I. “I’ve got a houseboat docked at the Himbo Dome”
On Friday, a 25-year-old singer-songwriter from Asheville, North Carolina named MJ Lenderman will release a new record. It’s called Manning Fireworks, and it’s my favorite album of the year. Manning Fireworks would be my favorite album of most years, but in 2024 it feels like an especially precious commodity. It’s the kind of record that makes me want to write like Jon Landau after seeing Bruce Springsteen in 1974. But I’m going to try hard not to do that. My job is to maintain critical perspective. In this instance, maintaining critical perspective will be a Herculean task.
I might have already failed. But let’s proceed anyway.
I heard Manning Fireworks for the first time in April. Like the protagonist of “She’s Leaving You” — the album’s first single and one of Lenderman’s finest songs — I was a middle-aged man wiling my life away in a Las Vegas hotel room. The room was not free, but I was feeling lucky. The night before, I bumped into a music industry friend at the concert I was in town to cover. We struck up a conversation about Lenderman, and he asked if I had heard the new record. I said I hadn’t, so he promised to text me a streaming link. And now here I was, playing the songs on repeat as 90-degree heat pounded against the windows like aggrieved hornets.
By then I was already two years into serious MJ Lenderman fandom. It started midway into my first listen of his third LP, 2022’s Boat Songs, when I suddenly realized that he was my new favorite artist. I can’t say that Boat Songs is a perfect record, but I can confirm that it is perfect for me. On every track, he delivered exactly what I wanted. Each song was about three minutes and 30 seconds and included an average of one smoking guitar solo and at least one standout lyrical turn-of-phrase. He was funny but not in a smug or jokey way. He wore his heart on his sleeve, but without coming across as wimpy or cloying. His influences — Neil Young, Jason Molina, Wilco, Drive By Truckers — were obvious but not in an overbearing or obnoxious way. As a young, curly-haired brunet dude, he made exactly the kind of music you would expect from a young, curly-haired brunet dude. But he did it so much better than his peers. I did not know how much better this kind of music could still be — after all this time, after so many iterations — until I heard him.
Have I mentioned that he rocks? MJ Lenderman rocks, man.
I texted my music industry friend and gushed about all the things I just mentioned in the previous two paragraphs. But mostly I quoted lines from the record that were already lodged in my brain. I pecked out a gloriously unpredictable jumble of words — “I’ve got a houseboat docked at the Himbo Dome” — from the fourth track, “Wristwatch,” a character study about a materialistic bozo whose self-aggrandizing blather becomes increasingly unhinged right before MJ plays a smoking guitar solo. (Along with everything else he has going for him he plays nearly every instrument on his records.)
“Probably the saddest song written about an Apple Watch,” my friend texted back. He was right. And he also nailed the MJ Lenderman aesthetic. He locates the soul inside the inanimate banality of everyday life. The houseboat docked at the Himbo Dome is never just a houseboat docked at the Himbo Dome.
I then confessed what I had been thinking privately since hearing Boat Songs: “I’ve been waiting for an artist like this for a long time.” It felt almost like a romantic proclamation. I was slightly embarrassed after typing it out, but it was the truth. Boat Songs was an instant classic, and then he put out a concert record with his live backing band The Wind that I liked even more. And now Manning Fireworks arrived as an undeniable “level up” album, even from those previous triumphs. The lyrics were sharper. The music was punchier and more fully realized. The arc from the beginning (the title track, a brutally pretty country dirge with a narrative about a church-bound lothario) to the end (“Bark At The Moon,” which is probably the saddest song written about Guitar Hero) was satisfying but understated, like the album was consciously designed for your 75th listen to be the most mind-blowing.
I already looked forward to my next 74 spins through Manning Fireworks.
II. “How many roads must a man walk down til he learns”
MJ Lenderman — his friends call him Jake, we will stick with the stage name — started playing music at age 8. Guitar Hero was the gateway drug. He jammed on guitar with a friend and cycled through lessons and local School Of Rock-style camps. In his freshman year of high school, he attempted songwriting for the first time. He described his early method to me as “trying to rip off My Morning Jacket.” By the end of high school, he realized it was easier to sing a song with words he felt good about.
