Jens Lekman believes in more than the power of love. He believes in the power of love songs. On his plaintive ballad, “If You Ever Need a Stranger (To Sing at Your Wedding)”, he eagerly professes to knowing “every song, you name it, by Bacharach and David / Every stupid love song that’s ever touched your heart” and trusts in the shimmering promise that permeates pop music eternity; in other words, the ever-looming narrative of boy meeting girl to be wed forever in Brill Building marital bliss.

Sure, such notions are beyond quaint, naïve, and rigidly heteronormative. The ’60s weren’t all happy-go-lucky, “Going to the Chapel”, wedding bell-laden sha-la-las. Anyone who watches Mad Men knows this. But, that’s no matter to Jens. He probably knows the falsity of his ideals. He does call such love songs stupid after all. The notion of finding one true love, one lone person to satisfy all needs—emotional, intellectual, and physical—through all life’s crazy transitions from now to eternity is ever the unrealistic one. And, as heard later on, he doesn’t deny their danger in making one feel entirely isolated and painfully alone (we’ll get to that in a bit).

However, he speaks to all of us who’ve ever wanted just a tiny taste of the visions put forth through such romantic cultural nostalgia. He makes it okay to yearn for an ideal that’s never existed. And he wants to vicariously live the seemingly impossible ideal, acting as wedding singer for any stranger who requests his presence at a life milestone he longs to call his own.

So earnest is this desire, one can practically see him serenading a bride and groom over a tacky dais festooned with rose petals and a three-tiered cake. However, marriage has become many things over the years—a fairytale promise, a billion-dollar industry, a right denied to millions, a complex and paradoxical institution, to say the least. Nonetheless, it appears Jens, at least from this song’s narrative position, is ready for an institution. At its purest, the thought of united bliss with a soulmate is damn easy to fall for.

He lives in a rose-colored world of endless possibility. Perhaps he’ll meet the one “tonight at the wedding buffet.” He’ll “walk up to her when she’s caught the bouquet.” And then the song swells. Just as this dream sequence gets underway, a girl’s voice enters and coos a coda of heaven-sent “oh oh ohs” as the tinkling piano swirls and “just like a whirlwind” the song fades out and the fantasy ends.

As for the aforementioned danger of said promise, Jens claims he’d “cut off [his] right arm to be somebody’s lover.” And while I admire that sense of conviction, it is a conviction that remains devastatingly sad. Out of anyone else’s mouth, that Morrissey-esque sentiment would sound, well, Morrissey-esque, dripping with winking irony and self-aware, woe-is-me self-pity. Maybe it’s his deep croon or Swedish accent, but whatever it is, it is nothing but achingly sincere. After all, he prefaces this audacious statement with, “You think it’s funny, my obsession with the holy matrimony, but I’m just so amazed to witness true love.” There is nothing funny about it at all.

Listen: “If You Ever Need a Stranger (To Sing at Your Wedding)” [at youtube.com]