MJ Lenderman Is Indie Rock’s Favorite Guitar Hero
MJ Lenderman has no idea where to go. It’s mid-July and downtown Durham, North Carolina, is hot and empty. The first bar we try is closed, so now we’re searching Google Maps for another.
“The Pour Taproom — looks kind of bright in there,” he says with deadpan concern. “There’s a swanky, sophisticated cocktail bar; that looks OK… Irish pub?” After a pause and a shrug, we settle on the pub.
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Durham is not where I expected to meet Lenderman, 25. He was born and raised about 220 miles west of here, in Asheville. I’d heard tales of Lenderman and his friends and bandmates all living in a kind of compound just outside of town — a creative paradise in the fast-growing mountain town where they had all the space they needed to make and play music together. That’s where Lenderman wrote his 2022 solo breakthrough, Boat Songs, which made him a fast favorite among those who love guitars and the fine line between comedy and tragedy. But earlier this year, everyone finally moved out. The property was being sold.
Lenderman briefly decamped to Greensboro with his then-girlfriend, Karly Hartzman, who fronts Wednesday, the rock band in which Lenderman plays guitar. This spring, the couple ended their relationship. Now, Lenderman’s just kind of floating, treading time until he can find a place to settle. He’s here in Durham for a few days before a late-summer run of shows with Wednesday that will end right before the Sept. 6 release of his own new album, Manning Fireworks. Then he’s back on the road through November.
The heat in Durham is the kind that’s hard not to comment on, though it maybe doesn’t help that today Lenderman’s wearing brown corduroys and a black T-shirt. His black hair forms a neatly-mussed pile of wavy curls, and tattoos scatter up, down, and around his right arm. Lenderman is thoughtful and easy to talk to, reasonably guarded, but also a goof. “I need to get some shorts,” he admits. “I only have a bathing suit.” He then defends his cords as more breathable than jeans, anyway. When he smiles, the sly gap in his front teeth peeks through.
Lenderman first knew he wanted to be a musician when he was a kid. “Probably as early as seven years old,” he says. Almost two decades later, his dream job has become his job, and he’s grateful, but still figuring out what that means. “Being on tour, and then when you’re not doing that, recording, and then you got to fit your family in there, too… It’s weird,” he says. “I haven’t really had much time to process.”
As we walk towards the Irish pub, Lenderman and I start talking about Michael Jordan. The NBA great figures loosely in the story of the young artist, who stopped playing basketball in high school to focus on music. There are the shared initials (Lenderman was born Mark Jacob, though he goes by Jake offstage), but mostly there’s “Hangover Game,” the opening track on Boat Songs. In a thicket of Southern-rock guitars, Lenderman pulls from the legend of Jordan’s superhuman “Flu Game” — and the rumors that he wasn’t actually sick that day — a deeply human declaration: “Yeah, I love drinking, too.”
Last summer, Lenderman was reading Roland Lazenby’s massive Jordan biography, Michael Jordan: The Life. At the time, he was still touring behind Boat Songs and touring even more with Wednesday in support of their great record Rat Saw God. He was in the studio, too, playing lead guitar on Waxahatchee’s Tigers Blood and carving out time whenever he could for Manning Fireworks. What Lazenby’s book offered Lenderman amidst all this was a deep sense of unease.
“That one was honestly pretty dark,” he says. “It left me feeling kind of disturbed… The level of fame and power that he has left him so lonely for a long time.”
Lenderman’s own fame, it goes without saying, is modest by comparison with Jordan’s. But in an attention economy, even micro-celebrity can feel bewilderingly macro, and there’s no question Lenderman has people’s attention. Manning Fireworks finds him expanding his musical palette — still lots of riffs, but cleaner production, more acoustic instruments, and even space for his love of drone experimentation. Boat Songs and its predecessors were released into relative quiet, music largely made for friends, by friends. This time, it’s different.
“I think he was cognizant of that,” Lenderman’s manager, Rusty Sutton, tells me. “But there’s a balance to be struck: ‘How much of this fires me up, and how much of it is a distraction?’”
When we meet in Durham, it’s a couple weeks after Lenderman announced the album and released its lead single, “She’s Leaving You.” The news, in certain corners, was met with excitement and memes, mostly of the “dudes rock” variety. Lenderman, already on a meager social media diet, was able to check out further thanks to a well-timed family vacation to Italy. I ask how he’s prepared for this moment, and he says, “I’ve just figured out ways to not think about that, like not being online.”
Still, he’s not immune to lurking Twitter and Reddit, and later, in the blissfully dark, air-conditioned Irish pub, he reveals to me the one corner of social media he’s still on.