Not long after graduation, he put out his first album, MJ Lenderman, in 2019. Most people didn’t hear it until Boat Songs made MJ Lenderman a medium-famous rising indie star. What’s interesting about MJ Lenderman in retrospect is how it doesn’t conform to the house style with which he is associated — the sports talk, the Gen Z pop culture ephemera, the classic rock worship, the endearingly trashy southern imagery. On MJ Lenderman, he’s a post-adolescent almost-man making post-adolescent almost-man music. The songs are long (often around eight minutes) and paced like shipping barges lurched toward the shore. Humor is nonexistent. Earnest romanticism reigns. He is, in practically every way, a painfully typical singer-songwriter.
There are exceptions. “Basketball # 1” is a troglodyte version of the sorts of songs that MJ Lenderman will go on to write. “We used to play basketball, now he sells drugs, or maybe he’s locked up / For having something like bad intentions,” he sings. It’s clunky, but unlike most of the lyrics on the debut, it’s memorable. It sounds like a line that Patterson Hood or Mike Cooley might have considered for Southern Rock Opera before committing to another round of revisions.
The following year, Covid happens. A one-time ice cream shop worker, Lenderman goes on unemployment. Stuck at home, he commits to writing exercises inspired by David Berman, in which he writes 20 unrelated lyrics per day. Most are eventually scrapped, but a few are keepers. He also jams with his roommates and improvises words over the communal din. Over time his next record, Ghost Of Your Guitar Solo, takes shape.
In every important aspect, Ghost Of Your Guitar Solo is the opposite of the self-titled record. The songs are short, sometimes barely a minute, with sparse but vivid lyrics. Many of them are funny. A critical track is “Gentleman’s Jack” — later revived at the end of the record as “Live Jack” — in which Lenderman sings about “Jack Nicholson’s courtside seat / Purple foam imprinted with celebrity ass cheek.” And then there’s “Someone Get The Grill Out Of The Rain,” an early example of Lenderman’s seizing upon a mundane object and turning it into a melancholic metaphor. The rusted-out grill sitting in the yard is more than just a rusted-out grill sitting in the yard.
Ghost Of Your Guitar Solo was the beginning of Lenderman writing from a regional perspective. On his Bandcamp page, he cites the authors Harry Crews and Larry Brown as inspirations, “southern, self-taught writers who balanced empathy, humor, and darkness.” On that count, another southern writer in much closer proximity to Lenderman must also be counted as an important influence: his former partner Karly Hartzman. They started dating in the late 2010s, and Hartzman eventually invited Lenderman to play guitar in her band, Wednesday.
Hartzman’s own artistic evolution paces slightly ahead of Lenderman’s — Wednesday’s 2021 LP Twin Plagues is her Boat Songs, and last year’s excellent Rat Saw God is her Manning Fireworks. On those albums, Hartzman writes about what I call the Gummo South, a nod to Harmony Korine’s grotesque 1997 horror-comedy shot in Nashville about a white trash town in the wake of a lethal tornado. Her songs are populated by rundown nail salons and seedy roadside sex shops and neighborhood trap houses with cocaine and guns stashed inside the walls.
Like Lenderman, Hartzman is a natural wit, though his songs tend to be less centered on small-town sleaze. He accumulates the accoutrement of southern miscellanea to decorate the exterior worlds of characters otherwise consumed by their interior lives. On Manning Fireworks, he’s learned to do this in an ambient sense; it’s so subtle that the environments are felt as much as they are described. In “Joker Lips,” a person works at a disreputable hotel, “draining cum from hotel showers.” Later, Lenderman rhymes “Kahula shooter” with “DUI scooter,” forming a kind of redneck haiku. “Hoping for the hours / To pass a little faster,” the guy in the song prays. Because Lenderman has done the work, you feel the tedium. You can practically sense it on your skin, like August humidity.
III. “Please don’t laugh only half of what I said / is a joke”
The press cycle for Manning Fireworks began in June with an interview in The Guardian. The most remarked-upon portion of the article concerned the phenomenon of “dudes rock,” and how the online meme about guys doing guy stuff is frequently attached to Lenderman’s work. Lenderman apparently brought this up, unprompted, to distance himself from it. “I don’t think all my songs are necessarily about dudes – I don’t really resonate with whatever ‘dudes rock’ is,” he said. “I don’t want the music to come across like it’s not inclusive to everybody – like somebody who’s not a dude.”
