NEW YORK, NY.- MJ Lenderman has been traveling light. In a London Airbnb on a recent afternoon, the 25-year-old rock musician (the MJ is for Mark Jacob; friends call him Jake) had a day off from his summer European tour with the band Wednesday, with plans to catch a screening of “Alien: Romulus.” Asked if he’d picked up any souvenirs on his travels, he searched his luggage, producing just a Nature’s Bakery fig bar and a bottle of tequila.
“I tend to not buy things on tour,” he said on a video call, dressed in a T-shirt with the logo of a friend’s record label (Sophomore Lounge). And the success of Wednesday’s most recent album, “Rat Saw God” from 2023, has kept him on the road. The LP, earmarked by his laconically fierce guitar and frontwoman Karly Hartzman’s vivid storytelling, elevated the band to a new tier. Lenderman’s guitar and vocal harmonies are also prominent on “Tigers Blood,” the acclaimed LP by kindred Southern indie rock act Waxahatchee, particularly on its single “Right Back to It,” his standout duet with singer-songwriter Katie Crutchfield.
This Friday, Lenderman releases his latest solo album, “Manning Fireworks,” doubling down on his skills as a singer-songwriter frontman — skills on striking display on the single “She’s Leaving You,” a Neil Young-style country-rocker involving an unfortunate character who evidently discovers that what happens in Las Vegas doesn’t necessarily stay in Vegas. Opening on the withering couplet “You can put your clothes back on/ She’s leaving you,” it accrues comically damning details on a downward spiral that resolves with an incongruously anthemic chorus. “It falls apart,” Lenderman drawls, offering cold comfort over a terrifically catchy hook, “We all got work to do.”
The combination of humor and poignancy — John Prine was a master of it — is a trick few songwriters can pull off. Lenderman can. “I tend to like that in the stuff that I consume,” he said, listing some creative touchstones. “Larry Brown — I’ve read most of his books. Harry Crews. Certain filmmakers, like Todd Solondz. The Coen brothers. I love David Berman’s songwriting. Will Oldham. Bill Callahan, too; his lyrics are super airtight. I’ve been obsessed with ‘37 Push Ups’ — it’s an old Smog song. Whatever that character is, is kind of a blueprint for the kind of characters I like to write about.”
On “Manning Fireworks,” those characters might be described as Questionable Dudes. “Wristwatch” is a droll sketch of a braggart inspired, Lenderman explained, by Andrew Tate and “this idea of alpha males gaining popularity. People spend thousands of dollars thinking they can learn how to be the ‘perfect man’ or something. It’s embarrassing.” Lenderman describes the lyrics of the title track as “kind of a laundry list of what makes this character a jerk,” one that builds from the couplet “One of these days you’ll kill a man/ For asking a question you don’t understand.” The album is a flipbook of misshapen masculinity, toxic and otherwise.
“I love the conversational nature of his writing,” said Patterson Hood of Drive-By Truckers, a fellow Southern rock storyteller whose records Lenderman grew up admiring. “And no matter what he’s singing about, even if it ends up being kind of dark or sad, there’s that ray of humor and light in it that’s really appealing.”
Hood sees him as a triple threat: a great writer, singer, “killer” guitar player. “And there’s that thing you can’t quite put your finger on that some people have — he’s got that star thing, for sure. Which is a wonderful thing to behold in somebody who’s also a really cool person, and has songs that good.”
Lenderman was born and raised in Asheville, North Carolina, and attended Catholic school until he persuaded his parents to let him start public school in seventh grade. The church was “basically our whole lives, until we all got confirmed,” he explained. “I have a big family, three sisters, so part of it is maybe it was a good way to keep everybody organized. And all our friends were there, so it was a big part of our social life, too.”
Lenderman’s parents also took the family to the annual Lake Eden Arts Festival, a “hippie festival,” as he put it, on the former grounds of Black Mountain College, a fabled incubator of American modernist art and poetry that is now the site of a summer camp where Lenderman attended church retreats. He also played basketball and the video game Guitar Hero (he’s referenced both in lyrics) as a youth, eventually picking up a real guitar. As a student at the University of North Carolina, he played drums and sang in a stoner metal punk band called Slugly, and fell in with a network of rising talents. One was Indigo De Souza, whom he recorded and toured with. The other was Hartzman, who persuaded him to join her band, Wednesday, in 2020. He did, and they became a couple, though they’ve recently split.
“In a small town, the music community just kind of enmeshes itself,” Hartzman said on a video call from a recent tour stop in Budapest, Hungary, recounting the band’s history. She appreciates how she and Lenderman have challenged each other creatively, to “live up to what the other one was doing all the time,” she said. “I think that made us both a lot better as musicians.” (Lenderman has credited Hartzman with spurring him to read more, which upped his writing game.)
Crutchfield, who was “blown away” when she first saw Lenderman perform at South by Southwest in 2022 and became “obsessed” with his solo LP “Boat Songs,” notes the evolution, too. “He has this amazing knack for taking a vocal melody and reworking it in a totally different way, so two melodies kind of exist together that are similar but not quite the same,” she said.
And both collaborators admire his guitar playing. “The name of the game with guitar players is taste, because you can get so corny so fast,” Hartzman said. “He’ll put a little bit of corniness in, but when he does it, you’re just like: That was the perfect place to get corny.”
Lenderman seems untroubled by the buzz suddenly swirling around him. (The video for “She’s Leaving You,” which features him in a kind of slacker talent show with a couple of cheerleaders who look exported from Nirvana’s “Smells Like Teen Spirit” clip, suggests a similarly side-eyed sendup of his situation.) His schedule is packed — his solo tour starts in October, right after the Wednesday tour ends, plus there are one-off appearances with Waxahatchee, with whom he’s been making new recordings. So he’s trying to pace himself: practicing self-care, staying conscious of his alcohol consumption, hydrating.
“I think if I was doing my music all the time and being the sole center of attention, it would probably drive me a little crazy,” he said. “I’ve become a much better musician in general by supporting other people.”
The result is a series of lessons in musicianship — and humility — that he’s taken into his own music, too: “It’s good to be reminded that you can trust other people to come in and give good or even better ideas than what I could come up with myself.”
This article originally appeared in
The New York Times.
