On a muggy afternoon in mid-June, I met 25-year-old singer and guitarist MJ Lenderman for a few beers at the Old Town Bar, a gritty and unfussy Manhattan tavern that has been in more or less continuous operation since 1892. Although Old Town is revered for its turn-of-the-century atmosphere—the fifty-foot-long mahogany bar, the rickety dumbwaiter that carries hot frankfurters from the kitchen to the dining room, the majestic row of porcelain urinals that Pete Wells, a longtime restaurant critic for the Justonce described as “so great that they make the act of urination sacramental”—it has largely escaped the kind of broad canonization that draws hordes of tourists. Instead, it remains the kind of dive bar where a person staggers in, drinks a whiskey, complains to the bartender, and emerges on the street thirty minutes later, dazed but purified. (The bar’s most public moment was in 1992, when rap trio House of Pain filmed the video for its 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 releases Manning Fireworks, his fifth album in five years. He’s often described – rightly – as the next great hope for indie rock, or whatever you might call today’s combative, dissonant, guitar-heavy music that cares nothing for the zeitgeist, sonically or spiritually. Manning Fireworks could have come out in 1975, 1994 or 2003, but that’s not to say it’s intentionally nostalgic; Lenderman just makes the kind of warm and caustic rock’n’roll that has felt timeless since 1968, when Neil Young released his eponymous debut.
In conversation, Lenderman is understated, affable and intelligent. He is tall and lanky, with a halo of tousled brown hair, and often wears a T-shirt and jeans. We ordered a round and began talking about the unsung art of putting together a tour rider, the list of slightly desperate culinary requests sent to a venue before a show. “There’ll be a hummus plate on there — that’ll happen,” Lenderman said, laughing. “I don’t think you even have to ask for it. We usually get a box of leafy greens — I take a handful. We recently had the idea of asking for a rotisserie chicken.” An inspired choice, I suggested — high in protein, cheap, easy to stuff into a mini-fridge. He shook his head. A mistake. “Apparently they buy the rider the night before, so we need something from the day before.”
Lenderman was born and has lived most of his life in Asheville, North Carolina, an artsy and historic town in the Blue Ridge Mountains. (“Manning Fireworks” was recorded in Asheville at Drop of Sun Studios.) He began learning guitar at age seven or eight, but music was always present in his life: His father played guitar, his mother played clarinet, and his three sisters sang. Lenderman’s paternal great-grandfather was jazz musician and bandleader Charlie Ventura, who DownBeat The magazine declared him the best tenor saxophonist of 1945. “He played with Gene Krupa and Buddy Rich. He was quite famous in the bebop world,” Lenderman said. In 1949, Ventura briefly hired the young Charlie Parker as alto saxophonist in his band. A concert calendar from that magazine attempted to capture the fury of their sound, at the Royal Roost jazz club: “Here you’ll find bebop lovers shaking like aspen leaves listening to Billy Eckstine and the bands of Charlie Ventura and Charlie Parker, performing in a milieu reminiscent of the sprint hour at the Six Day Races.” Lenderman is not a big bebop fan (“I don’t really hear it – I haven’t tried it,” he said), and his guitar playing is more reminiscent of a long, downhill ride with no hands. But there is a consistent wildness in both discographies. I told Lenderman that I instinctively responded to the laxity of his work, which is so unusual in an age when technology makes it easy to defuse, neuter and smooth things over. “I definitely think about it,” Lenderman said. “A lot of the stuff that’s touched me my whole life is like that. I’ve 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 selling ice cream in an Asheville store. “I quit because I thought I probably needed to figure out something else, but then I just kept touring and haven’t had to work for the most part since then,” he said. In 2022, Lenderman released the loud and sarcastic album “Boat Songs.” On “You Have Bought Yourself a Boat,” he skewers social climbing, briefly displaying a kind of seething disdain for Generation X:
In “Hangover Game,” another highlight of “Boat Songs,” Lenderman sings about Michael Jordan’s performance with the Chicago Bulls in Game 5 of the 1997 NBA Finals, during which Jordan reportedly suffered from food poisoning caused by a foul-smelling pizza late in the evening. (“That was a heroic performance, one that adds to the accomplishments that make his legend,” Phil Jackson, the Bulls’ coach, later said of the incident.) Over the years, rumors have circulated about Jordan’s behavior the night before the game: Did he actually party at Robert Redford’s chalet in the Utah mountains? Did he fly to Las Vegas on a private jet to play? Over a squeaky guitar, Lenderman gives his interpretation (“Remember I’m not a detective,” he said at the time):
“Boat Songs” made Lenderman famous and landed on the best of the year lists at Pitchfork and Rolling Stone. In 2023, Lenderman signed to ANTI-Records and released a live album, “And the Wind (Live and Loose!),” which consisted of two club shows he played that summer. Live albums aren’t as common as they once were (about fifty were released in 2023, compared to about a hundred and forty in 1989), and they’re even more uncommon from younger, nontraditional artists. Still, it felt right to capture the storm. “When ‘Boat Songs’ came about, I thought, ‘I’m really buttoned up here!’” he said. Spontaneity—a lighthearted kind of recklessness—seems crucial to Lenderman’s vision. I asked him if it was possible to write that looseness into his work, or if it simply had to come out in performance. “Every time I sit down to write, it’s like starting over again,” he said. “I have journals full of all sorts of unrelated stuff. Sometimes I get lost on the subject, but I try to write every day. The hardest thing is to keep coming back to it and deal with my own nonsense.” He paused. “Sometimes I surprise myself.”
