The t-shirts they sell at P.A.'s Lounge in Somerville, Massachusetts, just outside of Boston, say, "We're not hip yet, but we're getting there." P.A.'s transformation from sports bar (pennants and framed action shots still pepper the walls) to rock venue is ongoing -- what once was a dining area is now a performance space, with a foot-high, industrial carpet-covered riser constituting the stage, while trendily-shod feet tread a still-shining hardwood floor.

After a twelve-hour van ride from Pittsburgh that was hampered by a flat tire, Jens Lekman and his band arrive at P.A.'s in Union Square just an hour before the first band, local pop act Pants Yell!, is scheduled to go on. This is the first full US tour for the Swedish songsmith -- he did a small circuit of shows in the Midwest last Thanksgiving -- and his first visit to the ancestral home state of cult legend Jonathan Richman. The indie rock press has accorded many comparisons to Lekman -- most commonly to the Magnetic Fields' Stephin Merritt, by virtue of their baritone vocals and often-quirky songwriting. But of all the likenesses that have been implied, Lekman treasures -- almost wistfully -- the comparisons to Richman the most. "I'd love to be Jonathan Richman, but I fail totally, like he failed to be Lou Reed," says the 23-year-old singer. "I just fail to be him. I just can't be as naive and carefree as he was -- I don't know if he was that naive and carefree. I just can't be like him, even though I want to."

To the capacity 125-person crowd (though it feels like more) that trekked out to P.A.'s to see Lekman and his Secretly Canadian labelmates The Impossible Shapes on a cold February night, the prolific Lekman is no failure. In the past year, he's released three EPs and a full-length "collection of songs" on Indiana-based Secretly Canadian records. He's been near the top of the charts in Sweden and been named that country's 15th sexiest man by the Swedish version of Elle.

But Lekman is really the inverse of the venue in which he is performing. While P.A.'s is trying to become a part of the scene, Lekman seems to purposefully avoid it. While bands like the The Hives and Soundtrack of Our Lives are putting Sweden on the map as a rock music hotbed, Lekman follows an alternate course, heavy on the DIY and obscure sampling and light on the spotlight-hogging. Shunning hype and association with the burgeoning music scene in his native land, Lekman is still putting out EPs on CDRs, maintaining his own website and wielding a welcome blend of modesty and dry humor. A Lekman T-shirt might read, "I'm hip, but I'm not really trying to be."

When Lekman was 14, he taught himself the bass line to "Guantanamera". That kickstarted years of prolific songwriting: "I stopped counting when I reached 300 -- that was five years ago," he says.

Lekman began releasing his songs independently in 2000 in very limited and very homegrown CDR releases -- 2000's The Insect EP, for instance, with just 20 copies produced, had a bug attached to the CD sleeve with stearine. He recorded songs at his home and played every instrument (save for strings) himself, liberally incorporating samples -- sometimes from unconventional sources.

"I did an EP of Dictaphone recordings (I Killed a Party Again, 100 copies released on CDR) when I was 15," he says. "At parties, I recorded drunk people, my friends when they were talking. There are a lot of awkward moments on that, and there are a lot of funny moments as well. People are just drunk and telling jokes and words of wisdom and all that. But there's a lot of horrible stuff like people crying over cheating partners, people talking about how they were going to kill themselves and all that. I just compiled all this stuff on a CD I incorporated it with songs I'd written on the subjects."

"I used to sample a lot of stuff and that's why (the songs) went off in different directions," he says. "If I found a couple of steel drums I'd say, 'Oh, I have to use this somewhere,' and it'd turn into a calypso song. It has a lot to do with the samples." His sample sources range from random records found in second-hand shops to pop acts like Mariah Carey, for whose earlier work he confesses an affection. "'Fantasy' is my favorite song," he admits. "I like all the early ballads, too. It's just simple, straight love songs. They're just dreamy."

Contrary to all the comparisons to Merritt, Lekman can't claim him as a major inspiration. "I only had one (Magnetic Fields) record when I started putting out records and everyone started comparing me to him, so I just can't sit down and listen to their records at all. It makes me feel so weird," he says.

Despite his high level of creative output, Lekman didn't share his songs with anyone until he sent a demo CD to Bloomington, Indiana-based Secretly Canadian two years ago. This of course begs the question -- why did a Swedish singer-songwriter send a demo disc to a stateside label in the heart of Hoosier country?

"I didn't send it to any label except Secretly Canadian because I grew up with them," he says. "I bought the first record they put out when I was 17, then I kept on buying all their records. Every time I bought records directly from them they sent me these handwritten letters and sent me free records and all that. I liked the way they were working."

