On a steamy afternoon in mid-June, I met twenty-five-year-old singer-guitarist MJ Lenderman for a beer at the Old Town Bar, a dark and casual Manhattan tavern that has been open more or less continuously since 1892. However, the Old Town is revered for its turn-of-the-century ambiance—the fifty-foot mahogany bar, the rickety waiter carrying hot sausages from the kitchen to the dining room, the majestic bank of porcelain urinals that Pete Wells, a longtime restaurant critic for timesonce described as “so grandiose as to make the act of urinating into something of a sacrament” – has largely escaped the kind of broad canonization that attracts throngs of tourists. Instead, it remains the kind of establishment that one can stagger into, swallow a whiskey, enjoy the barman, and walk out again thirty minutes later, dazed but clean. (The bar’s most public moment was in 1992, when the rap trio House of Pain filmed the video for their single “Jump Around” in the dining room—the DJ scratching from the men’s room.) Lenderman and I grabbed a high-backed wooden booth.
This month, Lenderman will release Manning Fireworks, his fifth album in five years. It has often been described – accurately – as the next great hope of indie rock, or as it is now to speak of short, dissonant, guitar-based music that is uninterested, both sonically and spiritually, in anything that rules the Zeitgeist . “Manning Fireworks” could have come out in 1975, or 1994, or 2003, but that doesn’t mean it’s knowingly nostalgic; Lenderman simply creates warm and astringent rock ‘n’ roll that feels untethered from the time of 1968 when Neil Young released his self-titled debut.
In conversation, Lenderman is restrained, affable and bright. He is tall and thin with a halo of tousled brown hair and often dresses in a T-shirt and jeans. We ordered a tour and began discussing the unsung art of assembling a touring rider, the list of slightly desperate culinary requests sent to the venue before the show. “There’s going to be a plate of hummus — that’s going to happen,” Lenderman said, laughing. “I don’t think you should even want that. We usually get a box of leafy greens – I’ll do handfuls. We’ve had this idea recently that we’re going to start wanting grilled chicken.” An inspired choice, I suggested—high protein, cheap, easy to stuff in a mini-fridge. He shook his head. Error. “They obviously shop for the rider the night before, so we’re looking at a day old.”
Lenderman was born in Asheville, North Carolina, an artistic and historic town in the Blue Ridge Mountains, and lived there most of his life. (“Manning Fireworks” was recorded in Asheville, at Drop of Sun Studios.) He began learning guitar when he was about seven or eight, but music was always omnipresent in his life: his father played guitar, his mother clarinet, and his three sisters sang. Lenderman’s paternal great-grandfather was jazz musician and bandleader Charlie Ventura, whom DownBeat magazine declared the best tenor saxophonist of 1945. “He played with Gene Krupa, Buddy Rich. He was pretty famous in the bebop world,” Lenderman said. In 1949, Ventura briefly hired a young Charlie Parker to play alto sax in his band. A gig listing in this magazine tried to capture the ferocity of their sound at the Royal Roost Jazz Club: “Here you’ll find bebop lovers shaking like aspen leaves as they listen to Billy Eckstein and the bands of Charlie Ventura and Charlie Parker perform in an environment that suggests an hour sprint at the six-day bike races.” Lenderman isn’t much of a bebop guy (“I don’t really listen to it—I haven’t tried,” he said), and his guitar playing suggests more of a long, rolling coast , without hands. But there is a streak of wildness in both discographies. I told Lenderman that I reacted in an instinctive way to the laxity of his work, so unusual in an age where technology makes it easy to remove teeth, castrate, smooth. “I’m definitely thinking about it,” Lenderman said. “A lot of the things that have really resonated with me throughout my life have been that way. I just always liked that sound. It feels real to me.”
