MJ Lenderman: Miracles in the Mundane

The North Carolina singer, songwriter, and guitarist has had a busy but phenomenal 2024. In our latest Digital Cover Story, we caught up with him to break down why, discussing his collaborations with Waxahatchee, slowing down after two years on the road with Wednesday, and his star-making new solo LP, Manning Fireworks, along the way.

MJ Lenderman: Miracles in the Mundane

There’s a flea market spilling through West Fulton Street in Chicago, as vendors are peddling 20-year-old clothes marked “vintage,” DIY crafts and Instagram-ready, color-by-number paintings. Some MLM mouthpieces shuffle around, rubbing shoulders with cafe patrons trying to enjoy their overpriced grub; a few locals are haggling over prices via coin flips. Through the noise and the bodies, Jake “MJ” Lenderman tramps toward Beatrix, a lunch hub posing as a coffee shop. Ordering a hot coffee and a green drink, he looks exhausted, which makes sense; not even 24 hours earlier, he and his band, Wednesday, delivered one of the busiest sets on Pitchfork Music Festival’s Saturday afternoon. Somebody thought it was a good idea to schedule them, Water From Your Eyes and feeble little horse right next to each other, with the former two’s sets facing some serious overlap.

It didn’t seem to matter, though, as the Asheville band drew in the biggest crowd of the three, ripping Union Park to shreds with a 13-song set that spanned their three-LP-and-change catalog, from “Fate Is…,” to “Toothache,” to the crushing tempest “Bull Believer.” They made 14 acres feel like a house show. And last summer, a hot Columbus night felt even hotter in an oversold, beyond-capacity Ace of Cups, as Wednesday played one of their final Rat Saw God Tour gigs to a restless crowd of, unexpectedly, jocky college kids eager to mosh. Ahead of the show, everything seemed like it’d been culminating in that very night—one last show before returning for a homecoming set at the Orange Peel in Asheville. Wednesday were tired then, and they weren’t defensive about it. Bandleader Karly Hartzman said as much onstage in-between songs, only to take a deep breath, down a bit of her drink and tear her vocal cords up during “Bull Believer.” It speaks to who they are as musicians, how they’ll rarely give up an inch of effort even when colliding head-on with exhaustion. By my calculations, they played about 65 shows on that tour, spread out across about a dozen different countries. “I don’t know if our plan is to keep this pace up forever,” Lenderman tells me. “I don’t think that will be good for us. Ideally, there will be more time off [soon] to collect and write.”

Lenderman, 25, has a pretty routine backstory: growing up, he was an altar boy; you can trace his early music touchstones to Jason Molina; he went to UNC-Asheville for a few semesters before dropping out. He got his “start” by drumming in Indigo De Souza’s band and appearing on her first two records, I Love My Mom and Any Shape You Take. A self-titled album came in 2019, when Lenderman was a 20-year-old guitarist working at an ice cream shop and booking his own gigs at venues around town. Then he met Hartzman, whose band hadn’t made a record yet but invited him to perform on an EP called How Do You Let Love Into The Heart That Isn’t Split Wide Open. When Wednesday made I Was Trying to Describe You to Someone, Lenderman only contributed vocals to two songs (“Billboard,” “November”), but he’d join full-time for their semi-breakthrough Twin Plagues in August 2021 and its follow-up, Mowing the Leaves Instead of Piling ‘em Up barely six months later.

A couple of months after our conversation, Lenderman will appear on The Tonight Show on the same night as Shaquille O’Neal and Chloë Sevigny, but in April 2022, the prodigal, non-chalant son of North Carolina guitar-rock released Boat Songs—which would become a breakthrough, of sorts, for him. Pitchfork gave it a “Best New Music” designation in May of that year and, by December’s end, everyone across the indiesphere was hootin and hollering about the record. I wasn’t chronically online enough to buy into my mutuals’ affinity for Lenderman’s work, nor was I on many email blasts from publicists, even though freelance writing was my primary source of income at the time—so Boat Songs didn’t enter my orbit until the rest of the world already deemed it great. It landed on Paste’s year-end albums list, and it hasn’t left my rotation since.

