Jens Lekman “Friday Night at the Drive-In Bingo”

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If Jens Lekman had forgotten to bring his band and instruments to the Fonda on this Friday night, he probably could have gotten away with it. The Swedish minstrel seemed to have a wealth of droll banter that could have filled the night if necessary. Case in point: Lekman mentioned that he had just been in Austin, Texas, at the “dude fest” (aka South by Southwest), where, “I woke up the next morning with my pockets full of business cards.” Denoting his degree of interest in the networking aspect of the event, Lekman cheekily claimed that he used the cards to build a castle with seven towers, a moat and a functioning drawbridge. He said that he was hoping to add an eighth tower as well as a catapult — “all made out of business cards.” But Lekman’s gift for off-the-wall stories wasn’t confined to the spaces between songs. The lyrics he crooned tonight told of a romantic gesture resulting in a trip to the hospital (the wistful “Your Arms Around Me”), an Iraqi refugee operating a beauty salon out of her apartment in a Swedish suburb (the string-soaked “Shirin”) and using Google Maps to escape the labyrinthine layout of the same Swedish suburb (the as-yet-unreleased “New Directions”). That town was the muse and recording place of Lekman’s latest album, Night Falls Over Kortedala. On stage, he described Kortedala as “miserable,” but the music it inspired is bursting with joie de vivre. At one point during the performance, Lekman and his bandmates abandoned their instruments while a prerecorded track played, spread their arms and pretended to fly. Perhaps that’s how he got out of Kortedala.

— Thomas McMahon