Lenderman self-released his first album in 2019 when he was twenty years old and scooping ice cream at an Asheville store. “I left expecting I’d probably have to figure something else out, but then I just kept touring and for the most part I haven’t had to work since,” he said. In 2022, Lenderman released the outrageous and sardonic album Boat Songs. In “You Bought A Boat,” he channels upward mobility, briefly touching on a kind of simmering Gen X disdain:
On “Hangover Game,” another “Boat Songs” highlight, Lenderman sings about Michael Jordan’s performance with the Chicago Bulls in Game 5 of the 1997 NBA Finals, during which Jordan reportedly suffered food poisoning caused by from late night pizza. (“It was a heroic effort to add to the collection of efforts that make up his legend,” Bulls coach Phil Jackson later said of the incident.) Over the years, rumors have circulated about Jordan’s behavior the night before the game : Was he actually partying at Robert Redford’s cabin in the mountains of Utah? Could he have flown a private jet to Las Vegas to gamble? Over screeching guitar, Lenderman offers his own (“Remember, I’m not a detective,” he said at the time):
“Boat Songs” catapulted Lenderman to prominence, landing on Pitchfork’s Best of the Year lists and Rolling Stone. In 2023, Lenderman signed with ANTI-Records and released a live album, “And the Wind (Live and Loose!)”, taken from two club gigs he played that summer. Live albums are not as common as they once were (about fifty were released in 2023, compared to about one hundred and forty-five in 1989), and it is even more unusual to see them from younger, disinherited performers. Yet it was right to catch the storm. “When ‘Boat Songs’ was made, I was like, ‘I’m really locked in here!'” he said. Spontaneity – a carefree kind of recklessness – is seen as crucial to Lenderman’s vision. I asked him if it was possible to infuse this looseness into his work, or if it just had to come out in the performance. “Every time I sit down to write, it’s like starting from scratch again,” he said. “I have diaries full of all sorts of unrelated things. Sometimes I’ll get out of phase with this, but I try to write every day. The hardest part is going through it again and having to interact with my own crap. He paused. “Sometimes I surprise myself.”
Many of the songs on “Manning Fireworks” feature a narrator in the throes of a severe existential or emotional crisis—a series of lows. I wondered if Lenderman was particularly drawn to the rhetorical potential (or at least dark humor) of moments when it seems things just can’t get any worse. When the stakes are this low, anything is possible. (“Freedom’s just another word for nothing left to lose,” as Janis Joplin sang.) Lenderman’s antiheroes are bored, disgruntled, self-aware, and evil. “I think it’s funny when people are put in a real situation, revealing who they really are,” he said. “A lot of the books I like to read—Harry Crews, Larry Brown—deal with the same things.” On the song “Joker Lips,” over guitar and mellotron, he sings,
Lenderman’s tongue-in-cheek lyrics and arch staging call to mind both Kentucky musician Will Oldham and poet-songwriter David Berman, two titans of ’90s indie rock—each signed to the Drag City label—who perfected a madcap tenderness. “Will Oldham’s music opened some doors for me. Some of the things he sang shocked me,” Lenderman said. “I was like, ‘Can you do this?’ It doesn’t have to be so serious? Those two in particular really opened up to me how important words can be in songs.”
In Lenderman’s lyrics, humor and pathos are inextricably linked: “We were sitting under a half-masted McDonald’s flag,” he recalls on “You Don’t Know the Shape I’m In,” a breakup song that’s equal parts devastating and hilarious. The line always kills me. Lenderman is hyperaware of the ways in which the contemporary American landscape can feel absurd, especially to someone whose heart is open. Still, the album is not without moments of seriousness and sorrow, and several songs on “Manning Fireworks” suggest the painful breakup of a relationship. On “Bark at the Moon,” a ten-minute, piercing wail that closes the album, Lenderman’s nasal, crackling voice sounds especially wistful: “SOS / I took off on a bender / You took off on a jet.” He lets out an “Awww!” it suggests Warren Zevon’s “Werewolves of London,” a sly reference in a song that already shares a title with an Ozzy Osbourne song about werewolves. (“It was a little joke,” Lenderman said.)
“I say it’s not sushi and I say we have to eat our sandwiches.”
Cartoon by PC Vey
Recently, Lenderman and his then-girlfriend, musician Carly Hartzman, moved together to Greensboro, a few hours northeast of Asheville. “I guess I should mention that Carly and I broke up,” Lenderman said. “We moved to Greensboro together still after this happened. We already had the plan,” he said with a shrug. “I’ll be moving out pretty soon, but I’ll probably stay close to that area, maybe more towards Durham.” Lenderman and Hartzman are members of Wednesday, a big and vulnerable ensemble that Pitchfork once called “one of the best indie- rock bands around’. The band’s latest album, “Rat Saw God,” is both wild and insightful. Hartzman’s lyrics remind me of the writing of Mississippi writer Barry Hanna; Hartzman’s is also detailed and real, awakened to the grime of small-town Southern life. (Musically, Wednesday falls somewhere between the country rumble of the Drive-By Truckers and the melodic scream of early Dinosaur Jr.) Hartzman started the band, but Lenderman has been a member since 2019. The split was amicable, as far as these things go. “I’m still in the band,” Lenderman said. When I asked if working together had been a major strain on their relationship, he thought for a moment. “We’ve been through a lot together that no one else can understand. My band mates have partners back home and that creates its own tension.
