"an epistolary novel in the form of twelve folksongs"

December 8, 2023 5:37 AM

Correspondence was a project where Swedish musicians Jens Lekman and Annika Norlin (a.k.a. Hello Saferide) wrote and sent each other songs in English on alternating months over the course of 2018. You can listen to the original versions on the website but the pair also rerecorded many of the songs with strings and released it as an album which is available to buy from Bandcamp or stream on various services.
posted by Kattullus (6 comments total)

Thanks for posting this! I love Jens Lekman but haven't listened for a long while, so it's time for a dive back in when the family tires of Christmas music. His songs are very much grounded in Göteborg, which I made home for about 16 years, so his music is makes me very nostalgic for that time. I saw him in the basement at Nefertiti once maybe fifteen years ago with an all-female brass band accompaniment. A friend from New York who was with me compared him to The Magnetic Fields.
posted by St. Oops at 7:30 AM on December 8, 2023 [3 favorites]

Loving 'Joining a Cult', thanks for the listen
posted by Lookinguppy at 7:39 AM on December 8, 2023 [1 favorite]

St. Oops: so it's time for a dive back in when the family tires of Christmas music

The last song, titled Holy Night, isn’t the old hymn, but a song about the old hymn, and it’s a firm favorite as a Christmas song in my household. And it’s one of my favorite songs in the genre of songs p-about-other-songs, which are always about the power of music to move the listener.
posted by Kattullus at 8:05 AM on December 8, 2023

Ah, this is nice, thank you -- and a nice reminder about Lekman. His song Do You Remember the Riots was in very heavy rotation some 15 years ago in my house.
posted by AwkwardPause at 9:20 AM on December 8, 2023 [1 favorite]

This is lovely, thank you.
More epistolary Lekman:"A Postcard to Nina."
And a live version I hadn't heard.
posted by HeroZero at 9:52 AM on December 8, 2023 [2 favorites]

Thanks for the post! I've found myself humming "A Postcard to Nina" all week since it was on my "Discover Weekly" spotify playlist. Will check this out, sounds like I might enjoy it.
posted by fridgebuzz at 6:16 AM on December 9, 2023 [1 favorite]