The first time I saw MJ Lenderman was at a small outdoor venue in downtown San Diego. I avoided looking at his face. It felt rude. He wasn’t performing yet—he was standing near high-rise bar tables with a scattered and incomplete assembly of Wednesday, a band that describes itself somewhere between the wailing skuzz of ’90s shoegaze and classic country twang, championed by their hometown of Asheville, North Carolina. Since my awkward dispatch into adulthood, I had latched onto the band like a pacifier. I had listened to tracks with a near-concerning repetition. I had watched the band’s documentary, “Rat Bastards of Haw Creek” like a how-to guide on existing—a hypothetical what if of who I would like to be and what I would like to do.
At the center of my admiration stood Karly Hartzam, the singer and song-writer who stood about ten feet away from me, and next to her, her then partner, MJ Lenderman. If you weren’t looking for them, they could have hidden in the crowds of shag mullets and thrifted clothes. But everyone was looking for them, at them, in a contained excitement. I stood in a paralyzed shyness, a silent admiration, and tried to drill my eyes into something else, like my hands or the stitching on my boot. Draag finished their last song and I turned back around to the loose cattle of barstools to find the band had disappeared.
About 30 minutes later in the night, I was cramped between two very large, dying potted plants, right in front of the stage. In front of me, MJ Lenderman was wearing a Sonic Youth t-shirt, one that had Mike Kelly’s “Dirty Alien” smiling down at me. Lenderman on the other hand was not smiling. Looking back now, it reminds me of the dead faced gaze he holds all through the music video he made for “She’s Leaving You”.
I found myself amused the entire concert by the intensity of his focus. His flat expression, his eyes that seemed to analyze the crowd so intensely that it felt as if he could leave the show and sketch a 150 person portrait in the tour van on the way to the hotel. My amusement turned to a hushed shyness when his eyes met mine, and from the couple times the two of us had made eye contact, he could have drawn a pretty accurate caricature of me staring up at him like a deer in the headlights. He continued to dissect the crowd the entire night, simultaneously performing each song with a practiced comfort, occasionally leaning into his microphone to sing alongside Karly.
Maybe his eyes are still burnt into the back of my mind because it was my first time being that close to a musician I respect so much. Maybe it was his silence and the reserved, focused manner in which he spoke through his guitar, between swigs from a beer bottle he kept by his feet. Most likely, it was the natural awkwardness of the situation, because he didn’t feel like some bigger-than-life star, shining down. It was like the awkward feeling you get when you make eye contact with someone in another car on the highway driving 70. It felt like sitting a few tables across from someone in a restaurant when you’re both alone, and you can’t help but look straight into someone’s eyes while you eat, even just for a moment before you look back down to your phone.
That human rawness is an authenticity I cannot seem to unsee in him, even he reaches star-status in copies of GQ, The New Yorker, and The New York Times. Though I can still remember the awkward humanity in his eyes, audiences everywhere have become exposed to a far more serious face of 25-year-old, Jake Lenderman, who just released his new album, Manning Fireworks.
The album begins with the title track, “Manning Fireworks”, a somber, gentle strumming joined by Lenderman’s soft crooning voice. It reminds me of a dejected, drunk cowboy, his hat hung low, riding a tired, bow-spined horse who is a few steps from death. At the same time, it reminds me of a numbness that conjures tears, a flat heart and an imprint in your bed. It’s even more fitting with the context of Lenderman and Hartzman’s recently confirmed breakup. The two forming an incredibly complementary pair, the commitment of their creative collaboration shows at the end of the song, and throughout the entire album. Though the two are now apart, Karly’s voice softly accompanies MJ’s as he sings the final lines of the song, “Once a perfect little baby/Who’s now a Jerk/Standing close to the pyre, manning fireworks.”
As soon as the final words of the first track can sink into your chest, “Joker Lips” follows. The second single released before the album, the track holds a slightly faster pace, but an equally despondent, exhausted tone. Like many songs Lenderman writes, it masters the feeling of a hangover in its slow, dripping sound. It feels like regret, loneliness, and empty beer bottles on a beige motel carpet.
