Jens Lekman may only have one offically released full-length to his name, but that didn't stop the 24 year-old Swedish singer/songwriter from opening up his private vaults in November for Oh You're So Silent Jens, a compilation of early seven-inches, EP tracks, and previously unreleased material-- essentially, an hour's worth of his best work, spanning the past seven years. All that hard work, an entire adult life spent writing and recording, caught up with him last fall. In a post on his official website, an exhausted Lekman revealed that he had cancelled his tour, shelved his recent recordings, and was determined to find a job. "It doesn't take a psychologist to tell me that I need a break after 200 shows," he told me by phone, during an interview for Pitchfork's news section that would run just before the holiday break. But the hiatus didn't last long; Lekman was softening even while he speaking with us for the story: "I'm really fighting myself to make this break last because my fingers are itching. They want to get back to the studio and start working on stuff."

Fighting a high fever, an optimistic Lekman spoke with us from bed about his ambitious plans for his next full-length, the agoraphobia he suffered as a child, what it's like to be beaten by a throng of Morrissey fans, and yes, the day job he actually took during his respite-- in a bingo hall.

Pitchfork: So you seem to be off hiatus now. That was short-lived.

Jens: Yeah, the past couple of weeks have been amazing. I've never been this inspired in my whole life.

Pitchfork: Right, the post on your website ["I am writing, recording, and planning stuff 16 hours a day... 2006 is gonna be the best year ever"] seemed really enthusiastic. What inspired the renewed burst of confidence?

Jens: Actually, I found a job at a bingo hall. And I worked there for two days and quit. I realized right away that I had to do music. I mean, I had it in the back of my head, but I needed proof that was actually what I didn't want to do, so...

Pitchfork: Just a reminder of real world-type work.

Jens: Yeah, well, the very extreme real world I guess. I mean, a bingo hall is the...it's just the shittiest job in the world I think.

Pitchfork: Did you have to wear a uniform?

Jens: You have to wear a uniform and a little silly hat, and it's the only indoor place that you're still allowed to smoke, because most of the people who go there are just these...like a lot of alcoholics go there, and old people. It's really sad. The first time I worked in a bingo hall, this homeless guy walked in and he sat down, and he had to buy one of these tickets, you know? He had to play the game to be able to sit there. He just wanted to come in from the cold basically and get a good sleep. And I was calling out the numbers and I saw on the screen that someone had won the big jackpot. This was like $5,000 or something, but no one called out bingo or anything, and we walked around and it turned out the homeless guy had actually won the money, but he didn't understand it, so...

Pitchfork: Did he not get the money?

Jens: He did get the money, but he just didn't understand that. He was just coming there to sleep, basically. Bingo halls are mostly a daytime thing. They're not open in the night and they don't serve alcohol, but you're allowed to bring alcohol yourself, which means all these 90-year-old women come there with a bottle of vodka, and they cry because they've just played off all their money.

Pitchfork: I think I've read somewhere that you said that you try to write a song a day. Did you write anything during the break?

Jens: No, no. I wasn't writing at all. I was trying to actively get away from music, I guess. But I recorded a whole bunch of instrumental piano songs when I went to San Francisco in December. I stayed in this house where Gary Olson from the Ladybug Transistor and some people from the Aislers Set were living, and they had all this recording equipment and a lovely piano and everything. I just couldn't stay away from it.

Pitchfork: So, are you back up to your normal pace then?

Jens: No, I kind of like polishing the songs that I'm working on. I'm really working hard on some specific songs.

Pitchfork: Can you talk about any of the songs you've written recently?

Jens: No, I probably shouldn't go into that because they're in pretty early stages. It's kind of interesting that I had so many songs before the break last year. I had so many songs that were actually sort of finished. And I deleted them. I wrote on my website that I'd put them on the shelf, but that wasn't true. I actually deleted them from my computer. I got sort of trigger-happy and I think I deleted about 200 songs from my computer.

Pitchfork: Huh. How do you feel about it in retrospect? Do you regret it at all?

Jens: No, I felt so good. Actually, I caught myself thinking that I was hoping for someone to break into my apartment and steal my computer, or a big fire would take place in my apartment, or thinking of uninstalling my firewall so someone could hack into my computer. I just had all these dreams and eventually realized what I needed to do was delete the songs because I really wasn't happy with them. I needed a fresh beginning.

Pitchfork: You told me a few months ago that you're trying to attempt something that sounds different from your other material. Have you thought much about what kind of direction you'd like to take things from here?

