MJ Lenderman once again redefines slacker charm on Manning Fireworks

You’re doubly in business if you happen to be an Asheville, North Carolina native and are usually just a short jog from the average musical genius. Whatever chemical runs in the water supply there that makes indie musicians just the right amount of crusty, MJ Lenderman has a monopoly on the supply; he is the face, soul, and guitar god of indie Mecca. His furious work with Wednesday is extraordinary, and his personal discography is a series of drunkenly intimate gems.

Manning Fireworks is a reintroduction with no pretense; 2022’s Boat Songs was a preemptive breakthrough last year’s Rat Saw God (with bandmates Wednesday) ushered in behind it. It was filled with slacker stories in slacker towns, places where southern accents are adorned with just the right amount of cigarette digestion (I say this as a proud fellow North-Carolinian). His heart usually falls off his sleeve before each recording, an emotive pop with each hopelessly romantic yelp. More importantly, however, Lenderman knows what a damn good riff sounds like and has no problem churning them out with confidence.

“You Are Every Girl to Me” from his previous record has a gliding, life-affirming set of guitars and pedal-steels layering over each other, competing to see who can get the lighters waving at concerts first. Manning Fireworks harnesses the influx of new listeners Lenderman has garnered over the past few years and ensures that whenever his guitar is sold at auction in the future, the settled price will be just shy of a googolplex. Every pluck of a string is sultry, solid gold. And every track? Each is a final resting place for every great idea he’s had yet to settle down and prosper, including his typical half-baked finalies. Can’t leave those out.

More than just his recent triumphs, the roll out of the record was so enrapturing and extensive that the lead single, “Rudolph,” was more a long-range scout than a forecaster of the immediate future. No points lost, however, as I’ve lived with its southern, melancholic goodness for two Summers, and the more time in life I have with that track the better. Every time the chorus depressively wallops its way into my day, I age twenty years, grow a midlife belly, and a Blue Ribbon manifests itself into my hand. I don’t pretend to pray to this Indie God for anything more.

While his guitar layering pulls enough songwriting weight to create classics on their own merit, it’s Lenderman’s lyrical wit and delivery that makes him a central character in the scene. Insecurity-based wristwatches, “himbo houseboats”, and “[John] Travolta’s bald head” are all pillars of storytelling where in the hands of a lesser writer they would be shrewd remarks, forgotten and laid to rest. How he gets you to care about nobodies from nowhere and their very strange plights is in part to do with his knack for universal empathy, but more importantly, the fact that he sings everything like he was just robbed at gunpoint by his 8th grade bully who he later watched win the lottery. You feel bad for things you don’t necessarily even understand.

With Drive by Truckers and Neil Young on either shoulder like a devil and an angel (I’ll let you decide which each one is), Lenderman has produced his clearest vision yet of what it looks like when the saddest and funniest people in the room are the same guy. He’s picking up a guitar, and we’ve all sat down to listen. It’s not the least bit sad, more than funny enough to pick us up, and just north of more righteous than the Fellowship of Middle Earth. I return to his music in those moments between simply just to live a little.