“Rudolph” plays next with a gentle fury in its storytelling, like the narrator holds an indignation towards the idiot he’s become. The song has been around a while, released as a single over a year ago, but seems to belong best here, nestled in with the feeling of yearning and making mistakes not easily undone.
There is an earnest vulnerability that shines through, with a feeling of shame seems to seep through the lyrics, and even a poignant, catholic guilt in lines like, “How many roads must a man walk down ’til he learns/He’s just a jerk who flirts with the clergy nurse ’til it burns/I wouldn’t be in the seminary if I could be with you/If I could be with you.” It’s the same catholic guilt that can be found in a song like “Catholic Priest”, which has a stunning live recording on Live and Loose, and acts as its own confessional to the urge to abandon the ordinary life and all its awful heartbreak and complications for something larger than you.
Somehow, Lenderman is able to balance his longing for catholic fidelity with childhood cartoon characters like Rudolph the Red Nose Reindeer and Lightning McQueen within “Rudolph”. Even with calls to modern day culture, he contrasts it with an intensely intimate vulnerability that reminds me of the staggering moments when even my most unserious friends whisper their fears, half drunk and on the verge of crying.
Following that is “Wristwatch” another incredible hit on the album, which comes off as a sarcastic defense through its clever lyrics. The attitude stains the song with an undeniable impulse to sing along, in its false empowerment. Stretching over strong instrumentals, Lenderman sings in a voice that can see its defeat, but not yet admit it. The song drips with a tone of false victory, but slips into desperate moments of truth: whatever money can buy, it’ll never beat the love the narrator has seemingly lost. The wealth and unsatisfying success of the narrator reveals the last line of the song, “I’m on my own.”
The catchy first single release that revealed the album to the world chases after “Wristwatch”. The lyrical repetition of “She’s Leaving You” cements it as an easy hit, and it avoids some of the strong imagery evoked in other songs in substitute for a more sobering declaration. This far into the album, the sense of loss and heartbreak only makes Hartzman’s vocals stand out more as the two harmonize the title of the song. Departing from bargaining, shame, and loss, the words of the song echo like a mantra, or an obsessive acceptance of reality. By the end of the song, Hartzman’s vocals stand alone under the spotlight, as she repeats the phrase two more times like a final staggering acceptance.
“Rip Torn” returns us to the slow, somber, heartbroken cowboy from “Manning Fireworks”, except now he’s hungover, and his horse is dead. He’s defeated. He’s dehydrated and passed out at the breakfast table. The cowboy has finished his heartbreak bender, and seems to just soak in the shame of his defeat. Again, Hartzman shines a spotlight on the final lines alongside Lenderman’s raspy voice, “If you tap on the glass/The sharks might look at you/Damned if they don’t/And you’re damned if they do.”
She remains as an accompanying vocalist on “You Don’t Know The Shape I’m In”, which stands out with its lyrics I suggest you listen closely to. To indulge myself, I ask you to read all the lines together, and play the song while you do it. Of all the songs on the album, it seems the most vulnerable, acknowledging but departing from feelings of shame, self-criticism, and regret, while embracing the next chapter in all its failures.
Lenderman sings with a certain acceptance, an exasperation over the short-comings of the situation, but a certainty that there is no going back. I can even hear it in the name of the song: you don’t know the shape I’m in. The statement seems to hold a resentment, a near pride and a new forming independence that isn’t just the lonely despair of heartbreak. It seems to me, the hidden gem of the album, but may be biased because of the killer clarinet that squawks in the second half of the song.
Riding on the sense of a new chapter beginning, “On My Knees” sings and howls about the wandering, aimless sensation of leaving a bender of the heart and washing up in a world that feels unidentifiable. “Burdened by those wet dreams of people having fun,” Lenderman captures the experience of miserable recollection perfectly. As the phrase on my knees suggests, this song again admits to defeat, a submission to the reality of what happened.
