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Songs for Other People’s Weddings: A Q&A with David Levithan

By David Levithan, Isabelle McConville / August 8, 2025 at 12:01 am

Relationships can be messy, and what better way to capture the ebb and flow of romance than through song. David Levithan and Jens Lekman’s lyrical concoction is a heartfelt, relatable, and at times wistful exploration of human connection. Read on for an exclusive Q&A with author David Levithan on writing our B&N Book Club pick Songs for Other People’s Weddings.

Hardcover $25.00 ~~$28.00~~

Songs for Other People's Weddings: A Novel

By David Levithan , Jens Lekman

In Stock Online

Hardcover $25.00 ~~$28.00~~

From award-winning, bestselling author David Levithan and beloved, acclaimed singer-songwriter Jens Lekman comes a charming, tender novel about an unlucky-in-love wedding singer trying to find the right words to save his relationship

IM: Can you please give us a short introduction to your book and what it’s about?

DL: Songs for Other People’s Weddings is a book that I wrote with musician, singer/songwriter Jens Lekman, and it’s about a wedding singer who writes original songs for every wedding he plays. He learns a lot about love, but he’s trying to balance out the joy of the wedded couples with his own romantic life, which is falling apart.

IM: I really enjoyed this book, and while there were some sad moments throughout the book, I loved how you balanced that sadness with humor and the ridiculous things that J goes through in this book. Can you remember the initial spark that made you want to write it?

“We thought it’d be interesting to write about a fictional wedding singer encountering love in different forms.”

DL: I met Jens as a fanboy. I basically sent him an email; I was writing my novel Wide Awake while I happened to be staying with a friend in Sweden, and I was listening to a lot of Jens’ music. One day — probably as a way of procrastinating from getting writing done — I decided to look up his website and found his email address. I wrote him an email saying, ‘Hey, I’m a novelist. I just want you to know that your music is really getting me through my writing process.’ He wrote me back, and I sent him copies of my novels. We’ve kept in touch over almost 20 years now. He approached me saying he had this story idea based on his own life. He had a gig as a wedding singer, and we thought it’d be interesting to write about a fictional wedding singer encountering love in different forms. I volunteered to write it.

IM: We have two characters at the heart of this novel, J and V. Now that we know J was loosely based off of Jens, how did you really form his character?

DL: One of the first questions I had to ask Jens was if the story would be fiction or a memoir. He was very clear that he wanted it to be fiction, that it’s not about him. He’s not the main character. It helped because even though we’d corresponded for a long time, we didn’t know each other that well. We’d never spent real time together. I’d met him when he had concerts in Brooklyn, but I didn’t know who he dated or anything. I didn’t know where he was from, what his parents did for a living, things like that. In creating the character, I didn’t have to worry about it being too much like him because I didn’t know him enough. He’d give me examples of real wedding he performed at; one of the best examples, because I never would’ve made it up for fiction, was he actually was asked to get inside of a giant cake and pop out of it to perform. He really did pass out inside of the cake, like J did. Obviously, I had to use that as an anecdote in the book.

IM: This book is written in the 3^rd person perspective, so we spend the majority of our time with J, but you also give us glimpses into V’s perspective. What made you want to write it that way, and was it in 3^rd person the whole time you were writing it?

DL: It was in 3^rd person the whole time, but V’s sections got longer the more I wrote and the more I revised. It needed to be balanced; we wanted to get her side of the story and part of the novel is about their estrangement. There are times when J has no access to what V is feeling or thinking, and the book would feel too one-sided if the reader didn’t have access to V.

IM: Something else that really interested me was how J talked about living in and working in a gig economy as a musician. This is the only real way for him to make a living as a musician. What made you want to write about that?

“It’s ridiculous how poorly compensated artists are for when we stream music.”

DL: That was really from conversations with Jens; he told me that’s why he started doing the wedding gigs himself, because it was a regular paycheck in a time where everything else post Napster and then Spotify and basically all of the things that used to be your income went away. It’s ridiculous how poorly compensated artists are for when we stream music. Jens really wanted to convey what effect that has and what that give and take is like, because the book is a love song to music and about how you’ll do anything you can to be able to make a living off of music.

IM: We have original songs written by Jens that appear throughout the book. Did the songs come first, or did you give him the manuscript first?

DL: No, it was really fun. I’ve collaborated with a lot of authors and usually we’ll exchange chapters. I choose to collaborate because it’s always a different conceit or a different way to write. For this book, one of the ground rules was that we wouldn’t outline the book. We were writing it as we went along. For half the chapters I would write a wedding and then Jens would have to write the song that came from the wedding. The other half of the chapters, Jens would give me a song and then I would have to write the wedding that would lead up to that song. It was so fun! At this point, if you put both of us in isolation booths and asked us which chapters started with a song and which started with the prose, we would totally mess it up and get it wrong because it seems so seamless now. That was really fun for me because I’ve never gotten a song prompt before, and he’s never gotten a story prompt to then have to write a song about.

IM: That seems like such a fun process! How did you land on 10 as the number for the weddings?

DL: It seemed to be the natural arc. We didn’t start out by saying there will be 10 chapters, but I think by the time we got to four and five, we were like, ‘okay, we can see where we are in the story, and it looks like it’s going to be 10.’

IM: Later on in the book, V is ranting to J about living in what she calls “a mass performance culture,” and that really stuck out to me. Can you tell me what she means by that?

“Everybody wants other people to see them performing on their social media . . . she recognizes that she’s adding fuel to the fire.”

