review of Life Will See You Now.

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