“I just got this app, Beer Buddy.” He grins and snaps a photo of himself and his cold one before sharing it with a few of his friends. “It’s just like, your boys post pics… That’s my social media right now.”
THERE’S A LINE ON “Joker Lips” that’ll likely be quoted more than any other on Manning Fireworks: “Kahlúa shooter/DUI scooter” — a flash-fiction marvel to rival “For sale: baby shoes, never worn,” and two words shorter. Lenderman’s songwriting thrives on that kind of oblique specificity. He sketches people and scenes with clever one-liners and cultural cues that draw you in, make you laugh, but what you’re often left with is an unspoken ache.
“I love how off-hand his delivery is, and his approach to writing is so conversational,” says Patterson Hood of Drive-By Truckers, one of Lenderman’s favorite bands. “I also love songs that tell a story without telling it, and he gives you just enough to where your brain starts filling in the gaps. He checks all the boxes for me.”
Lenderman does some of his best work while “zoning out and watching TV” with a guitar in his hand. When he came up with the stomping lead riff for “Rudolph,” the first song he wrote for Manning Fireworks, he was watching a YouTube documentary about the comedian Artie Lange. Released as a loose single last year, it has all the hallmarks of a great Lenderman tune: images of obliterated Christmas ornaments and blacked-out Pixar characters, ceaseless yearning and Catholic guilt.
When he began recording Manning Fireworks in December 2022, though, he didn’t have anything near a full album written. In fact, he hadn’t written much at all in a few years. Though released in spring of that year, Boat Songs was recorded in 2020, a product of the pandemic, when there was little else to do but focus on making music. Once he could tour again, Lenderman hit the road and stayed so busy he hardly had time to write. Sessions for Manning Fireworks at Asheville’s Drop of Sun Studio extended through 2023, three to five days at a time, whenever Lenderman could squeeze them into his schedule.
“[Studios] were booked out months in advance,” he remembers. “I hoped that by the time that came around, I’d have something ready.”
Those closest to him talk all about Lenderman’s talent as if it’s preternatural. “He’s always known what he wants to put on a song,” says Colin Miller, one of his oldest friends and collaborators. “He knows it ahead of time. He has a vision for it.”
“It’s rad to watch where his mind gravitates, because it’s focused,” adds Drop of Sun co-founder, and Lenderman’s co-producer, Alex Farrar. “He knows when something is not working, knows what’s worth exploring and what’s not, in a way that is definitely not automatic, certainly for younger artists.”
Sutton says affectionately that Lenderman tends to “under-promise and over-deliver” in the studio. “He’ll be like, ‘Maybe we’ll get two or three songs,’ and then he sends me five.”
But Lenderman’s experience of Manning Fireworks was more fraught. He felt like he had to “relearn” how to write. “It was hard to come back into,” he says. “I really felt less confident than before. I also knew people were gonna hear it.”
It wasn’t until halfway through that the record began to make sense to him. He ditched a desire to go harder and faster, and brought things down instead, breaking out the acoustic instruments. “That was a big moment,” he says, citing songs like “Manning Fireworks,” “Rip Torn,” and “You Don’t Know the Shape I’m In.”
“If you know Jake, you know he’s quick to plug into a guitar amp super loud and shred solos,” Farrar says. “But I could see him trying something truly new in the context of his music.”
Hartzman could sense Lenderman’s frustration throughout the long, disjointed process of making this album. “You want to immerse yourself in the world of an album when you’re making it,” she tells me on the phone a few weeks later. “But the thing is, he can’t write a bad song. I think the schedule, and how he was recording, made it harder for him to see that it was his best work… When he’s under a bit of a time crunch, it is more motivating for him than he would think, because he just shits out a bunch of genius.”
AT VARIOUS POINTS as we talk, Lenderman and I spiral into comedy nerdery. As a kid, he always cited Tommy Boy as his favorite movie, and his introduction to stand-up was Frank Caliendo and Jim Gaffigan. Now, we geek out about recent specials by alt favorites like Conner O’Malley, Dan Licata, and John Early; sketch shows like Comedy Bang! Bang! and Whitest Kids U’Know; and the career choices of Adam Sandler. At the height of the pandemic, Lenderman tells me, he was doing deep dives on Don Rickles, Bob Einstein, and Howard Stern.
“I have a huge amount of respect for comedians,” he says. “Speaking of doubt, the way they have to interact with failure in front of people, by themselves — it’s just unthinkable to me.”
Two of his favorites are Tim Heidecker and Gregg Turkington, both their work together on the long-running podcast/web series On Cinema, and their separate musical endeavors. Turkington’s been playing the outrageous stand-up/crooner Neil Hamburger for years, and Heidecker has cultivated a music career distinctly separate from his comedy. Heidecker’s 2019 effort, What the Brokenhearted Do… — a straight-up divorce album, made by a happily married man — became a major touchstone for Lenderman.