Jens: In many ways, I'm actually working on pop songs, basically. I'm not sure what shape they'll be, but the thing is that I've been going in so many different directions. I have this black notebook with all my projects-- you know, like the Kullaberg DVD/EP and all the stuff that I've been doing for the tour EPs. I just feel like I really want to concentrate on making a normal album with 10 songs.

Pitchfork: Isn't getting away from albums something you've said you want to do, though-- that you prefer songs to full albums and would just rather release EPs?

Jens: Yeah, yeah, yeah. That has sort of been blown out of proportion because that was something I said once and then everyone kept asking me about it. I love songs, [but] I've never taken a stand against the album format or anything. It's kind of a boring perspective, that people have written all these articles about me being some kind of warrior against the album.

Pitchfork: What else are you working on?

Jens: Well, I've been thinking of working with this choir from Stockholm called the Sweptaways. It consists of 33 women and they're amazing. I've worked with choirs before, but this is really something special. I probably shouldn't be talking too much about it. It's really in the early stages.

Pitchfork: I do the same thing. You get really excited about something and just want to start running away with it.

Jens: It sounds so good in my head. I did a tour with a big choir that I put together with just a bunch of friends. It was a really big band of, like, 30 people for a small tour I did in Sweden. But it just didn't work out because no one really knew how to sing. It was just a bunch of friends, you know? I really wanted to do something with that because I really like vocal arrangements.

Pitchfork: It does seem like orchestrating something of that magnitude would require a group of people who are somehow really invested in the project.

Jens: Yeah, yeah. Vocal arrangements are something I'm working a lot with for the new songs. If you wanted to know about the direction or the shape of the songs, I think using choirs, but more in the sense of doo-wop harmonies.

Pitchfork: You're doing an Australian tour in March. Will that be a solo tour or will you be playing with a full band?

Jens: I'll be playing with three members of Architecture in Helsinki, and Guy Blackman who has a label called Chapter Music that puts out Japanese pop music like Maher Shalal Hash Baz and the Tenniscoats.

Pitchfork: You seem to be in a different city practically every month. Is that a recent development or have you always traveled a lot?

Jens: No, I haven't, but I've really got a taste for it now. I just can't refuse when someone offers me to go somewhere for free.

Pitchfork: When was your first time out of Sweden?

Jens: I went to Legoland in Denmark when I was five, I think, but I went to Germany when I was 17 to have a little adventure after graduation. I didn't have any money at all, but I found this trip in a magazine that said that you could go to South Germany by bus, and it included hotel and food and everything for like $200. I thought, "That's something I should do! Maybe there's something happening in this small town that the bus will take me to, and maybe some adventure might happen if I go there!" And it turned out to be a wine-testing trip for seniors. And I ended up sitting in a bus for 32 hours with all these 65+ people, and no one's talking to me at all.

Pitchfork: So sort of like a bus version of the bingo hall, then.

Jens: Yeah, exactly. [laughs.] It ended up being quite fun, actually, but it was the quietest week of my life.

Pitchfork: I'm not sure if your North American fans have any sort of comprehension of how popular your music is in Sweden. You're sort of a public figure there now, right?

Jens: Yeah. Well, no. I'm not that big, really.

Pitchfork: Come on, you've had some success. You won Swedish Grammys! And the album charted really high, too, competing with international pop stars.

Jens: Well, I remember touring with the Impossible Shapes in Europe right when the album came out in Sweden, and that was something that they were kind of amazed by, because at one point, it was me and...what was the name of that awful Los Angeles singer? She had glasses? Anastacia.

Pitchfork: [laughs]

Jens: Me and Anastacia were the most-played artists on national radio for two months or something like that, and I got the reports to my e-mail. That was kind of spectacular, in a way. It's not difficult getting into the charts in Sweden. It's a very different musical climate, and in a very good way, I think, because artists like José González or the Knife can actually get on the charts.

Pitchfork: Yeah, I really like that new Knife record a lot. It's super dark and weird.

Jens: I just heard that "Silent Shout" song.

Pitchfork: When did you first start writing songs?

Jens: When I was five, I think. I actually have all these tapes, from when I was five, from when I was 10, and from when I was 15, that don't really have to do anything with each other, but they're sort of archeological in my musical history. But when I was between seven and 13, I hated music. I wasn't interested in music at all. I'd tried to listen to it just because all my friends were getting into pop music and everything, and I remember I just wasn't interested at all. I liked drawing and science.

Pitchfork: What happened?

