Jens Lekman Shares WWJD Mixtape, Featuring Unreleased Songs “WWJD”, “I Remember” and “What’s That Perfume That You Wear?”

Jens Lekman has shared WWJD, a 33-minute mixtape that features unreleased songs woven in with song fragments and tracks from other artists. Three of the completed songs on the mixtape are “WWJD”, “I Remember”, and “What’s That Perfume That You Wear?” It’s his first release since 2012′s I Know What Love Isn’t. You can stream it above. 

Lekman also shared a characteristically elegiac statement about the mixtape:

While travelling through midwest America some time ago I stopped at a gas station and bought a WWJD bracelet for $1.99 and insisted that it stood for ‘What Would Jens Do?’. I would look at it when I felt indecisive, think about what Jens really would do and then do the opposite of that. I thought that would be a good way to find some new paths in life, and to get away from the paths I kept taking that didn’t lead me anywhere good.

WWJD is a song about regrets, learning from your mistakes, and bettering yourself. I wrote it last year, recorded it quickly and felt it didn’t fit in with most of the other songs I was writing. Together with ‘What’s That Perfume That You Wear?’ and ‘I Remember’ they weren’t adhering to the rules I had set up for my next album but they were also too good to forget. So I weaved them in exclusively on this mixtape where they are stations on a longer journey, where loops and smaller fragments, ideas for songs and favourite songs by others swoosh by outside the window. Feel free to open that window and feel the breeze in your hair.

Yours truly, 
Jens Lekman

Watch Lekman perform “I Know What Love Isn’t” on an episode of Pitchfork Weekly:

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