Jens Lekman's 2015 New Year's resolution was to write and release one song a week, so that we might all remember, "Where we were and when we were there, who we kissed and who we missed" last year. Statistically, most New Year's resolutions are broken by January 17, but Jens kept his word: Postcard #52 was released on December 31, wrapping up a year of songs that documented new love, ageing, friends' broken hearts, national tragedies, the refugee crisis, and realizing long-held dreams. On 2012's I Know What Love Isn't, Lekman pared back his trademark use of samples, but many of the songs here rely on a huge range of pre-existing songs, spanning classical, soul, and more, harking back to 2007's joyous Night Falls Over Kortedala.

Below you can find a guide to help you parse all 52 new songs, along with an email interview with Lekman about his Postcards series and its effect on his fourth studio album, which is due later this year.

Pitchfork: How does giving away 52 songs help the process of writing a new album?

Jens Lekman: I don't think that was the goal in the beginning. But I felt very stuck with the album last fall and needed to shake things up, do something different. I wanted to create a more spontaneous outlet for my songwriting to have alongside the more long-winded process of making an album. I wanted to have some fun. But now, when I'm at the end of it, I'm realizing that both Postcards and my other project, Ghostwriting [an installation-type project where he writes songs based on stories fans tell him], have started to influence the album in different ways.

Pitchfork: What was proving difficult about the album? Will it be out this year?

JL: I just got stuck and I think the problem was that I was working on it all alone, day in and day out. I've always done it like that but this time I needed to let in some fresh air, and both Postcards and Ghostwriting helped with that. And I realized I needed to work with other people instead of doing everything myself. Yes, I'm really hoping to have it out [this] year but it's not finished yet so we'll see.

Pitchfork: What did you take away from Ghostwriting? You've written quite a lot about your own friends, but what was it like translating strangers' experiences into songs?

JL: It was nerve wracking, I was terrified I wouldn't be doing these stories justice. It just felt so intimate and full of responsibility. And especially when I performed the songs in front of an audience at the end of each project and I knew the storytellers were in the crowd listening, that was hard. But I think it worked out really well and it was so nice to talk to them afterwards. Several people from the crowd came up and said "I really liked that one story," and then the author of that story jumped up and said, "That was me! that was my story!" That was very moving. All in all it was a project that I felt made me more humble, both as a person and as a songwriter. And the thought struck me afterwards that I would love to see other artists from completely different genres do it—like, what are the stories of Slayer's fans?

Pitchfork: With Postcards, beyond documenting your year, was there another end goal?

JL: Well, yes, to force myself to find magic when sometimes there seemed to be none at all. To be able to write about things that wouldn't make sense or matter a year later, things that seemed not very important at the time and that I otherwise would've discarded. And while it didn't occur to me until recently, I think also to find an escape route out of a music industry that is becoming more and more focused on making money.

Pitchfork: Has this process changed your approach to songwriting, or the way you observe the world?

JL: It's made me realize how the fate of a song is often established in the first 15 minutes of writing. As for observing the world, it struck me that I could've written songs about, for example, the Paris attacks as they happened and have the song out the day after, but doing this project and following the news made me realize how much I miss deeper nuances in the news reporting. There's already so many quick opinions and angles being thrown in your face, so I avoided writing about things like that and tried focusing on the smaller, more seemingly insignificant things. The things you would find in the back of the newspaper or the back of your mind.

Pitchfork: Has it been a challenge?

JL: The first weeks were tough, learning how to write quick enough and become confident enough to release it without listening to it a million times and changing your mind a million times. But after a while I wrote the song in my head while walking to the studio where I work on my music, and then I finished recording it in two to three hours. There's been a few times when it's felt like a burden, but mostly it's been my highlight of the week.

Pitchfork: Are any of these songs likely to appear on your next record in some form, or is it a complete clearing of the decks?

JL: The idea for me was to make it a completely separate project from the album, and I haven't imagined any of these songs to appear elsewhere. Of course, I might be inspired by or borrow a hook or melody from one of them at some point—they're my songs after all—but I already have about 25 to 30 other songs written for the album so I don't need these for that.

Pitchfork: Your last record came off the back of an aborted attempt to get married for a green card. What informed these songs?

