I’ve been listening to a lot of MJ Lenderman. Maybe you have, too. There are plenty of us out here listening. Lately, I can’t tap my phone without encountering the 25-year-old musician’s head full of dark curls.
This speaks in part to the way that social media affirms and digs in on what it already knows about us. I already loved Wednesday, Lenderman’s band with Karly Hartzman, and I had the singles released in advance of the Manning Fireworks LP, “Joker Lips” and “She’s Leaving You,” on repeat throughout August. These songs provided the sonic backdrop for my morning walks for weeks before the album release on September fifth, and they worked on me the way they were working on so many others: Real, real good.
To this point: “She’s Leaving You” is the kind of rocker you can lose yourself in for four-and-a-half minutes. Its velocity and stomp make you feel like kicking some ass—wait, no, you already ARE kicking ass, merely by pouring this song into your ears. But here’s the thing: At the same time, the song is about failure and falling apart. Both things can be true, I think, because doesn’t fuckin’ up sometimes come with its own high, or its own engine of change and (re)creation? The failure becomes, strangely, the juice. (And sometimes people get addicted to it.)
While the thematic spine of Manning Fireworks may be men and boys messing up, experiencing loss, and learning lessons (we hope), Lenderman himself is ostensibly in a moment of pure triumph and gain. Let’s look at some of the superlatives attached to his person by some of the best music writers out there:
“He is often described—accurately—as the next great hope for indie rock, or however one might now refer to scrappy, dissonant, guitar-based music that’s unconcerned, both sonically and spiritually, with whatever is steering the Zeitgeist.” —Amanda Petrusich
“A young artist with an old soul and a keen eye for observational detail that makes his canted portraits of small-town life come alive.” - Lindsay Zolandz
“Manning Fireworks is a masterpiece about quotidian misery that’s as playful and comforting as a best friend.” - Danielle Chelosky
Once the press started flowing, I was the target market, so I caught it all. The coverage covered me, and I found myself soaking in a not-unpleasant MJ Lenderman overwhelm.
I agree with all the acclaim. Lines from his songs are etched into the surface of my consciousness. “With a rolling start on the hill / This morning’s trying to kill me,” he sings in “Joke Lips,” from the perspective of a resigned, beleaguered loser. The thing is, we’re all that loser. Who among us has not felt, maybe often, that the morning is trying to kill them? Maybe most mornings? Who among us has not wanted to be asked how we’re doing? Today my teenager was exhausted. “Is the morning trying to kill you?” I said. “Yes,” she said. “We’ve all got work to do.”
I’m interested in the way Lenderman’s songs speak to contemporary male identity and masculinity, which lots of people have discussed already. But I’m also interested in the way his public persona—the way he presents, and the path his music-making has taken with respect to collaboration and partnership—evidences a change in what it means to be a rock-n-roll dude. Simply put, I am here for it if this is what guitar-hero energy looks like now.
I think Lenderman, or his persona, represents a new guard, a liberated indie-rock male who doesn’t have to be frontman (but if you want him to, sure, cool, can do, let’s rock). A guy who not only knows it’s not cool to subjugate or objectify women, in life or in lyrics, and pokes fun at the guys who haven’t quite figured that out yet. Which is to say he seems a few miles farther along the road from the indie-rock men of my generation, who maybe got the intel, or said they did, but didn’t really do too much with it, because, eh, it just wasn’t that important to them. Or maybe because they were still working on not feeling threatened by women’s power? These things take time.
As much as has been written about MJ Lenderman in the past few weeks, I still want to celebrate about how significant it is that an indie-rocker is singing lines like these, from “Rip Torn:”
You need a glass of water
It’ll kill the need to puke
You need to learn
How to behave in groups
First, Lenderman and Hartzman’s vocal extension of beeeehave here is just exquisite. What a word to draw out! Second, let’s pause to appreciate how this song gently, even sweetly, admonishes young men for their bad behavior. It puts its hand softly on their shoulders and asks them to think about how they might avoid alienating and discomforting others. Hey guys, let’s do better.
