MJ Lenderman
There’s a moment on the closing track of MJ Lenderman’s 2024 album Manning Fireworks when things get a little weird. “Bark at the Moon” starts off as a normal indie-rock ode to heartbreak, dejected and jealous about being left behind. “I took off on a bender, you took off on a jet,” Lenderman quips, complaining about someone else’s success between Black Sabbath and Warren Zevon nods, pleading for things to stop changing around him.
This lasts for about three-and-a-half minutes, the rough runtime of most of the other tracks on the record. Then, just as he’s done howling out a “Werewolves of London” reference, when it seems by all accounts like the outro is about to hit and the album will be over, the whole thing instead drops into nearly seven minutes of dissociative fuzz and drone. The bio for Lenderman’s upcoming Ryman show in October describes this moment like an act of God: “He and his friends then disappear.” It’s as if the song’s narrator is so much of a bummer, he literally dissolves.
“Bark at the Moon” is classic MJ Lenderman, a loser ballad with something bizarre at its core. It’s also a little ironic these days, considering Lenderman got on a video call with the Scene recently to discuss his nominations for this year’s Americana Honors and Awards while on a bus ride from Norway to Sweden — after our first video call was delayed by bad reception on a Nordic ferry.
Neko Case, Leyla McCalla and others also feted the powerhouse indie label’s 25th anniversary during AmericanaFest
Lenderman is introspective and reserved, and he seems a little bemused about all of this. Though his tour prevents him from being at the festival, he’s up for several Americana Awards this year: Emerging Act of the Year, Album of the Year for Manning Fireworks, and Song of the Year for “Wristwatch.” That Ryman show is in October, with his backing band The Wind, plus David Nance and Mowed Sound opening. It’s Lenderman’s first headlining set at the Mother Church after a couple of “insane” recent features there with Waxahatchee’s Katie Crutchfield, whose 2024 album Tigers Blood he appears on, and who’s compared his low, twangy voice to Jason Molina’s. He thinks “Americana” is a “funny word,” but when he’s asked about how it shows up in his own work, he points to The Band’s influence.
“Before Manning Fireworks, and even the album before that [2022’s Boat Songs],” says Lenderman, “I was listening to them maybe exclusively for, like, two years.”
Most Americana albums put forth a kind of rootsy timelessness — nostalgic, folkloric. Instead, more in the Don DeLillo sense of the word, media and electronics punctuate Manning Fireworks, and trying to connect or escape through them leaves Lenderman’s characters empty. On “Wristwatch,” an Apple Watch is taken to Batman-level heights. It’s a pocketknife, a megaphone, a distress signal. It’s a sendup of an anxious, manly notion that having the right gadget on you means you can always be a hero — even if, in Lenderman’s words, the tech is “really not all that impressive.” In the music video, he drives too-tall trucks under the “Can Opener Bridge” in Durham, N.C., creating a run of traffic hazards and sending basketballs and pool floats flying.
Lenderman is fascinated by this type of guy: dirtbag laughingstocks who might be played by Danny McBride or Tim Robinson. “Jerk” is one of the most frequently used words on Manning Fireworks, and Karly Hartzman, his bandmate in the shoegazey Southern rock band Wednesday and former partner, has called the record “divorcé music.” Lenderman loves Conner O’Malley and Dan Licata’s comedy, and he just started watching Eastbound & Down, which he says has “way more of an emotional depth to it than I was expecting.”
'Manning Fireworks' album art
His own narrators often go through the wild mood swings of O’Malley’s screaming zealots or McBride’s failsons, careening between confessional and ridiculous. It’s not hard to imagine one of them throwing out a line from O’Malley’s special Stand Up Solutions like “I have to become The Punisher” or a Kenny Powersism such as “I’m not gonna stop yelling, because that’ll mean I lost the fight.”
“It all stems from things I find funny,” Lenderman says. “Usually, the songs start with a line that makes me laugh.” Written on the phone with a friend, “Wristwatch” takes a cue from comedic structure, raising the stakes of its own surreal geography from the first verse’s Buffalo beach house to a “Himbo Dome” houseboat in the second.
