By: Oliver Stone
It’s almost impossible to find an MJ Lenderman video— either a deep-cut album rip from his Bandcamp days as an Asheville teenager, or a recent live performance on The Tonight Show— without stumbling upon a wide variety of comparisons in the comments. Slacker rock Gen-Xers laud his Stephen Malkmus-inherited demeanor; classic rock aficionados cite sympathies to monumental acts like The Band or Neil Young; alt-country diehards find hints of legendary artists like Jeff Tweedy, Will Oldham or Jason Molina. However, to list the generational acts from which the North Carolina multi-instrumentalist gathers inspiration is to reduce the originality behind MJ Lenderman himself.
Artists like MJ Lenderman are not spat out of the popular music machine by simply the amalgamation of previously mythologized musicians. Artists like Lenderman are crafted around a uniquely distinct background, granted the necessary experience to write music that genuinely resonates with some specific, ineffable human condition. This experience— shared through the
archetypal lens of Lenderman’s iconic slacker character— can be traced all along the roots of Lenderman’s latest album, Manning Fireworks, released through Anti- and Epitaph Records in
September 2024.
While Lenderman occupies a similar sonic space to slacker-rock and alt-country legends like Dinosaur Jr. and John Prine, the album never quite coheres to any expectation of either. Manning Fireworks is a nine track, 38 minute collection of twangy, guitar-centric ballads that flow like a lazy river, from the ringing acoustic of its titular opener to the droning electric outro on “Bark at the Moon” (no, not a cover of the Ozzy track, but in fact an homage to the Guitar Hero II setlist). Each song brims with layered references to Lenderman’s cultural moment alongside brilliantly crafted instrumentals. Whether it’s the earworm slide guitar on “Joker Lips” or the gnawing fiddle on “Rip Torn,” some special instrument shines on every track, and piques your interest with each re-listen.
You might recognize his name from a recent Waxahatchee collaboration, or as the guitarist for his fellow Asheville band Wednesday, or even as the drummer for Indigo de Souza. Still, his multi-instrumental talent does not detract from his songwriting capability. The album’s witty, sometimes vulgar, Americana-drenched lyricism soaked with yearning Appalachian vocals lends Lenderman a unique voice right out the gate. Skillful and impressive guitar work weaves along homegrown lyrics throughout his songs. Lenderman’s words echo the honky-tonk, early- 2000’s, older-brother-core world he originates from: “Deleted scene of Lightning McQueen, blacked out at full speed,” as well as moments of simultaneously introspective and humorous poeticism: “Is it the quiet hiss of a midnight piss, or a river turned to creek?” Lenderman never refrains from the real, while subtly laughing at it all.
The opener “Manning Fireworks” tells the tale of a hapless jerk through a cold, yet almost familial lens, critiquing the folly of the reprobate: “Some have passion, some have purpose/you have sneakin’ backstage to hound the girls in the circus.” Like many of the tracks on the album, the song describes in Southern Gothic vignette a character that’s hard to pin down to anyone not from Lenderman’s neck of the woods. Imagine a guy with a lot of used cars in the yard, perpetually being fixed up; a guy in a grease-stained black tanktop sporting a questionable tattoo; a guy who probably gets too riled up about high school football. As Lenderman reveals, “Once a perfect little baby, who’s now a jerk.” The music on Manning Fireworks helps paint this satirizing portrait with traditionally country instruments, twangy licks and fuzzed-out guitar moans.
The album leans from its wistfully bouncing acoustic opener to the melancholically laid- back “Joker Lips.” In the tangles of masturbation jokes and Catholic schoolboy dreams, Lenderman drops probably the greatest four-word short story of all time: “Kahlua shooter/DUI scooter.” All the while pedal steel guitarist Xandy Chelmis cranks out possibly the most memorable sound from any steel guitar or dobro since “Sleepwalk” in ‘59. “Joker Lips” is unforgettably relatable, not just to the jerkoff-archetype but to any reasonable human who’s ever thought, “This morning wants to kill me.”
“Rudolph” stands as a familiar track to diehard Lenderheads, and its presence on the album feels absolutely necessary: a clunking cowbell, steady drum work, and lyrical musings that range from classic Bob Dylan lines to the steps of the seminary. A rough and rowdy guitar solo reminds the listener that they’re thumbing through the pages of rock history and arriving at MJ Lenderman. His low-key chorus shines out from the glistening wall of noise playing out behind him, transitioning to his current-most popular song on Spotify.