JL: I wrote several songs for a close friend of mine who's had a hard year. Then there's some songs that deal with ageing. The concept of time seemed to be in the songs' nature—there's for example one song that is in the form of an interview with myself in the future where I left the second half blank so I can fill in the answers in 2020. And another song I wrote with Annika Norlin from Hello Saferide around the time the blood moon was happening that is about how those recurring celestial events put our little lives in perspective. Fear seemed to be something I was thinking about a lot too, that was something I explored in Ghostwriting too. And then there's some love songs of course, because you know, I'm Jens Lekman.

Essentials

November 28: Postcard #44 comes a month after the last instalment; Lekman has been in Cincinnati working on the Ghostwriting project. It also arrives a fortnight after the attacks in Paris, as Jens flies from "somewhere in western U.S.A." to the French capital. The flute from Baby Huey's "California Dreamin'" meets forlorn synths that recall Talk Talk circa Spirit of Eden, and the song shivers with desperate sadness. "It was a long time since the world felt this hopeless," Lekman sings. He identifies no causes or cures, instead quietly observing the dualities of each situation he encounters. The men denying climate change in the departure lounge sound like something out of The Onion, he thinks, but "maybe I'm just so used to hearing likeminded opinion." The mood in Paris is somber, but the repercussions of the terrorist attacks are more serious for people of color: "If you don't look European, you're a suicide bomber." It's just a Postcard, but it's also some of Lekman's most sophisticated and affecting songwriting.

February 7: Heavy sadness doesn't pervade too many Jens Lekman songs, and often he's best at conjuring it with sound, rather than words: remember the subtly gut-wrenching "F-Word", the way he deploys that Beat Happening sample in "Pocketful of Money", the chilly distance in "Cold Swedish Winter"? He distils that sensation here, a few days after his 34th birthday. After waving an intimate off with the gift of a Morse code chart, he says, "I'm sending you a message now/ Are you ready?" his voice full of anticipation. First he spells out "I miss you" in code ("two short, two long, two short…"), but then he just says it, plaintive and unresolved, letting the distance linger. Meanwhile he's spun a subtle sunset of disco: what sounded peachy at the start is purple and covered with cosmic sparkle by the end.

(Bonus "Jens Lekman is a song magician" fact c/o Doug on Soundcloud: the sample behind the Morse code bit is Hans Zimmer's "Cornfield Chase", from the movie Interstellar, and a scene in which Matthew McConaughey's character communicates via Morse code.)

October 19: As the year draws to a close, Lekman's Postcards grow ever-more melancholy. Perhaps it's a sign of the album to come, or a symptom of SAD; either way, here, he lists the ways that woodland animals know how to prepare for the cold system, implying the lack of such signposting currents and harvests for humans. "No matter what I do, the winter will come," he laments in this billowing, frosty number wrought through with saxophone from Frida Thurfjell. "Nothing I can do much about/ Keep swimming upstream like the rainbow trout."

October 5: Postcard #40 is a duet with Hello Saferide's Annika Norlin, and finds the pair comparing their respective experiences of late September's blood moon, over a luminous R&B slow jam that samples After 7's "Til You Do Me Right". Both agree that it was underwhelming ("We all updated social media/ Made fun of the moon," sings Norlin), but the anticlimax prompts a heavy realization (and a beautiful, soft chorus): This celestial event only takes place once every 18 years, and both artists are more confused now, in their mid-30s, than they were as teens. "There's gotta be more to this mortal understanding," Jens declares. "I don't know what I'm waiting for."

March 1: In the flush of romance, it's easy to get hung up on notions of forever. Lekman, however, isn't silly enough to waste time fantasizing about all the years he'll spend with his new love, but the way that, in her presence, "every hour is a minute/ Every minute has an eternity in it". He's deep in a "radiantly heightened mode of perception," as Eve Sedgwick would have love's ideal. He samples the shimmering lovers' rock of Intense's "You Are the One", which starts as if heard through a thick wall, comes into sharp focus, and then melts out again, mirroring his sweet, unending devotional: "I don't ever seem to get to the end of you," he coos.