Among his spate of Secretly Canadian releases in 2004 was the Rocky Dennis EP, intended as an assassination of the moniker by which he accidentally became known -- the name of the disfigured man whose life was the basis for the '80s movie Mask.

"It was just a mistake," he says. "Someone thought that was my name because I had a song about him, and then radio picked up on it and started calling me Rocky Dennis and I'm like 'What? That's not my name.' Then I had to execute him by releasing that Rocky Dennis EP. That doesn't really make sense outside of Sweden."

Something else that may not make sense to many people is the fact that Lekman still insists on personally handling so many of his affairs, from recording everything at home to maintaining his own website.

"I just want to keep it at that level where I can still do that," he says, though he acknowledges that it's becoming difficult. "At this point, it really gets too much. To try to take care of my website while sitting in a van on a shaky computer, it's really not working that well, but I just can't let anyone else do it for me. I'm just a control freak."

And while a slick website with embedded audio, interactive forums and a photo gallery is now considered a necessity for any musician, Lekman tenaciously drags his do-it-yourself mentality into the 21st century.

"I get 100 emails per days from web designers who are like, 'Please, let me do your website for you, it's so extremely ugly, I can do it for free,'" he says. "I want it to be ugly. I want it to be personal. I don't want it be Flash graphics, blah blah blah. I just want it to be simple and personal, like someone who's 14 and building his first web site."

Sometimes things get more complex. Lekman's discography notes no releases for 2001, calling it a "sad year". The song "Do You Remember The Riots" -- set during the riots at the 2001 European Union summit in Göteborg, Sweden -- encapsulates the events of that year, when Lekman realized that his relationship with his then-girlfriend was falling apart. The lyrics detail the painful realization: "Your hand slipped out of mine / I couldn't see no love in your eyes / I knew what I had to do / Burn the avenue." Lekman has released two versions -- one with sweeping strings, and another starker, loungey version performed a cappella.

"I had seven or eight months when I didn't do anything at all," he recalls. "I stopped eating for a while. I don't know what happened. I never felt like that in my whole life, and that affected me very much I couldn't do anything at all. I couldn't release records or anything. I didn't write any songs, Then, in 2002, everything just came back to me and I wrote all the songs."

Indeed, like "The Cold Swedish Winter" and several others, many of Lekman's compositions are love songs, directed towards a Julie, a Silvia, or an unnamed object of affection. They tend to combine a certain brand of twisted sentiment with sincere romance -- on "A Higher Power", for instance, Lekman sings, "She said let's put a plastic bag over our heads / and then kiss and stuff 'til we get dizzy and fall on the bed / We were in heaven for five or six minutes, then we passed out / and I was so in love I thought I knew what love was all about." On "Psychogirl", Lekman begs off an unstable suitor, asking, "If I'd be your psychologist / Who would be the psychologist's psychologist?"

"I always meet girls who are just like myself, who spent a lot of time at psychologists," he explains. "That relationship I had with that girl in 2001 and earlier, that was just built on being each other's psychologists. That was just built on solving each other's problems rather than being in love. You shouldn't build a relationship on problems; you should build it on love."

One of Lekman's strongest relationships is with his little sister, for whom he's written two songs. "I have this thing with my sister like a hockey dad or something," he says. "I had this thought in my head a long time ago, that if all my dreams would just crash against the cliffs, I can always fulfill my dreams for my little sister, like a dad thinks when he takes his son to hockey training or something like that. I have that kind of relationship with my sister."

And while Lekman's family isn't always the best at communicating -- "They're not very good at talking, they keep things inside all the time," he admits -- they love him and are supportive of his music career. His childhood, though, had some uniquely trying moments.

"I was prohibited to attend church when I was a kid," Lekman explains. "So I made up my own religion that had these enormous churches with millions of candle-lights. It was beautiful for a while. Then I just invented this god that was this punishing, evil god that would punish me for everything."

While those notions have subsided, Lekman says he's still looking for something to believe in.

"Sometimes I believe in something," Lekman says. "I still talk to some kind of god, I guess, so I guess I'm religious in that way; I just haven't decided. I think it's stupid you have to decide what kind of book you want to belong to."

On his first big swing through the States, touring with Indiana's The Impossible Shapes, sleep is a scarce commodity. "We've just been up for three days," Lekman says. He's looking forward, however, to traveling and seeing as much as he can. Oddly enough, one of his favorite places in the US is his label's home town.

"It's like an oasis," Lekman says of Bloomington. "I don't like Indiana at all. I think it's disgusting. You just drive and drive and there's nothing to see."