Many of the songs on “Manning Fireworks” are about a narrator going through a dire existential or emotional crisis — a series of low points. I wondered if Lenderman was particularly drawn to the rhetorical potential (or at least the grim humor) of moments when it seems like things just can’t get any worse. When there’s so little at stake, anything is possible. (“Freedom is just another word for having nothing left to lose,” Janis Joplin famously sang.) Lenderman’s antiheroes are bored, dissatisfied, self-conscious and dejected. “I think it’s funny when people are put in a real situation where they learn who they really are,” he said. “A lot of the books I like to read — Harry Crews, Larry Brown — deal with the same themes.” In the song “Joker Lips,” he sings over guitar and Mellotron:
“I say it’s not sushi level and I say we should eat our sandwiches.”
Cartoon by PC Vey
Lenderman’s wry lyrics and cheeky manner are reminiscent of both Kentucky musician Will Oldham and poet and songwriter David Berman, two titans of ’90s indie rock – both signed to the Drag City label – who perfected a dry tenderness. “Will Oldham’s music opened some doors for me. Certain things he sang shocked me,” Lenderman said. “I thought to myself, ‘You can do that? It doesn’t have to be so serious?’ Those two in particular really showed me how important words can be in songs.”
Humor and pathos are inextricably linked in Lenderman’s lyrics: “We sat under a McDonald’s flag at half-mast,” he recalls on “You Don’t Know the Shape I’m In,” a breakup song that’s equal parts devastating and droll. The line always kills me. Lenderman is hyperaware of the ways in which the modern American landscape can feel absurd, especially to a person whose heart is open. Still, the album is not without moments of seriousness and sadness, and several songs on Manning Fireworks hint at the agonizing dissolution of a relationship. On “Bark at the Moon,” a 10-minute, droning lament that closes the album, Lenderman’s nasal, crackling voice sounds particularly wistful: “SOS / I went on a drinking binge / You left on a jet.” He lets out an “Awooo!” it’s reminiscent of Warren Zevon’s “Werewolves of London,” a clever reference in a song that already has the same title as an Ozzy Osbourne song about werewolves. (“That was a little joke,” Lenderman said.)
Recently, Lenderman and his then-girlfriend, musician Karly Hartzman, moved together to Greensboro, a few hours northeast of Asheville. “I guess I should mention that Karly and I broke up,” Lenderman said. “We still moved to Greensboro together after that happened. We had the plan,” he said, shrugging. “I’m moving away pretty soon, but I’ll probably stay near that area, maybe more toward Durham.” Lenderman and Hartzman are both members of Wednesday, a burly and vulnerable ensemble that Pitchfork once called “one of the best indie rock bands ever.” The group’s latest album, “Rat Saw God,” is both wild and sensitive. Hartzman’s lyrics remind me of the lyrics of Mississippi novelist Barry Hannah; Hartzman’s lyrics, too, are detailed and truthful, alert to the cruelty of life in a small Southern town. (Musically, “Wednesday” falls somewhere between the country rumble of the Drive-By Truckers and the melodic squeak of early Dinosaur Jr.) Hartzman founded the group, 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 put a significant strain on their relationship, he thought about it for a moment. “We’ve been through a lot together that no one else can understand. My bandmates have partners at home, and that creates its own tensions.”