2022 was a long enough time ago that nothing is the same now. In December of that year, Lenderman played a gig with Advance Base at Mahall’s here in Cleveland that was, in his own words, “not very attended,” only to return to North Carolina a week later, play a packed-house show at the Pinhook in Durham, and begin recording what would become Manning Fireworks. That’s when the buzz around Boat Songs went from a dull roar to a bracing, novel dialogue. “People are still realizing how much they fuck with that record,” Xandy Chelmis, Lenderman’s pedal steel-playing bandmate, told me last winter. Lenderman was new in town on Boat Songs, though he’d already been around forever: “He has records that aren’t online anymore that were out when I was still working in food service, dreaming of being in a band,” Hartzman echoed in that same conversation. “He was in high school. It’s crazy how long his music has been good as fuck and influencing me and tying into the culture of the Asheville scene.” And listening to Boat Songs, you felt its juxtapositions—how the work was eternal but not sentimental; a punch in the gut but from a fist clenched out of love.

And surely you’ve had a fateful first encounter with a song that, pretty immediately, changed your life. Just like “Come On Eileen” 10 years before it, “TLC Cagematch” fell into my lap as if I’d known and loved it for many, many years. Sounding as delicate as the country ballads that ached out of my grandparents’ stereo throughout my childhood, there was an affection in the song’s arrangement that my cells recognized. And perhaps that is because the story Lenderman tells on it is one that I lived through, soundtracked by a scape that mirrors the beck-and-call of the very town I lived through it in. “It’s hard to see you fall like that, though I know how much of it’s an act,” he sings, evoking the double-entendre of a wrestling match masquerading like someone’s sense of self becoming lost, “in this tables, ladders and chairs match, where all things go.”

When “TLC Cagematch” is on, I am thrown back into a memory of a sleepover with my childhood friend, us wrestling and beating the piss out of each other in my bedroom—hurling ourselves off my bed like it was a top rope, pinning each other on the floor and imagining we were the marquee event on Monday Night Raw, or something like that. My dad caught wind of our roughhousing and summoned us to the living room, where he quickly took it upon himself to teach us both how to pull off a perfect half-nelson hold. Then, he refereed us tackling each other in the dark, our 10-year-old bodies painted blue by the glow of a muted television set.

In the entanglement of our eight limbs came the sound of a crack—not a broken bone but a wrong twist. Then came a cry—not from me, but from him. An arm got bent the wrong way, but not wrong enough to break. “That’s enough,” my dad said in a tone not yet burned by a drink, ushering us back to the bedroom with the demand that we call it a night. The next morning, his mom came to pick him up. It was the last time he ever slept at my house. 17 years later, we don’t talk anymore. “Like your shoulders, your hips and knee, they all hurt you but they will work,” a couplet in the song goes, and I think about how, as fate would have it, I wound up the one with lifelong body aches, knee surgeries and a chronic illness that forces me to repent every foul I’ve ever committed. Perhaps, if it had been me whose arm twisted the wrong way in my living room all that time ago, all of this living could be so easy. In the glow of “TLC Cagematch”’s starlit, bar-beaten lament is an invitation to remember the sanguine of our own recollections.

Much of the takeaway from Boat Songs is Lenderman’s penchant for ‘90s sports references and surreal collages of cultural imagery with universal truths. “On Boat Songs, it’s really only two,” he tells me, with a grin, before noting that Manning Fireworks only has one sports reference in it (a mention of a driving range in “Bark at the Moon”). But it’s why a song about Dan Marino that turns into a charming 16-line tome about seeing “dolphins from a friend of ours boat” works so well, or why Lenderman singing about Michael Jordan’s “flu game” and parlaying it into one crystalline, declarative statement of “I like drinking, too” sticks with us. It’s why he can write a song about Toontown and make it stick in the hearts of people who have canonically never logged into Toontown. It’s why, of course, a song about a hardcore wrestling match can become a metaphor for a friendship or a brotherhood that wasted away just as quickly as those very same bodies that took beatings on the mat night after night.