This, to me, is radical shit.
Onstage and in photographs, Lenderman projects a subdued presence, aside from the thousand-yard stare that reminds me as much of Neil Young as his guitar playing does. He sways gently behind the mic, if he moves at all; his vocals have a careworn feel, like a perfectly broken-in dad hat. He doesn’t sulk or glower. He might even crack a smile, but he’s not going to smile too big. He appears mildly concerned, not bored. He’s a Southern boy for sure (which definitely endears him to me), but also a cool kid who never wanted to be in a frat and is no redneck. Nevertheless he could be a good hang with those bros for a while (“I like drinking too”), until he’d interloped just enough. Then he’d amble back to his best jokers.
The thing that we’re all hearing is this duality of being wide awake to the dull ache of your lesser moments while also able to laugh at yourself in the mirror, and this duality gets channeled into brilliant character study. One hungover fellow is passing out in his Lucky Charms, another’s boasting about his beach house in…Buffalo? (because that sounds better than Gulf Shores, obvs). Another’s renting a Ferrari and singing the blues. When I listen to “Wristwatch” I imagine a guy sitting on the edge of his bed in his boxer-briefs, shoulders slumped, staring down at his feet, trying to rustle up the motivation to face the day. It takes a degree of self-awareness and vulnerability to paint portraits of men (or women) like this, because you have to be close to it for it to work.
Even the name he’s chosen to make music under—he initials MJ before his surname— suggest a wee joke, a wink at the culturally codified affectations of celebrity, a nod to a certain basketball star this young star-ascendent might have adored as a boy when he, too, played b-ball. Because we all know that when you’re a star, you do the initial thang, right, or the one-name thang. Or some other affectation. This is just how things work…right?
And his band’s name, “The Wind” -- can you seriously take this entirely seriously? I’m sorry, I can’t.
My point is that there’s a lot of fun being had, but it’s all so very chill, bro. The album’s genius lies largely in its tragicomedy. And it sometimes sounds a lot like Gen X bemused disaffection, as Petrusich picked up on: “On ‘You Have Bought Yourself a Boat,’” she writes, “he skewers upward mobility, briefly affecting a kind of seething Gen X disdain.”
Yes! The perceived lack of concern, the resistance to any suggestion of striving—this all feels lovingly familiar and extremely Gen X to me, and true of Lenderman’s whole vibe, which makes sense, given parent-child generational pairings of today—the Gen X-to-Z hand-me-down sensibility. “Go rent a Ferrari / and sing the blues” sounds like it could have been on Crooked Rain, Crooked Rain, as does “Don’t move to New York City, babe / it’ll change the way you dress.” (Darlin’, don’t you go and cut your hair, either!) But MJ is less sneering than Malkmus. “I don’t want the music to come across like it’s not inclusive to everybody – like somebody who’s not a dude,” he said in an interview with the Guardian. And to the point of Lenderman being a new breed of rock star, in “You Don’t Know the Shape I’m In,” a tale of lonesome woe, the (presumably male, but could be any of us!) narrator is the one pleading for a little kindness—“Whoa-oh-oh, be nice. To me.”
He’s also musing on the idea of a clarinet “singing its lonesome duck-walk.” Absolutely, I think every time: I don’t know why a clarinet sounds like a duck walking, but it does, and it’s delightful and funny, and I imagine Lenderman and Karly laughing about this, or laughing about “Kahlua shooters and DUI scooters,” to my mind a brilliant four-word flash fiction, and one I had to explain to my Gen Z teenager, who didn’t know what Kahlua was. I think about what Ann Powers observed, and what I suspect, too: that Hartman is Lenderman’s “major songwriting influence,” and “more people should be saying it.”
What’s also evident to me is that he’s got that spook. This is a word repeated many times in Neil Young’s biography, Shakey; it’s the undefinable, godly quality of creativity married to soul, to that shimmering somethin that can’t be learned or affected. For that matter, Lenderman is living proof that rock isn’t dead, after all. I never for a second thought it was, but anyway. . .