January 9: A three-minute-long Nora Ephron movie, replete with sunny brass and touches of Brill Building piano over a hiccuping Abdullah Ibrahim sample. Lekman's friend has a baby, so he stops calling because he doesn't want to bother her. It transpires that everyone has stopped calling, and she's never felt so alone—after all, "Silence is a sad ringtone." So he sweeps in, offering matinee movies, gossip, and summer escapes for her and her cute little cabbage. In the wrong hands, this would be a Nice Guy nightmare. Instead, it hearkens back to "A Postcard to Nina," and the absurd yet charming lengths he'll goes to for a pal in need.

July 15: Here, the story of evolution is just the prelude to Lekman's newfound love, itself the product of him asking to borrow someone's bass guitar as an excuse to get closer to them. "One magic night in an empty backyard/ You grabbed my arm and kissed me quick/ Under a heaven full of stars," he sings as Jackie Stoudemire's "Dancing" romps behind him. It's a rare Big Bang moment from the usually lovelorn Lekman, and it's beautiful.

February 1: Set to banjo clucks (c/o Elin Piel) and swooning strings, "Postcard 5" is a country diversion through Lekman's dreams, and maybe yours, too: He always wanted to play tiny places, he says, but early on someone told him that's not how touring works. Fifteen years later, now self-sufficient and up-ending traditional structures of how you release and market music, he decides it's time. Should you have been wondering how to put on a show, he's happy to play guinea pig: just send him an email "and we'll explain it some more."

February 14: Lekman's last album, I Know What Love Isn't, was inspired in part by his aborted plan to marry a friend in order to get a green card. Sometimes it does not seem wholly unfair to wonder whether he sabotages his own love life because it makes for better song material. But here, for Valentine's Day, he's in devotional mode, serenading the woman who has thawed the chill in his heart. "So hang me, like a wet sock, on the heater," he requests, over soft synths that sound like the Northern Lights glimmering in a shallow lagoon.

January 24: In an unusually grave tone, Lekman takes a somewhat bleak spin through his synapses to contemplate the way that pleasure's spark dims in time. "The coarse feel of your jacket's Gortex/ All stored in the weave of the cerebral cortex/ But still lost in time's unforgiving vortex." But perhaps the fade of positive memory is something to be thankful for. He references James Olds and Peter Milner's psychological test on rodents, which revealed that animals would pick pleasurable brain stimulation over food, and eventually die of their choice.

Album-Worthy

April 25: It's surprising that Lekman hasn't produced records for anyone else over the years, given his evocative arrangements and apparently bottomless well of musical reference points. Here, he loops a forlorn phrase from Charles Mingus' "Myself When I'm Real" as he contemplates a nameless fear that haunts him at night. A jolting clap seems to snap the song awake, like the agitated layer of conscious that stops Jens from falling asleep. "It's fffucking ridiculous," he repeats, in an understated, downhearted outro that recalls the gentle catharsis of "Pocketful of Money."

June 28: Postcard #25 ended with a vague allusion to a friend receiving good news, but offered few specifics. #26 makes clear that it was good news by a matter of degrees, not strides. "The worst has already happened," Lekman sings, and that knowledge brings fresh resonance to simple experiences cast in a melancholy golden shimmer: cycling down the coast, leaping in the frigid sea, blowing kisses at strangers.

May 31: "If you ever need a stranger to play at your wedding..." Lekman once offered, and honored. Going by Postcard #22, he could add commencement speeches to his ceremonial repertoire. "Summer ahoy!/ Tomorrow you'll wake up unemployed," he tells a friend on their graduation. That's the good news, though, and a freedom as sumptuous as his soft disco: "The market wants you to work yourself into the grave/ But be a punk, at least in spirit/ Reject the stick and the carrot/ And never let yourself be enslaved/ And keep dancing."

March 7: Lekman is a wordy guy, but he knows when to let an emotion just hang there, unexplained. The beat skitters across his piano's metallic chime as he pays tribute to his grandpa, who died a year prior. Lekman recalls asking him a question about his hobby that went unanswered ("maybe it was his hearing") before they shook hands, as they had since he was a little kid. He heads home through the snow, and realizes, "I had more than a question." A sample of John Klemmer playing sax pierces the glow. "I really wanted to get to know him."