Jens: Well, I started playing bass in my friend's band for some reason. It was just something I did because, well, he asked me if I wanted to play bass and he played me this song-- Nirvana's version of "Molly's Lips", the Vaselines song-- and he said, "You can do this! This is not hard!" and it's like a two-note song. I learned that and then I thought I was a genius.

Pitchfork: Yeah, I remember hearing that for the first time. A friend of mine had like a fourth-generation dubbed cassette of Hormoaning, the Japanese EP that was on, and we listened to that and "Son of a Gun" constantly. I had sort of a little mania with the Vaselines after that because I heard their versions and then they were even better. Such genius, awesome little songs.

Jens: I don't think there's anything better to start the day with than those two songs.

Pitchfork: You do a lot of sampling of independent artists. On Oh You're So Silent Jens you incorporate bits from Belle & Sebastian, the Left Banke, Beat Happening, Arab Strap...

Jens: Well, I used to sample basically everything that I could get my hands on. It's kind of because...I don't know how much I should be talking about it because my label will shit their pants, but it kind of looks like I only sample these indie bands when I give my sample credits. It's like Belle & Sebastian, Arab Strap, blah blah blah, and the last track is with like Blueboy and Television Personalities.

Pitchfork: So you credit when you can clear, and hope the rest slips under the radar.

Jens: Yeah, exactly. Some of it is really obvious. I know that. I'm still amazed that we've been able to get away with it.

Pitchfork: Your 25th birthday is coming up in a few days. Do you have any plans?

Jens: I'm going to Scotland, and I guess they will probably get me really drunk. Like everyone I'm talking to, I'm like, "I'm coming to Glasgow on my birthday," and they're like, "Well, you know, it's got its traditions." Maybe we'll be on a boat, actually, because there's a boat between Gothenburg and Britain.

Pitchfork: You wrote a song called "Are Birthdays Happy?"

Jens: Well, that song is really...it's so cynical. I mean, how does it go? "Are birthdays happy or are they just a countdown to death?" I guess I wrote that when I was 17.

Pitchfork: It's sort of a common theme in your songs. And when you played Chicago you even chose to open the show with a Scout Niblett cover that goes, "We're all gonna die/ We don't know how/ We don't know when/ We don't know why." It started out kind of morose and then became more and more joyous. Is your outlook on that less dour these days?

Jens: Yeah. Well, when I was a kid, I had a period in my life when I was eight or nine when I was so scared of dying that I wouldn't go out of our house for a whole year. I refused to step out of the door because I thought something would happen. I had all these compulsive thoughts or whatever, and my head was really messed up.

Pitchfork: Wait, a whole year?

Jens: Yeah, that was a weird time in my life. I met so many interesting child psychologists, though. They treated me like I was five and I was pretty intelligent at that age, so I played tricks on them and they came up with a really wrong analysis on my brain, and I was kind of laughing behind their backs.

Pitchfork: You said once that you were beat up by a throng of Morrissey fans when you were 17. Is that an exaggeration?

Jens: It happened a lot of times. Not because it had anything really to do with Morrissey, but that's just something about the music climate in Sweden. Everything's turned upside down, you know? I guess my fans are probably the new bullies. I guess they're listening to me, José González, and Morrissey, you know? I was sort of pushed around by the popular kids who were the people who listened to Morrissey. Is it true that in America you're still considered the kid who gets beaten up or the kid who's automatically gay if you're listening to Morrissey?

Pitchfork: [laughs] Well, that's probably putting an extreme spin on it, but it definitely is not what bullies here tend to listen to. They seem to prefer much more aggressive stuff on the whole. I mean, Morrissey is a huge cult figure here, but I'm sure he's still off the radar of most high school kids, and maybe a bit flamboyant or ostentatious to people who aren't accustomed to that sort of thing.

Jens: I wouldn't say the bullies would be like these very aggressive, big guys who would smash your face up. It's more like the beautiful elite that always knew what to like or something, you know? They were the ones that became actors or models later on, so it was more like they were freezing you out. I'm not sure how they could really relate to Morrissey, but somehow they did I guess. Or they just felt like they should. It's just that things are very upside-down here, so I actually turned to the music that they despised, like Eurodisco and stuff like that, because I felt like it really didn't have anything in common with them.

Pitchfork: So as far as the new record is concerned-- it's still in the extremely early stages, right? Do you have any sort of timeframe?

Jens: Yeah, I definitely want to release it this year. If things go well-- and I do have a long time after I come home from Australia-- I am hoping to release it after the summer or something. That would probably be a little bit optimistic, though.