It reflects a true disorientation with the new world that surrounds him, and a difficult readjustment to a new life where he faces his actions instead of ignoring, denying, or avoiding reflection. There seems to be a very authentic, desperate clawing in the words he mumbles and rambles behind the music. “On My Knees” speaks like an inner monologue on sober nights where you are constantly woken up by your own thoughts and intrusive dreams. It’s like when the trees, wind, and the crickets outside all seem to be screaming something at you, making sure you can’t escape reality so easily.
Finally, ”Bark at the Moon” checks out of the motel room and gets back on the road in exactly ten minutes. Looking back at the mess that has exploded and gathered itself back into a walking, talking man, the song feels like a final send off from a lover, from someone you look to for guidance, for someone who now without, life feels a bit lost. At just two minutes and forty three seconds, the song speaks its final words, “I’ve never seen the Mona Lisa/I’ve never rеally left my room/I’ve been up too late with Guitar Hеro/Playing ‘Bark at The Moon.”
It seems at this point that the protagonist, the hungover cowboy with no horse to ride, gets up from his bed with a staggering sobriety, a forming clarity, and walks right out the door and down the street to whatever’s next. Playing out our cowboy is a slow instrumental dissent into distorted, screeching guitars that expands out for over seven minutes. In my chest, the weight of the heartbreak seems to dissolve, like a figure in the far distance melting into the horizon. Lenderman’s presence dissolves too, as the album ends, and a new moment in life begins, baptized by the cold sweat of hangovers and heartbreak.
Manning Fireworks feels a long way from Lenderman’s first, self-titled album released when he was just 20 years old, or his hidden, unreleased 2017 album Him which may be one of the best things I’ve ever heard. Still, it’s in no way departing from his clear, distinguished style across every single song he touches: crooning vocals, pining, heartbreak, a bit of alcohol in the system, constant failure, a strong love for his hometown in North Carolina, dreams of being a good catholic boy, shame for not being one, waiting for the right time, waiting for the right thing to do to reveal itself, the feeling of being everything and the feeling of being nothing at all.
MJ Lenderman has always stirred something I felt I was just starting to know. The fumbling, timeless attempt and failure at love, at being someone you liked, at hating yourself, at growing calluses over old wounds, the always clumsy transition from a 17-year-old kid to someone who is older now but feels just as lost and a little more bruised up. I think that’s what I felt when he looked down at me, even if he did it absently. I looked in the eyes of a human whose poetry I had memorized, and whose voice I had listened to describe heartbreak, regret, and loneliness. Someone who had narrated my first years staggering into adulthood. He glanced at me, and for a few seconds at a time I could understand.
MJ Lenderman’s discography exists like a cold, sweating glass of beer. His music is an eruption of sound, a buzz, a lightness in the head, a forgiveness of the day-to-day idiocies we all make, even if it’s only temporary. Liquid courage for better or for worse, a drunken confession of love on the porch at 1:00 in the morning, with the cicadas at night murmuring away. A thought of confession, something you’ve thought of too much, until the thought isn’t just moldable dough you poke at, but a real, knotted thing that’s stubborn like rubber or over-chewed gum. The next morning with the humidity in the air, a thin layer of sweat on everything, and a hot breeze that feels like regret gives no option but to live with it all.
Selfishly, I hope he keeps going, like a medicine I can be prescribed to way longer than is medically reasonable. As he moves to his next chapter, he leaves behind little moments of soothing intoxication for all of us, like a cold beer on the porch at night and whatever awful or wonderful shit happens after.
If you like MJ Lenderman in any degree, you might like: Bill Callahan, Smog, Frog, Friendship, Wednesday, Greg Freeman, Silver Jews, David Berman, Songs: Ohia, Jason Molina, Mount Eerie, Sparklehorse, Neil Young, Roger Miller, Bill Fay, Blake Mills, F.J. McMahon, Townes Van Zandt, J.J. Cale, Nick Drake, Tia Blake. That should be enough to get you started.
All drawings by Jillian Abreu