July 27: Heavy organs douse Lekman's tale of a delayed flight, and his impromptu trip to Bremen Cathedral. The German liturgy escapes him, but the experience isn't wasted. "Just to sit there and hear the church organ echo through a summer morning/ To feel tiny for a little while/ To look up to the ceiling like you'd look at a starry sky," he sings. "To ask that old question: Where did we come from and where are we going?/ The sadness of everything/ The joy of everything."

June 14: On this sweet early summer's night, there's no need to take tram #7 to heaven; as Lekman forges north through the city, Gothenburg's streets are unfolding with their own strange magic. Improbably, he overhears Dave Grohl breaking his leg onstage at the Ullevi Stadium; he helps a pizza delivery guy who's crashed his bike, sees Jupiter glinting in the sky, and witnesses a fox drop a rose on a grave. "Not such a strange vision," he says over the dreamy, rolling music box motif. "Tonight is magical realism/ So we mention the mystic like we mention the mundane."

June 7: The long path to accepting the turmoil in your head, in just over two minutes. Over acoustic guitar with a little Spanish inflection, Lekman considers childhood and adolescent spells at the therapist, and how he feared that there was something wrong with him. Now, age 34, he accepts, "There's nothing wrong with me/ I'm just a human being/ With a lot of feelings/ With a lot of questions." It shares a philosophy with 2012's I Know What Love Isn't: "You don't get over a broken heart/ You just learn to carry it gracefully."

September 13: Lekman interpolates the luminous strum of Neil Young's "Harvest Moon" for a similarly simple devotional—though this one's to London, which he appreciates anew, arm-in-arm with his new beau (while firing deserved shots at the cruel "anti-homeless spikes" that proliferate in London's sheltered doorways and passages). In Postcard #26, simple experiences were a reassuring salve after being broken, but here, he delights in the flower market, airy libraries, and hotdog-thieving foxes on their own terms.

August 1: Lekman doesn't do social media, and maintains a web presence straight out of 1999. But he's clearly keeping up on the sly, as Postcard #31 perfectly knits together two all-time great memes: the determined dismalness of @sosadtoday, and its unwitting mascot. "Just let me be for a while and I'll be fine again/ I'm Billy Corgan at Disneyland," Lekman tells his friends, his refusal to be delighted by ducklings and baby owls contrasted by the ebullient island shimmy of Ed Watson's "Boogie Woman." Pushed to breaking point, he invokes Corgan's response to criticism of him looking miserable on the Thunder Mountain Railroad: "Oh, what the fuck do you want from me?"

February 21: Hooked around a Ravel sample and a Steven Wright gag, "Postcard 8" finds Lekman trying to tramp his troubles out: "Restructure, re-route/ Take a left at the raincloud." It's a lonely, noir-tinged journey, but his finger-clicks and layered vocals summon the spirit of a soulful male voice group.

Still Pretty Magical

September 25: Samples are sidelined in favor of an original slow jam, all glimmering keys and snapping drum machines, co-written with Lekman's pianist, Jonas Abrahamsson. It's a lovelorn missive from a late night train, but one that's taking Lekman home to his lady, rather than the Blue Nile's dismal conclusion.

December 27: An icy lullaby where Lekman's good fortune slowly comes into view. On a trek into town to post his application "for a grant to support me 'til my next album's done," he contemplates why he left and returned to Gothenburg. En route, he meets a homeless man who sleeps by the train tracks, and, imagining Lekman's letter to be a note to the North Pole, the man asks him to tell Santa that all he wants is "a proper address."

March 22: Even adrift in the South China Sea, life's hierarchies are unavoidable. Through his snorkel mask, Lekman catches sight of a cleaner fish, "checking tails and fins for parasites like a shoe-shiner on Wall Street." After all, "We all do what we can do get by/ Find a niche that will keep us alive." He digs into his own trusty toolbox here: the kaleidoscopic violin sample that swirls throughout recall Kortedala's sweet baroque stylings.

April 18: Lekman and a downhearted friend amble around Gothenburg from dusk until dawn, eating Burger King fries amid an explosion of cherry blossom that still clung to the trees just hours earlier. The flowers may not last, but his experience of the night will: "One single spring night can change you more than all the world's literature/ But a spring night cannot be reproduced that way," he croons.

