The Tender Evolution of MJ Lenderman
On ‘Manning Fireworks’ and the indie rock songwriter’s flawed-but-trying male protagonists
“What else can you say to help a friend with a broken heart?” MJ Lenderman asks in “You Don’t Know the Shape I’m In,” near the end of Manning Fireworks. It’s another quotable, coolly conversational line from a songwriter quickly becoming renowned for them. But something is different this time. Throughout his songbook, the 25-year-old Asheville, North Carolina musician has guided us through pivotal fights outside fancy meat shops; bad moods wafting through costume parties; glimpses of mortality in late-career pro wrestling matches. We turn to him in these environments less for piercing insight than for a sympathetic set of eyes. I know, dude, he seems to say from across the room, beer in hand.
Now, he’s as helpless as anyone. The music helps convey the feeling, too. While he’s often backed by a crunchy, comforting blend of alt-country and ’90s indie rock, “You Don’t Know the Shape I’m In” boasts one of his prettiest, dreamiest, and most surprising arrangements. Even he seems moved by it, taking time to comment on the instruments conjured in the swirl—“Clarinet! Singing its lonesome duck walk”—and offering a wordless “whoa oh oh” to suit the breezy rhythm. Two years ago, when an early version of the song appeared on a compilation, it felt buzzier and slightly more conventional. Working with producer Alex Farrar and his familiar accompanists from his backing band the Wind, he now creates own lush world to explore. It’s a little luxurious, a little busted, a lot more lonely.
In such a brief time, MJ Lenderman has experienced a career’s worth of level-ups: from the cozily evocative slowcore epics of his 2019 debut, to the tighter, funnier songs of 2021’s lo-fi Ghost of Your Guitar Solo, to the studio-aided distortion of 2022’s Boat Songs, and the rave-up rock band on 2023’s live album And the Wind (Live and Loose). (Not to mention: the runaway success of Rat Saw God and Wednesday, the country-grunge quintet where Lenderman plays lead guitar and sings harmony.) A casually understated presence in interviews, he is not one for spurring on his self-mythology and he seems dubious of celebrity on a wider scale. (On reading Jimmy McDonough’s definitive Neil Young biography, Shakey: “I was pretty sick of Neil after reading that book.”) As such, we know Lenderman almost entirely through these records and the multitudes they contain.
This trajectory might lead us to anticipate Manning Fireworks as a kind of pop breakthrough. And in some ways, these expectations are met. He’s never made a recording as sleek and dynamic as “Rudolph” or written lyrics more suited for regional applause (“Don’t move to New York City, baby/It’s gonna change the way you dress”) or endless memeability (“I’ve got a houseboat docked on the Himbo-Dome”). His first studio album for a bigger label (Anti-), the critically beloved release is bringing Lenderman to the biggest stages of his career and the largest audience (lead single “She’s Leaving You” has been in rotation on SiriusXMU and college radio since its release in June). If Boat Songs was the type of record that gets passed excitedly between close friends with similar taste, Manning Fireworks is the one you might put on when you get passed the aux among strangers.
How those strangers might react to Lenderman’s lyrics about “draining cum from hotel showers” is another question. Still, it’s been a long time since a songwriter has had this much confidence and originality in exploring such unromantic minutiae. His writing is personal but not diaristic, sad but not dramatic, funny but never cynical. He is particularly attuned to observing masculinity, which leads some people to describe his characters as “pathetic.” (He recently referred to the narrator of Smog’s “37 Push Ups,” who listens to an AC/DC cassette while exercising in a motel room, as “kind of a blueprint for the kind of characters I like to write about.”) This purview is best represented by “She’s Leaving You,” one of the most accessible, anthemic songs he’s ever written, which just so happens to involve a Vegas-bound divorcee who adores Eric Clapton and drives a Ferrari. Or, at least, that’s where the narrator fears he will end up if left to his own devices.
Lenderman finds the pathos in these kinds of stories. These are not easy jokes or clichés; they are archetypes he explores with the unassuming wisdom of a YouTube comment left under a classic rock video. His characters may be disappointed in how their lives have turned out—“once a perfect little baby… who’s now a jerk,” he sings in the title track—but they are aware of their limitations and how they might look from the outside. And maybe they are getting better. In “Catholic Priest,” a great track from 2021, we hear from a narrator gaining consciousness in the morning after a night of drunken mistakes. He nurses a headache and takes out the trash. And then he offers this couplet: “I woke up embarrassed/And I tried to make you laugh.”
Tried. You can just imagine how it worked out for him. And if you can’t, listen close to the creaky inhale of falsetto Lenderman uses to sing the word “laugh.” On Manning Fireworks, he knows better. When it comes to the unanswerable question of what to say to someone with a broken heart, he knows the conversation is probably over. Same goes for the burnt-out dude in “Rip Torn,” with his face in a bowl of cereal, coaching himself through a dejected pep talk: “You need to learn how to behave in groups,” he sings in the chorus. It’s uncomfortable; not necessarily something you can even “learn to do”; definitely not a natural fit to be sung back by a festival audience. All of this seems to be the point. It won’t be an easy fix, but it’s a start.
I should say, I am wary of leaning too deep into this type of analysis of the characters in MJ Lenderman songs. Not only does Lenderman seem resistant to it, but even his characters seem sick of it. “You always lose me when you talk like that,” the narrator of “Rip Torn” sings after chewing on several philosophical musings about manhood and milkshakes versus smoothies. It’s not that Lenderman lacks ambition. He aspires to people like Smog’s Bill Callahan and Silver Jews’ David Berman and Songs: Ohia’s Jason Molina (particularly the vocal melody and cadence of “Just Be Simple”). He’s looked back further too, transporting the groove from Bob Dylan and the Band’s “Tough Mama” into “You Have Bought Yourself a Boat” and aligning his work with 20th-century Southern novelists like Larry Brown and Harry Crews. Part of the thrill of Lendeman’s music is that, even with these clear reference points, his own voice always comes through clearest. You get the sense these influences—many of whom happen to be tragic male figures whose biographies occasionally read like cautionary tales—feel less formative than fraternal, like-minded voices he’s encountered along his journey, taking little bits with him as he goes.
On Manning Fireworks, he is already wrestling against the pillars of his identity, questioning things he seemed to know for certain just one album ago. He has never sounded more searching, more tender. The opening lyrics of the album, in the very stark and pretty title track, refer to “birds against a heavy wind that wins in the end.” It’s the rare imagery in a Lenderman song that could come from a book of zen poetry or a Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young song. We’ve heard him sing about birds stuck in a hardware store, gentle rain on an open grill, true love exchanged through airport gifts. But what happens when it’s just us and our nature, face to face? No props, no punchlines.
Spoiler alert—it doesn’t end well. And this is how Lenderman finds his way through it. Remember, after all, that his central metaphor about Michael Jordan’s sickly performance in “Hangover Game” isn’t about the unfair expectations we place on generational heroes or the deteriorating effects of nursing our demons with substances. “Hey, I like drinking too,” Lenderman sings in the chorus, and if you ever see him play it live, you’ll stand among a whole bunch of people who feel the same way. Being one with everything, he reminds us, means being one with some pretty down-and-out characters. So it goes with the birds and the heavy wind and the stuff that ends up blowing us off course. Still, the song keeps moving on and so does the guy at its core: born to lose, pushing ahead. What else can you do?
