“Writing requires some level of self-criticism and not believing that you’re awesome,” says MJ Lenderman, the words teased out slowly and followed with soft, self-deprecating laughter. The 25-year-old singer-songwriter might have generated massive online buzz and collaborated with indie royalty Waxahatchee, but he’s wary of believing the hype.
Never mind that his breakout record, the freewheeling and wryly funny ‘Boat Songs’, was widely considered one of 2022’s best. “Just seeing a lot of good press,” he says, “it’s like: ‘There’s no way everybody really thinks it’s that good.’ Maybe I didn’t believe it was that good, or something. So it was just confusing. I think there’s a danger in believing your own myth, too. I just chose to not interact with it as much as possible.”
As is the case throughout most of our hour-long interview in east London’s ice-cold Strongroom studios, Lenderman delivers these lines with a bashful smile; each sentence sort of trails off with an invisible shrug. Ultimately, it seems, he’s reluctant to be defined by others’ perceptions of him, which is why his upcoming fourth album, ‘Manning Fireworks’, veers away from its predecessor. Where ‘Boat Songs’ was lightly sarcastic and packed with pop culture references, the new record is tender, melancholic and populated by flawed characters who are depicted with cool, writerly curiosity.
“I think the shift was just kind of noticing that people were catching on to the comedic things,” he explains, “and focusing on stuff that I didn’t expect to be illuminated as much… But the songs are still funny to me. They all start as something funny – every song, I think. It always started with something that I thought was funny.”
Lenderman hails from Asheville, a mountain city in North Carolina that’s been enjoying a buzz of its own in recent years. This is thanks to a booming DIY music scene that’s produced the likes of Wednesday, the ragged indie five-piece that features Lenderman on guitar and his ex-girlfriend Karly Hartzman upfront. ‘Manning Fireworks’ draws on the classic Southern rock style – all sliding guitar notes, bright chord progressions and solos buried in distortion – but in a mellower, more reflective mode.
The melancholia is compounded by Lenderman’s keenly observed lyrics, with which he steers clear of confessional singer-songwriter territory. Instead, he looks outside himself to weave tales about a divorced dude in Vegas (‘She’s Leaving You’), childhood heroes on the skids (‘Rudolph’) and a party animal who passes out in their cereal (‘Rip Torn’). He’s a musician who absolutely writes stories, and in this, he’s been inspired by authors such as Harry Crews, Barry Hannah and Larry Brown.
“There’s something that’s very musical about their language,” he says of Harry, Barry and Larry. “I think that’s maybe why I’m attracted to the Southern writers.”
Lenderman first “messed around” with storytelling on ‘No Mercy’, a sparse track that appeared on his 2019 EP ‘Lucky’. Certainly, it sounds like a forerunner to ‘Manning Fireworks’, though its story of a bitter, lonely figure is a little mannered and lacks the warmth found in abundance in the new album.
“I think there’s a part of every person who’s grown up Catholic that feels like maybe they’ve done something wrong”
“I didn’t always write that way,” he explains, “but at one point, I realised that it was fun to do that, that there were so many more possibilities and so many more places you could go. My personal feelings and stuff are gonna come through in certain ways, but it’s more freeing to write fiction, in my experience. It was just a huge moment when I realised that.” Ever self-deprecating, he adds with a chuckle: “I think I just got slightly tired of hearing my own self.”
It was Hartzman who got him into reading more prolifically, which in turn influenced his writing style. This record took around a year to write in between tours and he sometimes found it difficult to pick up its threads. “But,” he says, “there’s things you can do that have a direct relationship with your faucet being on, which to me would just be reading and writing every day.”
Curiously, considering the tenderness at the heart of Lenderman’s work, he was most influenced by Harry Crews, whose Southern Gothic writing was brutally dark, violent and grotesque.
“A really big one for me,” he says, “after reading a lot of Crews, was this one called Getting Naked With Harry Crews, which is just a collection of his interviews over his entire career. I got a good window into the writing process and seeing how different people do it. That was really important ‘cause he talks a lot about his life philosophies, too. Not that I agree with him on everything, but it’s just interesting to see somebody that has worked their whole life to dial into some sort of philosophy for how to live.”
“I think it’s more effective to show facts rather than tell someone how to feel about something”
In contrast, Mark Jacob Lenderman – everyone calls him Jake – is still working it out. When writing his previous solo albums, he benefited from the time and space afforded in Asheville, where he was “insanely lucky” to rent a place that would be unattainable in, say, New York or LA. Until relatively recently, he lived with Hartzman next door to a house inhabited by a rotating cast that often included members of his band.
Since that house was sold, though, he’s been effectively living on the road. Perhaps this sense of rootlessness contributed to the nostalgic references to childhood (Pixar’s Cars on ‘Rudolph’, Guitar Hero on ‘Bark at the Moon’) that adorn ‘Manning Fireworks’. “Yeah, this is my quarter-life crisis record,” he laughs.