August 18: The continuation of #31's summer slump: With the Nutmegs' buoyant "wah wah"s as his life-raft, Lekman attempts to "write [himself] out of the dark," to move on from the bottom of the abyss and his feelings of worthlessness.

January 15: Lekman has been rhyming long polysyllabic English words with each other for a good 15 years now, but the effect never loses its charm. Here, they seem to bloom atop his skippy acoustic strum. "Why are we here/ In the extreme northern hemisphere?" he asks of two Australian friends on a stargazing trip. "What are we going above the polar circle?/ Why is the night so dark and eternal?"

September 10: Lekman has sampled dozens of slow jams in the past, but rarely does he sing like the ’90s adult contemporary crooners that populate his record collection. Here, though, he drops into a low-slung mode to recount a trip to a cemetery with his friend's kid, whose observation chimes with the dejected mode Lekman has been in for the past few Postcards: "I heard him say, 'We're just tourists on vacation from not existing/ We're just tourists on vacation from being nothing.'"

December 16: As documented in Postcard #24 and countless other songs, Lekman's life as he sings it often seems touched by a strange magic; here, he admits to relying on mystical signs as guarantees of good fortune. "Sometimes I get scared that you're no longer in love," he sings, "And I go through these rituals to please the gods above." If you've ever had to promise yourself that the sky is definitely blue in order to catch a breath, or walk down the subway steps in a certain fashion to prevent otherwise certain danger, here's the OCD anthem for you. 

January 1: No doubt there's a German word for the act of making New Year's resolutions you know you'll only break. Lekman, however, has a revolution for your failed resolutions, one that's as self-referential as it is a kindly proffered reset button. "This song is a time machine," he sings over resonant piano that glints like a pair of emerald slippers. "A chance to start over before it's even begun."

Entering Superfans Only Territory

May 24: "Kicks don't give me kicks no more," Lekman sings over crude hand percussion and distant birdsong, as he commemorates, rather than laments, the passing of youth. After all, there's still so much more to come: "To sow some seeds for an apple tree/ To make an apple pie/ That I'll enjoy 10 years' forth."

December 1: Postcard #1 was a time machine, a reset button for failed new year's resolutions. Postcard #45 is a portal to five years in the future: As the sampled "Vila Do Sossego" by Zé Ramalho swoons and stutters, Lekman asks his 39-year-old self a series of questions—"Are you still in love?/ Do you still carry a sadness somewhere deep within?"—and leaves the rest of the song blank so he can fill it in. Given Lekman's love of inter-song jokes and picaresque self-mythologizing, there's no way his Soundcloud (or whatever it is then) won't offer up the answers on December 1, 2020.

December 9: Postcard #46 is sung from the perspective of a robotic vacuum cleaner who "didn't ask to be the Christmas gift of the year, and asks, "please let me cry a little robot tear" as trumpets squawk in ascendence. It's not some cute marketing ploy; instead, in Lekman's appropriately absurdist yarn, the appliance is so aggrieved by Europe's treatment of asylum seekers that it's gone on strike. "Please, you can't afford refugees/ But you afford crap like me?/ Yeah, I suck/ You suck/ But I don't suck as much as you suck."

October 27: Postcard #43 is a test-run for the Ghostwriting project. The result sounds like French street corner chanson in more ways than one: there's his brisk acoustic guitar, and his friend's existential realization that her growing similarity to her mother is a sign of impending death.

March 28: Relations on a tropical island grow icy as all the coconuts, baby turtles, and beers in paradise can't thaw Lekman's friend's bad mood. So he leaves her to it, and writes this lilting Calypso number instead.

May 3: It's no "A Sweet Summer's Night on Hammer Hill," but Postcard #18 finds Jens and pals celebrating Walpurgisnacht in Finland, where the pagan holiday is as big a deal as Christmas or Easter. It's a trundling, plinking ramble that takes in drunken croquet games, dancing in the park, and a strange woman who insists that Return of the Living Dead 3 is a very romantic film.