DL: The interesting part is that J, as a recording artist and singer/songwriter is very much a performer, but he’s a performer in a very old-fashioned way. He plays gigs and has people come to see him live. V is part of a startup which is facilitating virtual events, to oversimplify it. Her rise is basically contingent on the fact that right now everybody is performing in different ways. Everybody wants other people to see them performing on their social media, not in an old-fashioned way, but in a very new way. There’s this tension for her because it certainly gives her a huge opportunity in terms of employment, in terms of her finances, but at the same time, she recognizes that she’s adding fuel to the fire. Everybody coming together to share on Instagram actually fuels isolation, because it makes people put their own spotlight on themselves more and more and more and not see beyond the spotlight into the darkness where everybody else is. It’s also interesting because — and I’ve experienced this too — because V is from Sweden and she’s living in New York, the time zones throw everything off. It’s amazing how you’ll notice that suddenly when you’re not on the same rhythm of all the other people that you’re used to being on the same rhythm with, it just throws everything off, even your relationships.

IM: Did you go back to Sweden to write this book?

DL: No, no. Luckily I’d been back to Sweden one more time in the interim, but in terms of Gothenburg, which is where Jens lives and where some of the book takes place, I was entirely reliant upon him for the details. I didn’t get a chance to go, but it would be so fun to have conversations with Jens where I’d ask him, “what is a venue where this wedding would occur? Okay, what does it look like? What’s nearby? If they walk outside, is there a parking lot? Is there a river? Are there hills?” That was such a fun part of writing this book because got to explore a place I’ve never been through the eyes of somebody who’s lived there his whole life.

IM: Out of the 10 weddings, did you have a favorite couple to create?

DL: Sky and Detroit are queer performance artists in Brooklyn. Most of the weddings are very self-contained, but theirs is the plot that actually spilled over into other chapters. I think it’s because their dynamic and the questions it raises for Sky in particular were ones that aren’t easily resolved. I cared so much about the character that I wanted to actually find out how it played out. Sky does come back in ways that I really enjoy, but that wasn’t by design at all. Once we had the character in front of us, we wanted to know more.

IM: I just wanted to give Sky a big hug. I’m so glad you stuck with their character. Do your characters do that to you often?

“I meet the characters as I’m writing them, and sometimes some of them stick around much longer than I thought they would.”

DL: Oh, all the time. I’m not an outliner, so I meet the characters as I’m writing them, and sometimes some of them stick around much longer than I thought they would. All writers do it differently. By day, I’m an editor, and I’ve worked with hundreds of authors now. The thing that I’m always most surprised by is that there is no one way to write a book. Every author finds their own way of doing it, and it’s awesome. I have authors who will write a 75-page outline for a 200-page book because they need to know every single beat before they start the writing. It’s so antithetical to what I do, but again, both are right.

IM: What is it like to write as an editor? Do you find yourself editing yourself as you write, or do you take that hat off and put on the writer hat?

DL: They’re totally different hats. I always use the metaphor of the surgeon who gets sick. I’m not going to perform surgery on myself. I have to put myself in somebody else’s hands to do it. Luckily, I learned that very early on. I’m just as messy as any other writer, and I should not put the onus on me to be the editor of my books at the same time that I’m writing it.

IM: I know you’re a big music fan; were you listening to any other albums or artists while writing this book, or was it strictly Jans?

DL: It was pretty much just Jens. Usually, I’ll blast music as I’m writing, but because music was such a major component of this book and I’d never know where a song would lead, I just had background instrumental music on rather than having a singer. Being incredibly observant, being very funny, but also being very real, is all totally dictated by Jens’ songwriting and his music. I wanted the novel to be very in step with his tone and sound as a musician.

IM: You’ve typically written for young audiences in the past. What was it like to switch gears and write this book for an adult audience?

“I didn’t approach it any differently than I would a YA novel. The story dictates the way that I write.”

DL: The only thing that’s different is the way that it’s published. People will ask me if I suddenly felt free to tackle all these different things, but I didn’t notice much of a difference. In truth, I always say about YA, the emotions are very similar to adulthood. “I love her. Does she love me back?” That feeling is there in YA, and it’s there in this book, even though it’s an adult book. Obviously, the circumstances are different, but I didn’t approach it any differently than I would a YA novel. The story dictates the way that I write.

IM: Who are some of your biggest influences on your writing?

DL: Oh my goodness, there are so many. I’m reading all the time, so it’s very hard to isolate who influenced what particular book. When I’m writing, I’m not thinking of reference points. Reference points inevitably come up, but it varies from book to book. This is not a book, but it is something that I think about all the time and probably is a touchstone for a lot of my work— the Before Sunrise trilogy of movies. Nick and Nora’s Infinite Playlist was very inspired by Before Sunrise, the first movie in the trilogy, where they meet for the first time and stay up all night talking. With Songs for Other People’s Weddings, I’m thinking more of Before Sunset and Before Midnight, the second and third movies.

IM: Who are you reading now?

DL: The book that has hands down blown me away recently is Mike Curato’s graphic novel Gaysians. It’s about a character who leaves his family and his past behind after college and moves to Seattle, where he falls into a queer group of friends. The book is about the dynamic of these friends; all of them are gay or trans or non-binary, all of them are Asian, and it’s about the dynamics between them individually, but also their histories. He captures the experience of finding your queer group of friends better than any other depiction I have ever read. It’s so incredibly nuanced, but also so relatable to anybody who had that moment of moving to the city and finding your people. The visuals are also so extraordinary. That’s the book I can’t stop talking about.

This interview was edited for length and clarity.