By April of 2023, Wednesday’s Rat Saw God would propel Lenderman toward an irreversible stratosphere. And Rat Saw God was a brilliant, period-defining release—a crockpot of crushing, throbbing, wounded country-gaze spiked with anecdotal WTFs and a rock template lionizing Benadryl overdoses and gas pump television sets you can never turn off. The LP landed at #1 on our year-end albums list, and “Chosen to Deserve” made it into the top five of our songs ranking. For Lenderman, Boat Songs surging in popularity right as the press cycle for Rat Saw God started ramping up unveiled new expectations punctuated by his other band’s breakneck pace into indiestardom. He was suddenly more than just an Asheville favorite; he was a guitar-playing starlet on the verge of full rock celebrity. “The initial, end-of-the-year buzz that Boat Songs was getting was the first wave of people talking about it in a way that made me start to feel nervous, pressured,” Lenderman says. “The rest of the year was [spent] learning how to not ignore it, but to not worry about it too much.”

Around the time Rat Saw God came out, Lenderman joined forces with Katie Crutchfield to start making her next Waxahatchee album, Tigers Blood. Before the two even began working together, Crutchfield had heard demo tapes that would become Manning Fireworks, including “Rudolph” (which he wrote a week before the second Tigers Blood session began), “You Don’t Know the Shape I’m In” and a track that didn’t make the record, which I can only assume was “Pianos,” which just came out on the Cardinals at the Window compilation. While he was at Sonic Ranch in Tornillo, Texas with Crutchfield and Brad Cook, he got the mixes back for “Rip Torn.” “That crew heard different stages of it all,” he says. When I interviewed Crutchfield earlier this year, she called Lenderman’s presence a “potent spice.” “You’re gonna taste it, you’re gonna be like, ‘Oh!’” she said. “When he started singing, that’s when everything changed. We heard how our voices sounded against each other. Brad and I were like, ‘We can’t get enough, we’re addicted, we gotta keep it up. Our emotional reaction to this is so big, I think we need to follow that.’”

And they did, a forward-motion encapsulated by “Right Back to It,” their irresistible, timeless duet that explores the unromantic fixtures of a long-held love. It’s the kinetic anchor of Tigers Blood, as Crutchfield dances around hesitancy and discontentment in the verses only to contend with unimpeachable matrimony in the choruses. Just as “Right Back to It” is the type of love song that doesn’t say too much, most of Manning Fireworks finds Lenderman walking a tightrope of show and tell. “It falls apart, we all got work to do,” he posits on “She’s Leaving You,” before dissolving into detail: “You said, ‘Vegas is beautiful at night,’ and it’s not about the money, you just like the lights.” So did sharing a recording space with Crutchfield influence Lenderman at all? “I’m sure it did,” he responds. “[Manning Fireworks], it’s a lot hookier than other stuff I’ve done—embracing some sort of pop aspect of music. Maybe I was able to see that in a new light and appreciate that in a new way, working with her.” He pauses for a moment, while a server takes someone’s order near us. “Other ways it would impact me, I don’t know if I could even be able to articulate it,” he continues. “But it definitely did have a big impact.”

The last two years have been busy for Lenderman even beyond the Wednesday and Waxahatchee of it all, as he made an appearance on Kevin Abstract’s Blanket in a duet with Kara Jackson and played some guitar on Fust’s Genevieve in 2023. He and Squirrel Flower’s Ella Williams are featured on Horse Jumper of Love’s “Snow Angel,” while he and Williams perform together again on her song “Your Love.” Somewhere in-between all of that, he recorded And the Wind (Live and Loose!) across two shows on two sides of the country. This is all just to say: Lenderman doesn’t write while he’s on the road. “All my mental and physical energy is going into touring,” he says, before citing his David Berman-inspired routine of getting 20 disconnected lines down a day. “For the previous albums, I had a pretty good writing practice. I would write every day, whether I felt like it or not. [On Manning Fireworks], I really didn’t keep up with that at all. I was just on tour all the time, so it was slower. Maybe not that slow, but every time I write, it feels slow, because it just feels kind of crazy until a song is done. This time, I was totally out of practice. I was trying my best to get it done.”