“They’re just capital-S Songs,” Lenderman says. “Having a good line for every chorus is basically the M.O.” He adds: “It’s funny in the same way Randy Newman is funny… It’s very self-involved. It’s consistent with the other characters he plays. I love that.”
Lenderman’s earlier songwriting — which he describes as being “very autobiographical, spilling my guts” — grew more character-driven after that. On Manning Fireworks, he spins yarns about drunkards and loudmouths, lonelyhearts and sad sacks, divorcés in mid-life crisis, and braggarts with everything and nothing. The guy on the title track is an emblematic Lenderman guy: overzealous and abrasive, horny and self-righteous, ignorant of his life-long plummet from grace. “Once a perfect little baby/Who’s now a jerk,” Lenderman sings. “Standing close to the pyre manning fireworks.”
As much as Lenderman resembles his songwriting heroes — Neil Young, Jason Molina, David Berman, to name a few — a closer analog might be a comedian like Conner O’Malley, whose work similarly centers around types of guys with inflated, fragile egos, consumed by the worst compulsions of their masculinity.
I ask Lenderman how much of himself he sees in his work now, and he says it depends. “I’m not trying to go out there and sing about me being a bad person. If you’re doing something wrong, I don’t think that’s the healthiest way to attack that. It’s more like, what would you do in certain situations? That’s the most you can put yourself into it… That’s why these subjects are fun to attack. Maybe that’s why people resonate with it, because there’s a part of that there for everyone.”
He pauses for a second, and then laughs. “I don’t know, I’m no expert.”
ONE OF THE MOST personal moments on Manning Fireworks is one of its last, the final lines of “Bark at the Moon”: “I’ve never seen the Mona Lisa/I’ve never really left my room/I’ve been up too late with Guitar Hero/Playing ‘Bark at the Moon,’” Lenderman sings. Then he releases a tender “Awooo!”
It’s a vivid depiction of the solace of solitude, and a nod to where it all began for Lenderman. “I was never really a gamer, but I got a PS2 when I was a kid, and [Guitar Hero] was the only game I played. I played it a lot with my friends, and it drove us to actually pick up real instruments.”
Lenderman’s been playing music with his friends ever since. After-school rock band programs and his church, first; then by high school, bands of his own. One was a stoner psych trio, and another was a straight-ahead rock band he asks me not to name in this story “because it’s bad.” (When I note their Bandcamp is still up, Lenderman quips, “I’ll delete it,” before admitting he doesn’t remember the login.) During his senior year of high school, he recorded a solo record, but that he has successfully wiped from the web.
Lenderman spent a year at UNC Asheville studying music before dropping out. “I was lucky to have a little bit of perspective because I’d been playing in bands since high school,” he says. “When I got to college, I realized, ‘Oh, none of you have ever done this or really have any ambition to actually be a musician.’”
After leaving college in May 2018, he moved into a house in Haw Creek, near downtown Asheville. Colin Miller had grown up there and stayed on after his family moved out, bringing in a rotating group of friends and bandmates from the extended MJ Lenderman/Wednesday universe. There were a few houses on the property, including the “big one” — the two-bedroom that appears on the cover of Lenderman’s official self-titled debut, from 2019 — and a smaller home first built as a garage. Lenderman and his band practiced there, as did Wednesday and Indigo De Souza, the singer-songwriter whom Lenderman drummed for in the late 2010s. The landlord, an exceptionally kind older man named Gary, lived nearby and didn’t mind the noise. He hung out with everyone, watching NASCAR and Discovery Channel, and never — despite being a landlord in a town going through a cost-of-living boom — raised the rent.
“The place itself was gorgeous, acres of woods and creek,” says Hartzman, who shared a room in Haw Creek with Lenderman. “Gary, who I write about all the time, and who Jake is probably channeling a lot in his divorcé music, is the spirit of so much shit we like to write about.”
The first thing Lenderman and Hartzman worked on together was a short EP, How Do You Let Love Into The Heart That Isn’t Split Wide Open, recorded in Lenderman’s bedroom before they started dating. Its charms are rough and lo-fi, pulling threads of alt-country and shoegaze, their voices already pairing wonderfully on “House Pool”: “The water was stale/And the weather is too/But I love and I love you.”
The end of their romantic relationship this year has not strained their artistic one. “I think our relationship has always been, from the beginning, a strong creative partnership,” Lenderman says. Hartzman echoes that sentiment: “Opening your world up to another person — especially another creative person — inherently creates an explosion of collaboration. That’s what happened with us.”
