Searching through the now defunct jenslekman.com right before he pulled the plug on his self-constructed site, I stumbled across some old recordings posted by him a good 3 1/2 years ago right when he first toured the US in promotion of his debut 2004 LP When I Said I Wanted to Be Your Dog. Meant at the time as a tour-only EP, USA October 2005 shows the origins of one of the wittiest songwriters of our generation.

Instrumentally stripped down, this EP feels more like intimate home recordings that were never planned to see the light of day than a touring album. Accompanied by only a piano in the Nagisa Ni te cover song “Me on the Beach” (sung in what sounds like fluent Japanese) shows a more serious side of Jens that is mostly shrouded under dense layers of situational humor and irony in his present work.
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