On one hand, he’s absolutely correct — Lenderman’s songs really are inclusive. One of his primary concerns (an apparent remnant of a Catholic upbringing) is shame, the most universal of all emotions. (“I wouldn’t be in the seminary if I could be with you,” from “Rudolph,” is perhaps the definitive MJ Lenderman lyric.) But he’s equally interested in the lack of shame, particularly on Manning Fireworks. It’s the characteristic that applies to almost all of his characters: the philanderer in “She’s Leaving You,” the status-obsessed stooge in “Wristwatch,” the burnt-out partier in “Rip Torn,” the self-destructive loner in “You Don’t Know The Shape I’m In,” the allusion to modern cinema’s ultimate anti-hero in “Joker Lips,” and so on. These are people who do not, and cannot, see themselves for what they really are. On that note, I have a hard time believing that Lenderman isn’t writing mostly about men. In fact, I think he’s one of our most perceptive writers addressing the deeply confused state of modern masculinity.
A word that recurs throughout Manning Fireworks is “jerk.” The album in some ways is a taxonomy of jerkdom, whether it’s the “perfect little baby / who’s now a jerk” in the title song or the jerk fighting creeping self-awareness in the cowbell-powered “Rudolph.” In that Guardian interview, Lenderman speaks derisively about internet influencers peddling a comic-book caricature of manliness, defined by silly displays of brute strength and piggish misogyny, though in his own songs he approaches these types with surprising evenhandedness. Lenderman expertly avoids self-pity (the classic trap for male singer-songwriters since early ’70s OGs like James Taylor and Jackson Browne) and self-righteousness (the go-to tactic for deferential male “allies” in the contemporary world). Instead, he portrays these guys as “drowning in plain sight” losers who put up facades — often without knowing it — that barely conceal how broken they are.
Warren Zevon used to be the master of this kind of songwriting, where you neither redeem nor judge your toxic characters. Rather, you put the listener in that headspace for a few minutes, the way a short story writer does, as a form of psychological tourism. On Boat Songs, Lenderman achieved this partly via the proliferation of lyrical references to famous athletes, a clever acknowledgment of the “Remember Some Guys!” method of male communication. But on Manning Fireworks, he sets the Michael Jordan and Dan Marino shoutouts aside in favor of more direct invocations of delusion and despair. He can do this with humor — like in “On My Knees,” which opens with a sly one liner about being “burdened by those wet dreams, of people having fun” — but then he’ll remind you that these guys are not totally kidding.
I don’t know that I have ever heard “dudes rock” uttered or texted or tweeted without some element of self-mockery. Most guys I know feel at least a little self-conscious about enjoying stereotypical “guy” stuff, like betting on football or eating at Buffalo Wild Wings, and there’s an instinctual desire to defuse that feeling by exaggerating their “dudeness” to the point of knowing silliness. It’s a defense mechanism at a time when the expectations for “acting like a man” have never been less clear. Nevertheless, at the root of “dudes rock” is a genuine yearning for community in a culture where men are more isolated (and suicidal) than ever. For me the most heartbreaking moment on Manning Fireworks occurs in “Joker Lips,” when Lenderman sings, “Please don’t laugh all half of what I said / is a joke.” Pouring your heart out and having it treated as a punchline — I don’t know that there is a better definition of loneliness than that.
IV. “Every day is a miracle / not to mention a threat”
I love MJ Lenderman’s music. I love it so much that I actually worry about him. I’ve interviewed him twice, and he struck me as unusually grounded and guileless. Are the usual villains of the music business — the hangers-on, the enablers, the vapid and malignant soul stealers — threatening to invade his inner circle? Are bad substances and worse love interests looming? Is someone going to ruin this guy?
Is it possible that … I’m the problem? Is raving about the greatness of MJ Lenderman’s songs the biggest threat to the potential greatness of MJ Lenderman’s songs in the future? Could it be that compliments are potentially more perilous than a line of coke or hooking up with a Kardashian? “For me personally — the more I see written about me and see other people’s perception of me — it makes me start to think about me a little differently,” he told me in 2022. “I feel like that’s probably not a great thing for an artist, so I try to avoid that as much as possible.”
Again: This is an unusually grounded and guileless person. Please do not show MJ Lenderman this column.