Like George Saunders, Lenderman writes out of his own lexicon and into a gleam of satirical motivation meshed with humanity and struggle and strangeness. A couple go on the log ride at Six Flags and, while drenched on the car ride home, destroy each other with love; a narrator drains cum from hotel showers while lamenting a morning that “wants to kill me”; a beautiful doe gets its guts splattered across the road by a blacked-out Lightning McQueen; sentences told through a hiccups spell sounds like you’re speaking in tongues; there’s a stark separation between milkshakes and smoothies; an Apple Watch can be a compass, cell phone and pocket knife. Through all of it, you’re damned if you don’t and damned if you do.

At the beginning of COVID, when Lenderman was writing Boat Songs and Manning Fireworks, he was reading Tenth of December; now, a McDonald’s flag flies at half-mast. His gambit is so wickedly poetic, even though he’s somewhat agnostic about poetry. “I’m a little intimidated by it, ‘cause I don’t feel like I understand it a lot of the time,” he admits. “Maybe I’m not supposed to.” When he was writing Manning Fireworks, a friend sent him a book by Dean Young. Recently, he read John Ashbery’s Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror—a sensical pairing, as the titular poem’s “the soul establishes itself / but how far can it swim out through the eyes” couplet registers as a very Lendermanian turn-of-phrase. When he uses idioms like “I’ve got a houseboat docked at the Himbo Dome,” or “Jackass is funny like the Earth is round,” or “Burdened by those wet dreams of people having fun,” or “Once a perfect little baby who’s now a jerk,” or “Kahlua shooter, DUI scooter,” they are micro-poems of a certain, singular vernacular—an idyllic convergence of internet-speak and Mad Libs. It’s not so much generational phonetics, but a combination of intrigue and access. “A lot of it has to do with what words I do know how to use,” he says. “Obviously, my vocabulary is always growing—for all of us, really—and then, another side of it, it’s fitting into a rhythm and rhymes too. I was really into rhyming on this album.”

Pop culture references, which have lingered with him since Boat Songs—like Eric Clapton being the “second coming,” or John Daly singing “Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door,” or a Romeo “with his pants pulled down,” or hurricanes having human names, or a purple courtside seat at a Lakers game being imprinted with Jack Nicholson’s “celebrity asscheek”—aren’t random. “It has to be something meaningful or funny to me,” Lenderman says. “Over the past two or three albums, I’ve been just trying to zoom out and write from a more third-person perspective. It’s definitely opened up a lot more possibilities for what I can write songs about.” And on Manning Fireworks, he writes about men who aren’t mean but they’re hurting—pulled from sources that are “all over the place”: parents of people he grew up around, or even his own family and, certainly, himself and friends of his; or friends of friends, or even the books he’s read.

Masculinity and displacement are recurring themes on Manning Fireworks, fashioned into tales about men who drink, cheat and are, as Lenderman frames them on the album’s title track, caught up in a “series of characteristics” that emphasizes how much of a jerk they are. Every protagonist on the record is, in his eyes, a similar guy. “Bark at the Moon” and its Guitar Hero-citing third-verse is half-fact and half-fiction. “It’s funny,” he says, smirking, “a lot of interviewers have said, ‘At the end of the song, you’re back in childhood.’ I don’t know if I really see it that way. The core feelings and stuff are real and precious to me already. I haven’t really felt like I’ve written a very autobiographical song in a really long time. Maybe on the next album.”