June 21: A warped, metallic glow encases this vignette of an evening in limbo, spent picking ticks off a cat ("dangling like blueberries, juicy and fat") as a friend waits for an important phone call. The news is good, but that's all we discover. The lack of conclusion or detail is a reminder that these songs are being written in real time, and although Lekman often seems to live a lyrical life where stories wrap up neatly, those are selective occasions. You can imagine him here, sketching out the song while his friend takes the call.

December 29: Kisses, too, are a time machine; over a game of chess on a park bench, Lekman encourages his heartbroken friend Oscar to sustain himself by the memory of someone's lips. It's a classic mid-tempo Jens number, and a sweet moment of platonic intimacy between two male friends: "If there's anything we know, it's each other's weaknesses," Lekman sings of Oscar. "Then he looks serious/ As he checkmates my sorry ass."

December 15: At the end of a bad year, a road trip and gas station coffee with a friend is its own kind of salve. "Hey, it's good to be alive," Lekman sings with resigned jollity, over brisk acoustic guitar and sweet piano. "Hey, feels pretty nice to be alive."

December 19: At first it seems as if the echo pedal-laden vocal might tip into Arthur Russell territory, but Lekman keeps it simple on this a capella memory of a dream, where chimps who take risks live longer, happier lives. "I thought to myself, I need to be more like that monkey."

Rarities For the Box Set

September 15: Lekman's girlfriend cranks FS Blumm's "Flocke" from 33 to 78rpm, turning its summer hum into teeming maximalism, and the bed from which he probes someone about their own introspection.

August 25: In this short, sweet a capella message, Lekman encourages listeners to donate to his friend Carey Lander's fundraising appeal for Sarcoma UK, the charity funding research into the rare form of cancer that the Camera Obscura keyboardist succumbed to in October.

September 8: Bright, stuttering samples underpin a field recording of a rally to welcome refugees, the day before a similar gathering in Gothenburg: "Say it loud, say it clear, refugees are welcome here." It's simple, but resonant: racism has risen starkly in Sweden in the past few years, and two months after Lekman released this song, the country ended its open-doors policy to those seeking asylum, reverting to the EU minimum quota.

May 17: Lekman's embarrassment for an unpopular busker becomes a humbling moment as he contemplates what he would do if "nobody listened any more." He also makes good on the promise of Postcard #5: It was recorded a capella in a bathroom on his tour of under-the-radar Swedish towns.

August 13: An ebullient mixtape in miniature, weaving together Guerre and Scissor Lock, the Go-Betweens' "Streets of Your Town", Moe Koffman, the Rubettes, and the Nutmegs.

April 5: Human hubris battles the desire for self-destruction on this rambling full band effort, where Lekman uses a strange sci-fi story he's made up as a litmus test to figure out where his friends see themselves in the world.

May 10: A brisk, lo-fi acoustic number (recorded on Lekman's phone) that skewers idealized young love and artists that use their friends as characters in their work, while doing exactly that.

July 7: Two-and-a-half minutes of wordless sampledelic joy: the Whispers' "Lady" chopped up into glitchy euphoria. It's a bit adrift by itself; better to imagine it as the breeding ground for Kortedala-style dazzle, or a period in one of Lekman's peerless mixtapes.

March 15: A low-key one where Lekman likens Sunday night dread to "being strangled by a small but determined child" over lovely cascades of chiming piano.

October 12: Spacey instrumental that builds from tentative bleeps to tremulous piano.

April 10: Wistful, wordless keys + fingerclicking interlude hooked around the vocal tick from Biz Markie's "A One, Two."

July 10: A fairly abrasive instrumental experiment with a video game beat, a pretty piano motif, blaring whale song and a few "whoa-oh"s.

The End

December 31: "All these memories and melodies, you can keep them," Lekman sings on New Year's Eve. "I'm giving them to you for a reason/ So you can store them for me and remind me/ What life was filled with—both sadness and beauty." The dreamy, titular female vocals from Derek Martin's "You Better Go" loop throughout the final Postcard, as our musical diarist wishes a "Happy New Year/ From Jens Lekman." The signoff is a sweet affectation he nicked off Leonard Cohen; after this generous year of unfiltered, intimate missives, it's the perfect goodbye.