As a Catholic kid, he planned briefly to become a priest, which attracted him because it seemed to take some uncertainty out of life: “Finding a house, being in love with somebody and starting a family or getting married or something – you didn’t have to worry about that as a priest.”
This early ambition bleeds into the new album’s ‘Joker Lips’, which features the lyric, “Every Catholic knows he could’ve been Pope”, a line lifted wholesale from Getting Naked With Harry Crews. “I think there’s a part of every person who’s grown up Catholic that feels like maybe they’ve done something wrong,” Lenderman notes today.
Eminem provided his first taste of musical transgression – “classic middle-school rebellion-type stuff”, as he puts it. The rapper’s recent album ‘The Death of Slim Shady (Coup de Grâce)’, though, left him cold: “I tried to listen to it just ‘cause I was curious and it’s so bad. It’s crazy. Like, so outdated. It’s funny – he mentions getting cancelled and stuff. It’s like, bro, that’s not gonna happen to you.”
Aside from the road, Lenderman has never really lived anywhere but Asheville, which harboured small venues and house shows that incubated Wednesday until they were ready for the bigger leagues. ‘Manning Fireworks’ will be released by ANTI-, the influential indie label that’s also home to Waxahatchee aka Katie Crutchfield, who had him appear on her acclaimed album ‘Tiger’s Blood’ earlier this year. It’s a family affair: Katie’s sister Allison is the A&R who brought Lenderman to ANTI- for ‘Boat Songs’.
“Allison and Katie both, they’ve lived pretty similar a life to what me and my friends were doing,” he says, “so they are really open and understanding and immediately felt like friends. They’ve done a lot for me between the two of them. It was really lucky that I met them and their support is really cool. It was super-easy to get along with them.”
Between the Crutchfields (who grew up in Birmingham, Alabama), his pals and the aforementioned authors, the American South has clearly had a big impact on Lenderman’s music. He’s typically careful, though, not to portray such a vast region as one homogenous place: “Asheville’s kind of a liberal bubble. It’s kind of white-washed, and my experience there as a white person is different than [it is for] people of colour. But down in Georgia is a lot different as a state, and the deeper you go, it gets different. And then Florida is its own world almost.
“Writing requires some level of self-criticism and not believing that you’re awesome”
“It’s lumped together in that it’s the Confederacy, I guess. So, there is some sort of bond there, which… there’s a level of complicated and problematic history shared between the states. They do have all that in common.”
Harry Crews channelled this bleak history into violent prose, but Lenderman was drawn to the humour and honesty in the author’s work: “Earlier in his career, he tried to write books about normal families, which he never experienced in his life. Once he realised he could talk about all this dark and weird shit, that’s when it starts making sense. So [my work] is just filtered through my life and what I feel equipped to speak on.”
Yet Lenderman is remarkably adept at writing outside of his lived experience. Just look at ‘She’s Leaving You’, which depicts middle-aged malaise with nuance and depth that’s surely beyond most 25-year-olds. “It’s kinda, like, an old story,” he protests. “It’s not super-new or anything.”
He stitched together vignettes based on friends’ families and the Louis Theroux documentary Gambling in Las Vegas, which follows men so certain to lose a fortune that Vegas casinos pay for their hotel rooms. “It’s like super-dark and sad,” Lenderman says, “but there’s funny images there too – just grown adult men acting like that.”
‘Manning Fireworks’ often amounts to a study in thwarted masculinity, and he’s spoken previously about his distaste for macho influencers who exploit this frailty. He’s prone to “hate-watch” the likes of Jordan Peterson, whose appeal he understands even if doesn’t share in it: “He’s said smart and interesting things over time, but that doesn’t mean that everything he’s said is right.”
What’s Peterson said that he found smart or interesting, as opposed to all the other nonsense? “I dunno,” he replies, flinching slightly for the first time in our conversation. “I’ve just seen clips over time, but the main point was that I understand how people, like… he’s a good talker, mainly.”
Lenderman might be understandably wary around this subject, but it’s true that Peterson and his cronies stepped into a vacuum left by a media uninterested in speaking to young men. The musician, on the other hand, sees a lot of this demographic at his shows: “There’s a pretty good range of ages and identities and stuff, but it definitely, I think, speaks to younger dudes, too – in a specific way that I think maybe even older guys couldn’t understand based on certain references.”
After NME switches off the Dictaphone, Lenderman will half-jokingly worry that he came “across as a Jordan Peterson fan”. Really, though, it’s obvious which side of the fence he’s on. Unlike the bros in the manosphere, he’s not telling anyone how to live or offering easy answers. He’s just searching, and he hopes you’ll come on the journey with him.
“I think it’s more effective to show facts rather than tell someone how to feel about something,” he says with another invisible, bashful shrug. “But if the right amount of images or just certain observations come through, then maybe I’ve done my job.”
MJ Lenderman’s ‘Manning Fireworks’ is out on 6 September via ANTI-