One piece of continuity that Lenderman has carried from project to project is his recalibration of old songs in new ones of his own—using their words to amplify his own memories and curiosity, “flipping them on their head and putting them into a new context.” The Bob Dylan-invoking “Knockin’” isn’t on Manning Fireworks, but “Bark at the Moon” is a verbatim riff on the Ozzy Osbourne song of the same name. “You Don’t Know the Shape I’m In” is a winking play on “The Shape I’m In,” the Robbie Robertson-penned song from the Band’s 1970 LP Stage Fright. And, the first line in “Wristwatch” is a misquote of Quiet Riot’s “Cum On Feel the Noize.” Lenderman beams while using Rick Alverson’s 2012 film The Comedy to make sense of his own referential inclinations. “Tim Heidecker plays a character similar to the version of himself that you see in other stuff,” he says. “The movie just puts him in a bunch of situations that are uncomfortable instead of funny. I think about that a lot, just using one thing that you have an understanding of and putting it in a new context that maybe makes it a little disturbing, or something funnier or sadder.”

On Manning Fireworks, we are met by a familiar tandem: Lenderman and Hartzman singing together, just as they have for five, six years, on songs like “She’s Leaving You,” “You Don’t Know the Shape I’m In” and the title track. A Guardian article on Lenderman earlier this summer broke the news, albeit subtly, that the once-longtime partners had romantically broken up. A skirmish of discourse unfurled online, as the faction of fans who’ve quietly maintained some sort of parasocial connection with the two musicians felt a profound sense of loss. It all felt weird, but none of it matters, at least not in terms of what Wednesday’s listeners are owed—because they aren’t owed anything. Lenderman and Hartzman still make music together, evidenced by Hartzman’s cameo onstage during Lenderman’s recent The Tonight Show performance.

I don’t ask him about any of it, because I imagine the only truth about the breakup worth knowing is that good things don’t just cease to exist overnight. Perhaps, within that, those who need it can find reassurance. And, with Manning Fireworks coming together, Lenderman wanted to pick Hartzman’s brain about melodies and harmonies. “I wanted to utilize that,” he says. “I like having the harmonies be a different voice that’s not mine. It was a no-brainer, once I had her do one I had to get her to do four or five more.” He takes a beat, as Joan Jett’s “I Love Rock ‘n’ Roll spills into the cafe around us. “I’m still thinking, like, ‘Man, I wish I’d gotten her to sing on a couple more,’” he adds, with a boyish smile.

Manning Fireworks feels, instrumentally, more in-tune with Lenderman’s 2023 live album, And the Wind (Live and Loose!), than Boat Songs. (Live and Loose!) remains, to me, the purest capture of his work. Of course, this is a reflection of Wednesday’s extensive concert itinerary and how the creekgaze quintet so blazingly has turned its onstage imperfections into punishing addendums of gobsmackingly unpredictable and raw-hemmed rock ‘n’ roll. “Something about playing with Wednesday so much over the last few years, we’ve gotten really tight. And my band’s always been a little loose,” he says, grinning, “so I feel like I’ve learned a lot about how to make a band sound good live.”

In a live setting, Lenderman and the Wind play to their strengths. Whenever a song that, on Manning Fireworks, features a fiddle comes up on the setlist, Chelmis does that voice on his pedal steel; the seven-minute drone conclusion on the Sonic Youth-conjuring “Bark at the Moon” was done live with Colin Miller, Landon George and Shane McCord (though Hartzman and Adam McDaniel are both credited on it in the liner notes) but, when performed at gigs, it’s used “interstitially, to go somewhere else” three-fourths of the way into the setlist. Assembling a song like “Bark at the Moon,” which goes from this very beautiful, warbling synth-country lick to a very onerous, despondent soundscape of pitch-black ambient, was an “exercise in listening to each other, being patient.” Lenderman is hesitant to call his band’s noodling “jamming,” but he insists that, when the players nose-dive into those sprawling, louder climaxes drenched in walls of feedback—which he cheekily calls “a little aural therapy”—it feels better “once you have tighter parts for the rest of the set.” “If the whole thing was like that, maybe it would get boring. Maybe it already is boring,” he laughs.