Wednesday have already recorded their next album, and Lenderman plans to see out his current commitments before figuring out his future. But if he leaves the band, it won’t be because of the break-up, Hartzman says. It’ll be because “he’s extremely overworked” — as are Wednesday’s lap steel player, Xandy Chelmis, and bassist, Ethan Baechtold, both of whom also tour with Lenderman. “There has to be a lot of change,” Hartzman says. “We’ll see, but my favorite version of the band is gonna have him in it forever.”
Allison Crutchfield, who does A&R for Anti- and signed Lenderman, spent her twenties under similar circumstances. She was playing in the great band Swearin’, her sister Katie was doing Waxahatchee, and they were living in punk houses in Philly and Brooklyn with their bandmates. Everyone was dating, making records, spending every second together at home or on tour.
“It’s an unhinged concept,” she says of playing in a band. “It’s like a weird polycule where you have to navigate all these dynamics — this person’s mad at this person, because this person did this, so these two are breaking off to talk shit about that one, then these people are crying… We dealt with so much of that in all the bands I was in, and I feel like that crew, they all rise above it. They navigate it like adults. They’re really trying to preserve what they’re doing.”
Because the stakes are clear. “What’s at risk if we’re not like that is our friendship and our favorite thing, which is playing music,” Hartzman says. “I’m not willing to sacrifice any of that for any petty bullshit. Even though romantically our situation isn’t forever. It just seems like not a good enough reason for us to sacrifice what our favorite part about life is.”
Lenderman adds: “We’ve gone through some of the hardest — physically and mentally — things together. And that bonds us to each other, like family. But you have to think about these things, grow and figure out how to be a good person to be around. And how to hold your friends to that, too.”
AFTER GARY DIED IN 2022, it was clear to everyone that they would have to move out of Haw Creek. “The houses were old, and they weren’t worth staying in, except for all the history and the community,” Miller says. In early August, he emailed to say that the Asheville City Council has approved a redevelopment plan to bulldoze the houses and build 90 new ones.
Though bittersweet, Lenderman was ready to leave. “I’ve never been anywhere else,” he says. “I could use a change.”
In Durham, before we scour Google Maps for a bar, we scour Google Maps for coffee. Lenderman, still jet-lagged from his trip to Italy, needs caffeine. “If we were in Asheville, I’d probably have a better idea of what to do,” he says. “My housing situation is messy. I just don’t have any time to figure out a new place.” He tells me he wants to settle around here in Durham, and will get it sorted as soon as he has some time off.
When’s that gonna be?
“I have no idea. It’s crazy. I’ve never been in this situation in my life.”
Since leaving Haw Creek, Lenderman’s creative practice has become less collaborative, understandably, since he’s no longer living with three creative people. But when it comes to his solo work, he’s always been driven by a certain amount of control: He plays nearly every instrument on Manning Fireworks, just as he did on Boat Songs. (“Kinda selfishly,” he notes, it’s also the only time he gets to play drums anymore.) But he also knows well enough it’s a balancing act. The breakthrough with the acoustic songs on Manning Fireworks came about in part because he brought in his friend Landon George to play upright bass and the Asheville musician Shane McCord to play clarinet. As the rest of the album came together, so did the usual crowd — Miller, Chelmis, Baechtold, and Hartzman — chipping in with vocals, lap steel, piano, or “slide bebo” (the name Lenderman came up with for Miller’s inventive use of an Ebow sustainer on a banjo).
As Lenderman sips his iced coffee, we start talking about how art and writing are often solitary ventures, even though collaboration makes them easier and better. “Suddenly, your own bad idea is not that big of a deal, because everybody has them,” he says. “And it might not even be a bad idea.”
Every time Lenderman starts to write a song, he gets a little freaked out, he says. “Or maybe not freaked out. It just feels like re-learning it every time.”
Sometimes, a song will come in five minutes, but that’s rare. Often, it’ll take a while, multiple drafts, multiple attempts. “It requires a really awesome brain space to get there. And I don’t know exactly how to get there,” he continues. “So finishing a song is the best feeling there is. That’s why I still do it. Even though it feels like a struggle and makes me really interact with my own bullshit — I feel like I embarrass myself so much when I’m alone, just having to look at the stuff I come up with.”
I tell Lenderman about how everyone described his talents — how in awe they were of his confidence, his vision, his understanding of what a great song needs. But at the same time, this is art we’re talking about. The doubts must be immense.
“I feel that 100 percent,” he says. “I felt it a lot when making the record. I don’t know how to deal with it. I feel like, in a way, that’s become my job — to try to figure out how to not feel that way so much.”
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