Jens Lekman at The Earl, Atlanta, January 30, 2018

I can state right up front with quite a bit of confidence that I'm not likely to go to a happier, more cheerful show in all of 2018 than Jens Lekman's performance last night at The Earl.

Opener Peter Oren certainly didn't give Jens any competition in the cheeriness category. 

Oren's songs are deliberately dark and somber, down-tempo tunes for end-of-the-world times.  He's what we used to call a folk musician, even though he doesn't perform any traditional folk songs.  Today, he's what's more accurately called an acoustic singer-songwriter, and his music is spare and quiet and by his own admittance something of a downer.  The amazing thing is, though, that with his deep voice and the sheer gravitas of his stage presence, he commanded the room.  The Earl is renown for its often exuberant and noisy audiences, and it seems that there's always a rowdy group near the bar at the back of the venue that seem oblivious to the fact that they're sharing the room with a live performance as they talk loudly and freely among themselves even as a musician is struggling to make himself heard on the stage.  Not so last night - despite the size of the audience (the show sold out), everyone in the room was quiet and rapt and attentive, a trait that Oren even noted from the stage and for which he expressed his profound appreciation. You could have heard a pin drop; you could have heard a heart break.

Here's Oren's end-of-times song about, well, it's called Anthropocene and I'll let him explain what it's about. 

Jens Lekman couldn't have been more different.  He also took the stage solo with only an acoustic guitar, but during the course of his 60-minutes-plus set, he took the set from folk (okay, acoustic singer-songwriter stuff) to upbeat rock to pop and eventually to disco, at one point even giving up on singing and guitar playing altogether to just dance around on stage to a disco beat while playing a  tambourine.  Odd as it sounds, the audience loved that part as he channelled a younger, more Euro-centric Jonathan Richman.

Jens is from Gothenburg, Sweden, the home of a startling number of excellent bands including The Knife, Little Dragon, Junip and El Perro del Mar.  I don't know what it is about Gothenburg or what's in their drinking water, but I want to go there.  Anyway, Jens comes off as very European - cool, sophisticated, tolerant, and friendly - and like most modern Europeans, is fluent in English and its vernacular.  Many of his songs start with spoken word stories about the song's origins and background, and it's amusing how the lyrics assume deeper meanings based on the context he just provided.

Anyway, it was fun, it was funny, it was charming, and it was just what Atlanta needed on this late January evening.  And to fully illustrate the contrast between opener Peter Oren and headliner Jens Lekman, while Oren's Anthropocene is about the end of times, Lekman's How We Met starts at the beginning, the very beginning (it's The Long Version).