But his work, on-record and on-stage, is anything but boring. The only way to speak about MJ Lenderman’s music is through how it makes the rest of us feel. He has no interest in filling in the gaps for us. “The record is all people need to know,” he says. “The music, tracks one through nine, that’s all you need. Everything outside of that is a way to present it.” There are rarely ever any answered questions in Lenderman’s music, and I’m not so sure I—or you—would want them answered. There’s a reward at the end of the chase on a record like Manning Fireworks, some shred of humanity worth compartmentalizing in song, but he’s not so distracted by the semantics or the what, where, when, who and why. “Maybe 25 years from now, I’ll have some more wisdom, or I’ll be more direct and be able to answer things,” he furthers. “I like intangibles—big ideas that everybody feels and experiences, but there’s no real great understanding of what they actually are. Big words, like love and fear and hope, shit like that.”

That’s what makes Manning Fireworks so special—the distance between artist and audience, and the ability to narrow it with our own conclusions. Lenderman is as big as he is right now because we all wanted him to be, no matter how hard everyone gatekept him when his best song was still “Come Over.” To anyone who hasn’t yet bought into his work, he’s a nobody. For everyone else, he is the second-coming he pokes fun at on “She’s Leaving You.” I have long been a card-carrying member of the “dudes rock” brigade, the demographic of people whose axiom is that Lenderman is a Zoomer Neil Young—if Neil Young was born at the turn of the millennium and wrote about barbecue grills stuck outside during a storm and hanging onto somebody’s boyfriend’s SUV keys, that is.

He’s just likable. And he doesn’t even try! Or, maybe he does try, but his earnestness is so nonchalant that we mistake it for ambivalence. Lenderman is the “just a guy” paragon to many of us because we’re convinced we could’ve ended up just like him—someone who used to play Guitar Hero and then, 15 years later, lucked into indie stardom ourselves. He’s a rec-center hooper who can shred! But the truth is that none of it is luck, and 99.9% of us will never be like him. What makes MJ Lenderman’s music so good is that it’s just a snapshot of all of his talents colliding into each other at the same time, as he closes generational gaps with ageless rock ‘n’ roll.

Lenderman doesn’t have a Shakespearean explanation for the ins and outs of his craft. It’s the vocation that’s profound. The decision to pursue that vocation is profound too. The contradicting forces of desire and mourning in a song like “Joker Lips” can stir a thousand different reactions from a thousand different people. Good music finds a way, and may we all take our time in a moment like this—where someone like Lenderman can wax poetic about Johnny Napalm, Lars Ümlaüt, Axel Steel and Xavier Stone in one sentence and then beautifully explain how he and his longtime collaborator/producer Alex Farrar “don’t have to say too much together to get where they’re trying to go” in the music right after. Very rarely has phenomenal, provocative art come with such little pretense. “It falls apart, we all got work to do” endures because most of us know how much both parts of that clause hurt.

Someone wiser than me once said that “comparison is the thief of joy,” but if we have learned anything from Shakey or Guitar Hero, it’s that the riffs and bombast eventually give way to human mistake and the references eventually dissolve into rituals and reckonings of grief, of nuance, and of oneness. Maybe it’s not about the guitar solos. Maybe it’s everything about the guitar solos. Manning Fireworks is ostensibly generous with its veracity—the names are fake but the stories reflect somebody’s history—and absurdity is the compendium of all that arrives to us without explanation. When Lenderman and I walk out of Beatrix together, we enter back into the rotten Chicago heat and exchange thanks and goodbyes. After parting ways, I enter a nearby clothing vendor’s tent and Venmo him $100 for a cardboard cutout of Shaquille O’Neal.

Recently, Hurricane Helene hit Western North Carolina and the storm’s subsequent flooding affected Asheville, the city where Lenderman, most of his band, and their families are based. Paste encourages all readers to refer to his Instagram post with correct information about mutual aid organizations and disaster relief funds you can donate to.


Matt Mitchell is Paste’s music editor, reporting from their home in Northeast Ohio.

 
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