“The attention is not normal.” MJ Lenderman tells me. He’s been getting a lot of it recently. His album, Manning Fireworks just came out and he’s being hailed as the next Neil Young and the new king of the dude’s rock movement. It’s not a crown that Lenderman is cheerfully putting on. “There’s a lot of information in my head already and I’m going though a lot of big changes, so I don’t know how that stuff serves me really.”
Though I don’t think he means it to be, the humility is really charming. We are sitting on two abandon chairs under a tree outside of The Waymore Hotel in East Nashville. Lenderman played The Blue Room the night before and tied one on with some friends of friends of mine and now here he was, confronting his newfound indie stardom at 11AM the next morning in the bright light of day. His defenses were down.
The big changes are complicated. Lenderman grew up in Asheville, North Carolina where he played basketball and wanted to be a Catholic priest until he realized that they had to write a sermon every day, and in his own words from the song “TV Dinners,” “I don’t love to work / But I provide.” In Asheville he met Karly Hartzman and formed the band Wednesday with Hartzman on vocals and Lenderman shaping the guitar sound into a new little Southern Rock movement in indie rock. Last year Pitchfork named Wednesday’s album, Rat Saw God their #4 album of the year. In a Record of the Week article for that album I drove to Asheville and interviewed Hartzman in the little house in the country that her and Lenderman shared together as a couple.
In July, right at the beginning of the promotional cycle for this record, The Guardian published an article referring to Hartzman as Lendermans “ex-girlfriend.” The breakup leaves questions about Lenderman’s future in Wednesday and makes his new album feel heavier. And adding to, they’re touring together right now. Lenderman and Hartzman performed together at that show at the Blue Room the night before the interview.
After the direct to acetate recording ended, the two played, “How Can You Live If You Can’t Love How Can You If You Do,” a song that Hartzman wrote about Lenderman in which she sings, “Jealous of the rooms whose floors can feel your wright upon them.” In my mind, that’s one of the romantic lines of the past decade… in any song. When the song finished, Hartzman said, “Well, that was an insane choice for this setlist.”
Hartzman sings background vocals on “She’s Leaving You” off of Manning Fireworks, a song Lenderman told me “wrote itself.” At the end of the song, the guitarist fades away, leaving the bass and drums and Hartzman sings alone for the first time in the song, “She’s Leaving You.” Lenderman told me, “it’s poetic.” Let me make this clear, I do not know if this song is about the break up. I didn’t ask. Maybe a stronger journalist would have, and it’s not that I don’t want to know, but I don’t think it’s any of our place to know really. And without knowing, it adds a layer of mystery and beauty onto Manning Fireworks, an album that is tragic to it’s core.
Many of the songs on Manning Fireworks are character studies of degenerate men who are making contemptable decisions based on questionable taste, or, as Lenderman would describe them, jerks. There is the guy in “Manning Fireworks” who opens the Bible in public to the very first page, bets on horses and who even dogs seem to hate. In “Rip Torn” the protagonist is passed out in a bowl of Lucky Charms after a night of blacking out and talking about conspiracy theories. When asked why he writes about such unlikable men Lenderman answers, “Mostly just because it’s funny to me.” He’s spent a lot of time in the back of a tour bus watching shitty YouTube videos of high school bully type guys who are now comedy podcasters. “Since we are talking about the songs I can call that research.
Through the tragedy of Manning Fireworks, Lenderman has a sense of humor. Embedded in each tragic tale there is a punch line. The night of this interview, Lenderman played The Basement East. During “Wristwatch,” 10 of us in the front row joyously belted “I’ve got a houseboat docked at the himbodome” during a sad song about an Apple Watch. “I always like to remember that humor and sadness are usually two sides of the same coin.”