“Wristwatch” is a self-actualizing didactic tale told from a jerk who, despite owning a houseboat docked at the Himbo Dome and a fancy wristwatch, is ultimately all alone in this world. With such a classic story as a rich dude realizing that his wealth and pride has rendered him emotionally deserted, MJ Lenderman spins the narrative in absurdist mockery of modern life (“Well, I got a beach home up in Buffalo/and a wristwatch that’s a compass and a cell phone”). His lines cannot be reduced to shallow dude rock. There’s something deeply intriguing about Lenderman’s writing, something introspective, questioning the very nature of this strange Southern pot roast of characters as he inhabits their voices backed by a country rock band. The album’s champion single, “She’s Leaving You,” features lovely backing vocals from Lenderman’s Wednesday bandmate Karly Hartzman. The eclectic accompanying music video, directed by comedian Whitmer Thomas, hilariously echoes the song’s sardonically depressing lyrics about a washed-up infidel caught red-handed in Vegas. Lenderman’s chorus reflects matter-of-factly, “It falls apart, we all got work to do.” While the track (and video) display Lenderman’s booming, anthemic success (and wry humor), I’m drawn to an earlier Lenderman music video, directed by Hartzman herself.
In the official video for Lenderman’s cut “Someone Get The Grill Out Of The Rain” from Ghost of Your Guitar Solo (2021), we see the MJ Lenderman and the Wind cast in their natural habitat, it seems: the rural outskirts of mountainous North Carolina. The band members tend to the grill, smoke a cigarette, chill out on the porch steps, while Lenderman muses into the mic and cuddles with then-girlfriend Hartzman. In grainy black-and-white footage, a passerby catches a glimpse into the authentic reality of Lenderman’s world, a humble musician making music and videos with his friends.
Manning Fireworks’ B-side launches with the enigmatic fiddle-centric ballad “Rip Torn.” In a recent NPR Tiny Desk concert, Lenderman said of the song, “This one kinda has to relate to
the government… the men in black.” Whatever the song really means, its profundity cannot be understated, making lines like “Passed out in your Lucky Charms,/lucky doesn’t mean much” feel as emotionally resonant as the pained desperation behind “You need to learn/how to behave in groups.” The track explodes frantically with a chaotic outburst at the end before dwindling into silence, showcasing the immense power of folk instrumentation, and its surprising place in modern popular music.
Its title lifted from a chorus by The Band, the album’s seventh track is probably, quietly, the album’s most emotional. There’s something captivatingly postmodern about Lenderman’s bleak realizations on life combined with absurdly mundane settings: “Some say distance grows the heart/but I know, sometimes we just drift apart,” he acknowledges, before dropping the line “We sat under a half-mast McDonald’s flag,” a startlingly vivid contemporary image, though he sings it with a sort of timeless wisdom. The arpeggiating, wailing clarinet towards the end of the song worms its way into the lyrics “Clarinet, singing its lonesome duck walk,” creating a fascinating self-awareness between song and singer that culminates with the deflated battle cry, “You don’t know the shape I’m in.”
The penultimate song on the album, “On My Knees,” reverberates the distorted reverie of nineties indie rock (see Built to Spill) with electrifying religious allegory and David Foster Wallace-esque meditations. Not only do the guitar moments glimmer like in the guitar-rock days of yore, the lyrics shine among Lenderman’s most earnest. In a standout moment on the album, the final chorus blares loudly over the dramatic confession, “Wherever you find me/you’ll find me on my knees.”
On the tracklist, the final song “Bark at the Moon” may seem daunting with its ten minute runtime, but the song really ends around the three-minute-thirty mark before bursting into an ambient drone. The cacophony eventually fades into nothingness. “Bark at the Moon” is an excellent song that warrants more attention than a gimmick track, but the outro feels deserved when you listen to the full album in its own right, and the way Lenderman and the Wind have performed the song live is even more compelling— they leave their instruments on the ground and let the noise play out in real time. Of course, there would be no better way to end this album than a nod to Lenderman’s well-sung heroes; in this case, he combines the howl from Warren Zevon’s hit “Werewolves of London” with a nostalgic aside about an unhealthy obsession with Guitar Hero. And so Lenderman’s landmark fourth solo album ends right back where it started; in the midst of an early 2000’s boy’s bedroom, blasting dude rock, jammin’ till the sun comes up, leaving you with the quiet reflection of the still Southern morning.
The online music community seems to unanimously agree that MJ Lenderman is an artist on the doorstep of stardom. After taking a listen to his latest album, Manning Fireworks, that fact becomes hard to argue. He’s landed sold-out shows from Athens, GA to London, UK; the album landed the #1 spot on The New Yorker’s Best Albums of 2024 list. One can only wonder, where
will the spurting flame of Lenderman’s firework take him next?
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