What Swedish indie pop musician Jens Lekman wrote for Paulo
Anyone who has been in love knows there are few things so personal as a hand-written note. In the age of the internet, it's becoming an increasingly uncommon gesture. Getting musicians to open up in the glow of the post-gig performance is also rare. So when you come across a weblog that combines the two, stories hand-written by musicians and given to a fan who loves them, you know you've stumbled across something special.
Write Me Stories is something just like that. Over a five-year period a lad called Paulo from London has collected 109 such stories from bands and singers he loves, including Arcade Fire, the Flaming Lips and Jens Lekman. He waits around after the gig for the musicians to finish up and then asks them to write a short story or poem or maybe do a drawing on a file-index card. He then posts them on his blog. This beautifully odd request somehow gets the musicians to open up and captures them in a state rarely recorded by most journalists. They write for him something as personal as a letter, and often as funny and rambling as a drunken uncle.
On the evidence of the collection, he's been to some legendary gigs as well. He caught Arcade Fire's first UK gig at King's College in 2005 (they wrote for him in English and French). He has received a large collection of cards from the various members of the Polyphonic Spree, after their gig at Shepherds Bush Empire and Sufjan Stevens on his first tour over here.
Read enough of them (and some of them really should work on their handwriting) and you think this would work well as a book. Something a bit like Ringo Starr's splendid collection of Postcards from the Boys, perhaps. True, it's a bit geeky, a little bit more than collecting setlists from the front of the stage after the gig, just one click up from collecting signatures, but his collection is so original and simple that it seems to transcend all that.
So what are the stories actually like? Well like any good music collection they are an eclectic bunch. Kristin Weber of the Young Republic wrote a proper short story over several cards; while Mark Oliver Everett of the Eels scrawled but a single letter and told the boy Paulo to consider it as a bookmark. The Dresden Dolls where similarly minimalist in their approach, but when Paulo posted them on the site, Amanda Palmer, the duo's vocalist, apologised for her brevity and sent him a scan of a story she had written when she was four. You don't get much more personal than that.
