In the back room of a Brooklyn bar, a nonbinary performance artist named Skye is suddenly nervous before their show. Soon, they will pretend to marry their polyamorous partner, who they really do love. The wedding singer, J, reassures them. “It’s just a performance,” J says.
“Just like every other wedding,” Skye replies.
This scene is from one of the nuptials depicted in Songs For Other People’s Weddings, written by David Levithan with songs from Jens Lekman. And it’s one of many times in the novel that fiction intersects with fact. As I was preparing for my own wedding, the officiant told me, “A good wedding is good theater.” The elaborate costumes, the scouted location, the cues tuned to the minute, the string lights and photo booth props: The rite is also a show.
For Swedish singer-songwriter Lekman, weddings are literally a performance—he has played more than 130 since releasing the song “If You Ever Want a Stranger (To Sing at Your Wedding)” on his 2004 debut album. The song was tongue-in-cheek, and he didn’t expect to follow through, but he didn’t not mean it. So when the invitations rolled in, he accepted.
Part of the draw, he said, was that weddings were an area where music held some importance, “especially during the 2010s when music became more and more like content, something to be played in the background of Starbucks or a cafe. I was looking for a place where music meant more than that, and having this connection, having these couples choose me and my songs for their big day, gave meaning again to music.”
After years of moonlighting at weddings, including one where Lekman fainted inside a giant cake, he was inspired to turn his side hustle into a book. He approached the writer David Levithan, with whom he’d become acquainted years earlier. As the author of collaborative, music-inflected love stories such as Nick and Norah’s Infinite Playlist, Levithan made a natural fit.
Early in their collaboration, Lekman made up the fictional couples and wrote songs for them, then Levithan crafted chapters around them.
“I had the idea for this character, the wedding singer, and the idea for the structure of the whole thing,” he said. “Initially I asked David for advice, and then I realized that actually David would be the perfect person to write this with.”
The novel follows J, a Swedish musician and wedding singer, whose girlfriend, V, travels to New York indefinitely for work—leaving their relationship in excruciating limbo. Each chapter is dedicated to a different wedding and J writes a custom song for each couple, all of which Lekman recorded to go with the book. Lekman will release a full-length concept album of the same name in September, featuring the wedding songs from the novel along with others that describe the story.
Early in their collaboration, Lekman made up the fictional couples and wrote songs for them, then Levithan crafted chapters around them.
“That was fun, but it also meant that it lacked a little bit of an emotional component,” Lekman said at a recent book event. “And when he sent me chapter five, he turned it around, and he’d already come up with the characters and the storyline. He said, just write songs for these characters now. And it turned out that I felt a lot for them.”
In the novel, J bears a strong resemblance to Jens, including the inciting debut album track, “If You Ever Need a Stranger…” According to the creators, the book necessitated that the character be a Jens Lekman avatar.
“My story is too specific to pretend like it has nothing to do with me,” Lekman said.
Levithan equated it to “writing somebody else’s autofiction.” “Even if we had made it like, a guy named Gary who lives in Pittsburgh who’s a wedding singer, everybody still would have been like, ‘Well, it’s Jens, right? He’s doing the songs,’” Levithan said. “So I thought it was actually more interesting to lean into it than away from it, because it would give the narrative some authenticity, and people would understand that this is a plausible narrative, even though it’s not Jens.”
Levithan said that he constructed J like any other character, not consciously modeling him after Lekman, which also meant that there weren’t constraints on writing someone who adhered to Lekman’s life story. During the process, Lekman said that it often felt weird to see himself—or not—in J. “David would send me a chapter and I would read it, and sometimes I would see myself being J and almost feeling offended by it, and be like, ‘No, I wouldn’t do that, I wouldn’t say that.’”
While Lekman reminded himself that he is not J, it’s impossible to completely separate the two.
“I still, on some level, need to be able to stand for what J does, even his flaws,” Lekman said. “I think of J as this counterfactual history version of myself, since there is a moment in the beginning where [Levithan writes] about the song on my first album. So there is a connection to the real Jens.”
Early in his career, Lekman was inspired by Swedish underground graphic novels of the 1990s, which often pulled from the creator’s life.
The couples and plot of the novel are entirely invented, but the book’s musings on love and relationships came from long talks between Levithan and Lekman. The descriptions of songwriting, too, are amalgams of their creative processes. At one point, J describes songwriting as “a castle where he’d wander from room to room pacing the chambers and ransacking the drawers to find the perfect phrase or instrumentation.” At another, assembling the words is like “dancers at the ready, waiting for the choreographer to show up.”
“Writing a novel and writing a song are obviously very different things, but the creative process and the feel of the creative process, I don’t think is very different,” Levithan said.
“The musical aspect, that’s what really touched me about the book, about the motivation for playing these weddings, and the songwriting process, which I was surprised how well David described it,” Lekman said.
It’s perhaps not surprising that Lekman would approach novel writing. His earnest, funny songs—or “bookish, folkish ditties” as J describes them—tell universal stories within specific settings, like a Ferris Wheel after closing time or the outside of a Gothenburg hotel where Kirsten Dunst is staying. Working on the book was similar to his typical songwriting process, he said. While his songs are “emotionally autobiographical,” he makes up most of the stories in his work.
“It’s things that I’ve experienced,” he said. “But then I write stories instead of just handing out my diary.”
Lekman said that, early in his career, he was inspired by Swedish underground graphic novels of the 1990s, which often pulled from the creator’s life, down to character names. Eventually, he said, “I just got kind of bored with that way of writing,” he said. “It didn’t feel challenging, it didn’t feel interesting to me. I became so much more interested in the way that fiction can also be autobiographical.”
Lekman said he was recently inspired by Christian Kracht’s Eurotrash, a novel that’s half autobiographical and half wish fulfillment. “I think of that in my songs, in my stories, that the fictional often is an expression of my own desires and what I wish would have happened,” he said.
Lekman’s music includes himself as a character too. He drops his own name in the lyrics of several songs, and his last full-length album features one track about performing at a wedding. “Wedding in Leipzig,” the second single from the novel’s companion record, ties together all of these Lekmans. The ten-minute song sets the scene before the wedding ceremony:
I ask why he became a priest and he says, “For the love of God”
Well, the guy is German, I don’t know if that’s a joke or not
He asks why I sing at weddings and I say it makes me feel like a midwife
Like I deliver these people into the next phase of their lives.
Levithan wrote this moment almost verbatim into the novel. And, Lekman said, that happened to him in real life.
There is a spectrum, in all of this work, between reality and fiction. Jens the songwriter, Jens the character in his songs, and J all exist somewhere on it. They are like a series of funhouse mirrors, both reflective and distorted.
“The way we wanted to work was that there would be things informing the character or the situations,” Levithan said. “But at the same time, it really was, in my mind, reflecting it back. It wasn’t a pure translation.”
Lekman said that the novel takes more from his feelings about love than any moments or people he has encountered personally.
“Weddings are like a reflection of how you feel about love and relationships. If you are at a point where you are feeling cynical and bitter about love, then it’s a quite awful place to be, and vice versa,” he said. “So for me, it was first and foremost, a place for reflection and my own thoughts about things were what was interesting to tell a story about.”
Still, at least one aspect of Lekman’s life made it into the book almost unchanged.
“When somebody tells you ‘I passed out inside a wedding cake,’ as a novelist, I’m like, ‘I am going to use this,’” Levithan said.