Erlend Øye feels the same way. On this night, Norway's Kings of Convenience happened to be playing at the Paradise club in Boston, and they've made their way over to Somerville to catch up with Jens. During the show, Øye grabbed a mic and sang along to the chorus of "Julie", grinning all the while. The two Scandinavian musicians are obviously glad that their tour paths have crossed on this particular night.

"What I really like about America is that there's all these small little oases like you're talking about, like Athens, Georgia and Omaha, Nebraska. Lawrence is a great place," Øye says. "In the middle of nowhere, suddenly there's one place where people like music like us. But it's also like, if you go to Miami, all the people who think enhancing your body with help from medicine is cool, they all move down there. In Orlando, the first part of our tour, there was this place called Celebration, where Disney manufactured a town to look like Donald Duck comics. And a lot of people moved there, people who really want just the most straight life possible, peace and quiet. You have to have tons of money to live there, I suppose."

And that's what you can't help but encounter when you're a musician from abroad touring across the United States -- patches of confusion or misunderstanding refreshed by appreciation. Something Lekman has frequently encountered -- even with certain interviewers who will remain unnamed -- is the mispronunciation of his name. But he takes it in stride. "I like how Americans pronounce my name," Lekman says. "I should spell it with a 'Y' so it's 'Yens', not Jens. I don't care."

There are some things about the music business, however, that bother the easygoing Swede. On his website's journal, Lekman ranted about his three nominations in the Swedish Grammy Awards and the whole award show culture in general. When asked about it, he reiterated his disdain for industry-driven hype. "I was thinking of declining those nominations," he says. "I don't want anything to do with the people who organize that. It's just the record industry. It's got nothing to do with love for music." In the end, though, Lekman did not decline the nominations, later apologizing on his journal for the rant and expressing appreciation for his Manifest Award -- described as "Sweden's independent music awards" -- for Best Pop/Rock Album.

Despite his reluctance to embrace the hype machine, Lekman couldn't help but be amused by his inclusion among the sexiest men in Sweden. "I think the cool thing is that I was voted the 15th sexiest man in Sweden, not the sexiest man in Sweden," he says with a smile. "There's a whole football team (ahead of) me."

Although Lekman doesn't identify with the emerging Swedish rock scene, he isn't out to bash what they're doing. "I'm not a part of that at all. I don't like talking about bands that I don't like. I'd rather mention some bands that I do love."

That list includes El Perro Del Mar, with whom he released a limited-run split EP in October 2004. "She writes these beautiful orchestral songs by herself and records them by herself, just crystal clear pop music," raves Lekman. "So sad."

Other faves include Frida Hyvonen ("this girl plays piano and sings and it's just amazing, her lyrics are amazing") and Hans Applequist, who released a concept album about a fictional Swedish town.

"It's this long record with fragments of people talking, trains passing by, a radio station," he explains. "There's a part where two people have sex in the restroom of a club, but apart from that there's really nothing happening. There's something extremely Swedish about it -- it puts the finger on something that's undefined. I like that."

Lekman says he's planning to release a compilation with like-minded Swedish artists. There are certain preconceived notions about his country that he wants to get away from. "I would just cut out all the stupid Vikings," he says. "The only ones who like Vikings are Nazi death metal bands. I'm trying to find these bands that sound Swedish but not in a way that has anything to do with Vikings or Abba or something like that, something undefined."

With that project as just one of several he has planned, 2005 is set to be another busy year for Lekman, with a US tour to complete and more worldwide dates expected. He's been releasing some of his rarer songs on MP3 via the Secretly Canadian web site in a feature called "The Department of Forgotten Songs", after the track of the same name. A new seven-inch EP, The Opposite of Hallelujah, is out, with a CD release slated for later this year on The Hidden Cameras' label Evil Evil. But Lekman is afraid the hectic pace may be taking a toll.

"I know I've lost a lot of weight," he admits. "I've become really skinny. I don't have the time to eat anymore. But," he adds as he studies his bicep, "the American food is doing its thing."

Shortly thereafter, Lekman and The Impossible Shapes finished loading their equipment into the van and peeled out into the crisp, quiet Somerville night. The following day held an in-studio performance at MIT's WMBR and a show at the Mercury Lounge in New York City for the increasingly popular performer. Although he probably wouldn't have time to drive past a Stop and Shop or cruise down Route 128 like Jonathan Richman does in the classic "Roadrunner", another Richman song comes to mind.

"I've been listening to 'Twilight in Boston'," Lekman said. "I love that song." And at 1:45 a.m. in Union Square, that song came to life: "Yeah, time for adventure now / When it's twilight in Boston / When it's twilight in Boston / Time for adventure."