I got to see Lenderman and Hartzman play a sold-out show at the Blue Room the other day where they cut a live album, each of them on electric guitar, no other accompaniment. Their chemistry was good and fun, even if they are no longer romantically paired; sometimes Lenderman would sort of halfway strike a guitar pose and play a little riff and smile shyly at Hartzman, and you could so easily imagine them goofing around, writing songs, having fun.
At one point, some dude in the audience bellowed, a gesture that’s both appreciative and attention-seeking in a very trad male way. The bellowers are still out there at the rock shows! (Is there a bellower at every Lenderman show? I’m willing to take that bet.)
“The Bellower” -- that feels like a Lenderman song. The guy who can’t help himself. Maybe he knows better. He knows, okay, that bellowing at the artists on stage is…kind of a stupid macho-man move, the sort of thing his guitar hero might even smirk at and put in a song. But he’s gotta let that shit out. The guttural response as gag reflex!
At the Blue Room, Lenderman responded to the bellower beautifully: He offered up his own little half-ass, bemused bellow—a bellow-back!—and it somehow managed to feel like a high-five and a mockery, both. It was fun, and everyone laughed.
I worry about Lenderman a little, and not just because I’m old enough to be his mom. I’m thinking about the mindfuck of it all. Selling out a big tour in a blink and being goggled at by the media and being adored by fans sounds like a dream come true until you see the dark shadows cast by all those bright lights; or if you’re a sensitive being who would just like to be left alone a lot of the time; or if you have ye olde melancholic tendencies. And so many photo shoots!!! Again I’d take the bet that Lenderman checks at least two of those boxes. He’s gamely doing his tour of duty, and no doubt it’s sometimes a hoot, but it can’t all be a blast. ““Visibility and stuff, that’s not really something I’ve been after,” he said in the Guardian interview.
I suspect that having one’s work praised so much, so fast, might breed its own skeptical rumination spiral: Do you get amped by the hype, at the risk of a self-aggrandizing trip, or do you reject it out of hand, then grow overly critical of your own work?
Maybe he’ll be just fine, and I just need to chill, bro. (This is usually at least 50% the facts.) His laid-back demeanor and love of a good joke suggest that Lenderman has the right disposition to swim in the shark-infested waters. Speaking of!: I can’t stop thinking about one set of lines from “Rip Torn,” the song that, for my money, has the most compelling lyrics on an album dripping with them. Frankly I’m surprised that I haven’t seen these quoted all over the place like I have a few of the others:
If you tap on the glass
the sharks might look at you
You’re damned if they don’t
And you’re damned if they do
Is there a more pithy metaphor in circulation for the double-edged sword of stardom, or for the simple experience of social media, for that matter? I think not.
All this talk of and listening to MJ has brought me back to Karly, and I’m glad for that. She has the last vocals on “She’s Leaving You” as the noise falls away, which feels just right. Sweetly, the woman in this story echoes the man: Yes, she’s leaving him. Telling him what he already knows. Letting him down as easily as she can. But is he capable of appreciating that? Has he the aptitude for such growth?
Hartzman’s songwriting is what pulled me into these NC kids’ song-universe in the first place. From TVs in gas pumps to semis getting stuck under overpasses (ooooops…shit) to people standing line at the Panera and grouchy old ladies giving out full-size candy bars at Halloween and so on and so forth, she telegraphs a landscape I have noticed in much the same way my entire life. (I think it’s interesting that Hartzman gets asked a lot more about the Southernness of her lyrics than Lenderman does. Maybe that’s another newsletter.) If I had three wishes from a magic frog, right now one of them would be to go back in time and eavesdrop on the writing sessions that must have produced some of both Hartzman and Lenderman’s songs. What gorgeous, fun, spooky collaboration.
I hope I haven’t buried the fact that I absolutely love Manning Fireworks. As hot-and-heavy as the media coverage is to a kind of ridiculous fawning degree, I love to see it.
And man, post Hurricane Helene, I’m hoping Lenderman’s people are OK back in Asheville, a city I love so much.