As the sun set and the air became chilly last Tuesday evening, Eclectic’s ballroom was filled with eager students, gathered around an empty stage and chatting to the sounds of generic dance music. Shortly thereafter, acclaimed Swedish pop musician Jens Lekman stepped onto the stage, accompanied by a blond girl on the bongos. The room fell silent, and Lekman broke into his first song.

“Jens really sings about the mundane, sings about bingo, going to the ocean with his sister,” explained Ben Seretan ’10, who helped bring Lekman to Wesleyan on Oct. 30.

Such is the nature of Lekman’s music. He tells us the stories of his life—not through ambiguous metaphor, but with actual facts. He weaves such moments, even those that may not seem interesting, together with sweet melodies.

“I’ve told this story a million times,” Lekman said, while introducing the song “A Postcard to Nina,” from his latest album “Night Falls Over Kortedala.” “This will be time one million and one that I tell it.”

Though the audience was packed with students, dancing and clapping their hands, you felt as though Lekman—no, Jens—was sitting across the table from you in a small Swedish cafe, recounting the things that happened to him over the past few days.

Such things might include the time he visited his lesbian friend in Berlin, as he sings in “A Postcard to Nina,” only to discover that she had told her Orthodox Catholic parents that they were engaged. Lekman stopped partway into the song to set the scene:

“You know the scene from ’Buffalo 66?’ It was just like that.”

Most of Lekman’s songs, however, do not sound like the screenplay for a Ben Stiller movie. “Shirin” describes the hairdresser he went to once a month while living in a disgusting, subterranean apartment in the hip Swedish city of Kortedala. As the song begins, Lekman simply croons the name Shirin, before explaining, “When Shirin cuts my hair/ it’s like a love affair.” As the song ends, he worries “[b]ut what if it reaches the government/ that you have a beauty salon/ in your own apartment.”

“The Opposite of Hallelujah,” a lively pop song, tells the story of a day when Jens took his younger sister to the ocean to teach her a few lessons and failed miserably: “I picked up a sea-shell/to illustrate my homelessness/but a crab crawled out of it/making it useless.”

Despite some of the songs’ depressing lyrics, the crowd danced wildly as Lekman put down his guitar and began to wave his arms in the air. The singer/songwriter also played songs from older albums, including the classic, “Black Cab.” When the song began, Lekman beat-boxed into the microphone, recorded it, and looped the beat throughout the song. As it came to a close, he leaned the microphone into the audience and asked them to sing the chorus back to him.

Lekman also played a few songs that weren’t originals. In honor of his bongo player Tammy’s birthday, Lekman and his band sang the Swedish version of “Happy Birthday,” explaining “I love the Swedish birthday song because it reminds us of our welfare system.”

He also played Paul Simon’s “You Can Call Me Al,” explaining that he has loved the verses to this song since he was 14, but dislikes the chorus. He then played the song, refraining from the chorus until the end.

It’s clear that Lekman loves to play to fans, and the small crowd of just a few hundred students allowed him to sing and speak to the audience instead of at it.

“Even being at Eclectic, where it’s usually hectic, the concert was relaxing in an acoustic, folky sense, but still lively enough to dance,” said McLean Denny ’11.

Lekman is a composer of ballads; each of his songs invites us into a tale of his life, and no matter how mundane or depressing each story is, there is no resisting his sweet voice.