Sometimes, instead of embodying these dudes, Lenderman talks directly to them — in “Rip Torn,” he admonishes, “You need to learn how to behave in groups.” There’s a frustrated kind of empathy there, a putting-up-with that you might extend to a self-destructive friend. “Maybe I can recognize it in myself,” the singer muses from the bus.
For his wry lyrical observations — and maybe also for his self-effacing streak — he’s often compared to longtime Nashvillian and Silver Jews frontman David Berman. “The comparison thing is dangerous,” Lenderman says. “I don’t think it’s a great look for me, because no one’s ever going to touch how good and valuable his work was.”
Sad news came via Chicago on Aug. 7, when record label Drag City announced the death of poet, visual artist and songwriter David Berman, found…
He emphasizes how important Berman’s music was to him personally, noting, “The lyrics are so up-front, and the delivery is so specific that it made me think about words in a new way.” In a 2019 Reddit AMA, posted a few weeks before he died, Berman laid out a writing exercise that helped shape Lenderman’s 2021 record Ghost of Your Guitar Solo: “Write 20 lines a day, five days a week. Good or bad. 20 lines. After a couple weeks go thru and remove the good stuff.” Manning Fireworks took inspiration from the same exercise, but Lenderman’s writing process felt the strain of a career that was taking off.
“I was on tour with Wednesday a lot, so I didn’t feel I was being very productive, and I wasn’t able to bring myself to do all that,” he explains. “I basically just did the same thing, but over a way longer amount of time — maybe just one line at a time.”
The record marked his first attempt at laying down instrumentals, whenever he could eke out studio time, before writing lyrics. That process was unsettling. “I didn’t know what anything was, and eventually it worked out,” he says. “I don’t want to do that again.”
Ghost of Your Guitar Solo, like Boat Songs, dwells on what in one of his songs Lenderman calls “subtle misfortunes”: a hurricane sharing your name, leaving a grill outside, accidentally walking in on a friend’s mom while she’s sleeping. Manning Fireworks zooms out to consider total failures, a shift that Lenderman attributes to his ongoing wrestling with fame.
“I had this new level of visibility, and I wasn’t sure what to do with it,” he says. “If I didn’t like how people were reading into something, maybe I was trying to sharpen up.”
MJ Lenderman
For instance, he never intended to be the sports guy. He picked up that reputation on the internet after Boat Songs’ “Hangover Game” — which takes inspiration from Game 5 of the 1997 NBA finals — took off. Sports, with all their high-stakes glory and failure, were an interesting “vehicle for storytelling” for a while, but he certainly doesn’t want his work to be defined by them. “There’s literally only one song about basketball,” he points out, cracking a smile.
Manning Fireworks was the biggest press cycle he’s ever done, and the online reaction — “there’s a lot of memes” — was unreal. “There was a lot of attention, which is a little weird when it’s all online,” Lenderman says. “It doesn’t really register in my head what it is.” He’s stopped running his own socials to “get that distraction out of the way.”
Instead, he’s filling his time with music, including a recent watch of Ken Burns’ Country Music. “I feel like forever, I’ve been looking back, musically. Researching, I guess.” Lately, though, he’s been getting especially inspired by his friends. The North Carolina singer-songwriter released his own take on Brooklyn experimental pop project This Is Lorelei’s “Dancing in the Club” in March. It’s part of the deluxe edition of their album Box for Buddy, Box for Star. He’s been spinning the new albums from Friendship, Walker Rider and Florry, as well as recents from Ryan Davis and the Roadhouse Band, who toured with him last year.
This month, he’s got more of his own music coming. He’s featured on Run for Cover Records’ I Will Swim to You: A Tribute to Jason Molina, out Friday, alongside homages from Hand Habits, Horse Jumper of Love and Advance Base. Proceeds benefit MusiCares, a nonprofit that provides financial support to musicians in times of crisis, including the late Molina. On the tribute compilation, Lenderman covers a tune from Molina’s Songs:Ohia album The Magnolia Electric Co. — the devastating “Just Be Simple,” which deals in some of the same desires as “Bark at the Moon.” Then, Wednesday’s new album Bleeds will be out on Sept. 19.
“It’s been a pretty exciting year,” he says, as the boreal forests roll out beyond his window.
Ahead of AMERICANAFEST, we talk with multiple awards nominee MJ Lenderman, run down our favorite shows and much more
