Is Jens Lekman for real? Funnily enough, it’s the very intensity of the Swedish singer-songwriter’s earnestness that raises the question. Even when grounded in autobiography, his stories are gaudily and perhaps implausibly embroidered. His music is delectable, but in the way of an absurdly fancy galette that looks almost too good to eat. Even for the sweetest tooth, it can be an acquired taste: Piling his pastry with the most sumptuous orchestral toppings, then adding thick dollops of syrupy crooning, he comes on strong. I’ll never forget when the milkman at a coffee shop where I worked arrived while Night Falls over Kortedala was playing and groaned, “What is this, Neil Sedaka?” Or the mix of confusion, concern, and dawning horror on my partner’s face when she walked in during a schmaltzy patch of his new album Songs for Other People’s Weddings. In that moment, she may have been lost to Jens forever.

But it’s a taste that, once acquired, can’t easily be sated—that lacquered fruit, that heavy cream, those sharp observations curlicued in frosting. It might actually be an anti-taste: uncoolly garrulous, glorying in chintz, scoffing at moderation. Mariachi horns, beatnik spoken-word interludes, Disney movie piano themes, soothing spa flutes, smoldering Sergio saxophones, country boot scoots, theme-park medieval motifs, and strings splashing everywhere in champagne-glass towers: There is nothing Lekman won’t try to wring a few more drops out of the oldest subject. If all his music is about love, then Songs for Other People’s Weddings gets to its beating heart, though glazed in the fine layers of truth and fiction that make him one of a kind.

Some 20 years ago, not long after Lekman’s sampledelic twee pop first broke out, he took up a sideline as a wedding singer. It started as a lark: He put a song called “If You Ever Need a Stranger (To Sing at Your Wedding)” on his debut album. Some fans called his bluff. But it became a lifeline when streaming started gutting recording artists’ revenue. This reality breaks into the fizzy orch-pop paradise of “A Tuxedo Sewn for Two” when the wedding singer makes a mordant remark about Spotify to two guys standing before a urinal, uncomfortably stitched into a single suit.The song also features references to Plato’s Symposium and The Human Centipede and finally breaks down into a saloon ditty with a gin-and-juice kicker. Welcome to the anything-goes world of Lekman, whose music inhabits a kind of heart-shaped Schrödinger’s box—a presentation so frou-frou that it seems like some kind of gimmick. The trick is that it’s not.

Lekman had long corresponded with author David Levithan, who co-wrote the 2006 novel Nick and Norah’s Infinite Playlist, before they collaborated on songs for a novel, also called Songs for Other People’s Weddings, about a fictional but familiar wedding singer. But then, rather than just recording the songs he wrote for the book, Lekman went further, delving into the characters’ POVs to create a Sinatra-inspired standalone musical. Appreciating the resulting album isn’t contingent on the book—it’s pure Lekmanalia. But it’s contingent on how much pleasure you can stand. If the record has a defect besides the preciousness that Lekman, to his devotees, turns into an indispensable virtue, it’s the whopping length. My nervous system just can’t endure 17 tracks of uncut Jens at once; it’s a giddy squee! sustained for 80 minutes. But it has variety and inspiration throughout, and it works great when taken in two chunks, one spinning a relationship together and the other gently tugging it apart.

The story traces the arc of the romance between J, the Lekman proxy, and V. They meet at a wedding where all the guests are dressed as songs (he’s “Raspberry Beret,” she’s “Crazy in Love”), and after taking a pill that tastes like hairspray, they fall into the playful connection that will define their intimacy. It’s about being in love while also being love’s outsider, both participant and observer, a split that blurs the line between life and music—as Lekman adores doing. When V moves overseas, seeking space, J starts booking gigs just to be near her. Throughout, V is powerfully sung by Matilda Sargren, whom Lekman recruited through a youth orchestra in his hometown. V has the last word on their relationship, and J learns that his music’s purpose is not to bottle permanence but to celebrate connection, however fleeting.

The music has as many moods as love does: now light and irrepressible, now crackling with an erotic charge, then turning tentative or questioning, cozy or desolate. Duets peel off into monologues; what was joyous returns as profound. Lekman’s storytelling is exceptionally detailed and funny, kind of like a Swedish David Sedaris, and his wedding-singer avatar gives him a chorus of toothsome characters and milieus to weave through J and V’s evolving dynamic. “GOT-JFK” kicks off an ingenious suite set at a performance-art wedding in Brooklyn; later J finds himself at a singles table in Leipzig with “two sisters who look like Patty and Selma from The Simpsons/An elderly man whose lungs sound like a broken whistle/And a man who’s the embodiment of a full blown incel.” We come to realize that Lekman’s side hustle, rather than taking away from his songwriting, must inestimably feed it.

His band, including Owen Pallett on three songs, has built the songs into many-jointed contraptions, lovingly detailed and buffed to a blinding shine. On “The First Lovesong,” Lekman’s voice starts out surprisingly low and croaky, like late Leonard Cohen or Stephin Merritt, but it’s just a fake-out for the exquisitely soaring chorus. “Candy From a Stranger” puffs and pulses like expensive perfume on a hot dancefloor, while “Speak to Me in Music” fumes like an ’80s cocktail bar. There are shades of INXS on “With You I Can Hear My Own Voice,” Tori Amos with a touch of gospel on “I Want to Want You Again,” where a backup vocalist adds a strange little cowboy voice to Sargren’s centered lead. There’s Princely electro-funk on “Wedding in Brooklyn,” while the magic-lantern oscillations of “For Skye” might have come from the prompt “Beach Boys 1990 but it’s Steve Reich.” The most heartbreaking moments are often doused in the most joie de vivre, especially the full-on trance anthem “On a Pier, on the Hudson.”

It’s fitting that Songs for Other People’s Weddings grew out of letter writing, as Lekman treats his music as an epistolary form—an exchange, not a one-way conduit. One of his best albums took the form of a pen-pal exchange with Annika Norlin. The Tracey on “Become Someone Else’s” was Tracey Thorn, answering her gentle rebuke of him on her song “Oh, the Divorces!”—my favorite secret portal between two artists’ catalogs. At concerts, he used to sign his name in the air when he got to the “yours truly, Jens Lekman” part of “A Postcard to Nina.” To treat every song as a letter means that you’re always considering who you’re writing to, whether it’s a certain person or the composite creature of your audience. You collect people’s stories, but you give them back better than they were—brighter, smarter, more caring and insightful. This is why we Lekmanites are so devoted, and why the role of wedding singer seems so symbiotic with his songwriting. For art or for hire, it seems, it’s all the same to him: “If we’re gonna talk about love, let’s talk about music.”