Everything is embarrassing

This is MJ Lenderman’s America: half-funny, half-tragic, tapped straight from the shit that keeps you up at night.

The 25-year-old with the inscrutable, boyish smile seemed to shrug his way into music. He grew up a lapsed Catholic, driving down North Carolina highways with billboards promising that hell is hot and only your guilt can save you – and so all of this, his career, his work, and the fact he is obliged to talk about it sometimes, is like a sin teased out in a confessional. “90% of the time it’s embarrassing, really,” he mumbles. “To me, at least. I don’t know…”

Jake “MJ” Lenderman has been declared by dads – and, of course, the Internet – to be a generational songwriter. His guitarwork unleashes a particular chaos on Wednesday’s terrible beauty, the country-shoegaze band he plays in fronted by his ex-partner Karly Hartzman. But as an artist in his own right, shyly evolving in parallel, Lenderman has grown capable of a certain ramshackle storytelling found only at the bottom of a bottle and between the covers of the Southern American realists.

With a self-aware smirk and a clumsy drawl, his lyrics are humdrum portraits of men who are disappointed, or disappointments – “jerks” – littered with sports in-jokes, off-kilter pop culture references and deliberate misquotes. Because that, after all, is how guys talk to each other when other words fail.

He knows that language well, yet within Lenderman’s striking images and irreverent humour which earned his breakthrough solo album Boat Songs such critical adoration, there is wisdom. Manning Fireworks, his fourth album and studio debut since signing to taste-making label ANTI-, is a refinement of these early gifts; an ugly reflection of human frailties in a way that feels painfully, personally, familiar.

“We sat under a half mast McDonald’s flag / Broken birds tumble fast past my window / And you don’t know / The shape I’m in”, he confesses - and within that image, there is an unknowable loneliness. Cum circles the drain of a hotel shower as the hours pass by alone in “Joker Lips”, a song about a man’s desperation not to be laughed at; “On My Knees” aches under the weight of those forsaken mornings, “Burdened by those wet dreams / Of people having fun”.

Manning Fireworks might sound like a local hardware store, but Lenderman tells me that the meaning is quite literal, “I think it was just a picture of somebody on the brink of causing some serious problems for the people around them”. It’s an age-old tale that is never any less baffling, always philosophical and never quite serious: “Once a perfect little baby / Who’s now a jerk / Standing close to pyre manning fireworks.”

Lately, life has been strange for Lenderman. The record was born from a period of disruption, and as it turns out, a disruption knows no end. Touring relentlessly with both Wednesday and his own band, MJ Lenderman & The Wind, he has become a man without roots; he packed his bags one day, and he feels as if he never came home. “It takes time to collect thoughts and stuff,” he shrugs, a typically nonchalant (and this time, jetlagged) response.

He shared a home with Karly Hartzman in Asheville, the artsy, liberal oxygen bubble in the Blue Ridge Mountains with their Wednesday bandmates as neighbours. In the suspended reality of the pandemic, Lenderman thrived creatively. Freed from serving scoops at the local ice cream parlour, his life became strikingly simple: drink coffee, take a walk, read, paint, write… and the music followed. But then people started to pay attention, things got more complicated – and “I’m not really anywhere now”, he tells me.

Manning Fireworks was crammed into the in-betweens; four-day bursts when Lenderman had a break from the road. “At first, you’re like, ‘I don’t know what I’m doing’, and then it maybe starts to feel good… and then it’s like, ‘What the hell is this?’” he says. “It’s just this constant back of forth of not knowing if this is good or not.”

Lenderman plays the instruments which are the musical backbone of the record – drums, guitar, bass – but his friends play, alongside organs, drones, clarinets and trombones, far more unusual things that defy a search engine. What, exactly, a “slide bebo” is, or a “bass clarinet abuse drone”, for that matter, is only for Lenderman to know. But these are the kinds of playful in-jokes we don’t need to understand for him to endear himself to us as if he were our own friend.

I ask him how he feels about this persona which, to some extent, has been thrust upon him; about the ways in which Manning Fireworks solidifies and subverts those expectations, and he shrugs, “I guess there’s not much I can do about it, people are gonna do that. It’s better for me to not pay attention as much. I mean, I stopped running my socials, so I’ve never seen anybody talk about me or anything. It made my attention span worse. It’s still pretty bad, I guess.” This distance from the internet manifests itself in sweet detachments: a viral post is a “famous post”, or, “something that a lot of people see”. He would lose hours to profile deep dives, “just to see what’s going on in their world”. Manning Fireworks is a similar, casual act of anthropology, nose pressed up against a fish tank.

There is something quite literary about Lenderman’s songwriting that lends itself more naturally to the sparse, incisive prose of novelists native to the American South rather than to [insert Gen X musician here] that he is often compared to. He invokes the strange, violent and darkly humorous spirit of Harry Crews; the unsparing portraits of pathetic characters in the tradition of Breece D’J Pancake and Larry Brown."

Wednesday’s Karly Hartzman was the first to put those paperbacks in his hands, and now, their way is inextricable from his own. “I try to create characters, I guess,” he tells me. “Their books are kind of focused the same way on a flawed individual, or something. It's really simple, musical writing – super funny but also really dark and sad, too. The Southern writers have a specific thing to them which I don’t think I can even pin down, a knack for seeing what’s going on. They’re progressive, as writers, because they speak in their own voice and don’t try to assimilate, I guess, into a broader culture.”

There is a phrase coined by the Southern Gothic writer Flannery O’Connor that feels central to the spirit of Appalachia, and it’s one that feels woven into the tapestry of its people and its storytellers: “Christ-haunted”. The dereliction of Catholicism stains Lenderman’s imagery: withering references to The Bible, seminaries and flirting with the clergy nurse emerge as naturally as childhood memories. Though his family are no longer practicing, there “symptoms”, as he describes it, are hard to outrun. “The lingering stuff comes through,” he says. What tends to linger? “The fear that I’m gonna get into trouble,” he shrugs. “That anything bad happens for a reason, or something like that.”

It feels quite unnatural to correlate Lenderman with anything ‘Gen Z’. As a person and as a musician, he is altogether timeless; Manning Fireworks would just as naturally in 1994 as it does 2024. But one tell-tale behaviour that is a striking reminder that he is only 25 is his tendency to create a Russian doll of decade-sprawling references. In “Rudolph”, there is the Dylan-twisting lyric, “How many roads must a man walk down ‘til he learns / He’s just a jerk”, and nested within “Wristwatch” is an unlikely reference to Slade’s “Cum On Feel The Noize”. He smiles shyly, avoiding eye contact: “Yeah, I’ve been doing that a lot, I guess. I don’t know what makes me do it. It’s just kind of funny to me.”

The album’s devastating lead single, “She’s Leaving You” is conjured, in part, from Leaving Las Vegas (1995). A Hollywood screenwriter who lost everything to alcoholism resigns himself to drink himself to death in Sin City, before finding mutual solace in the friendship of a sex worker. But there is a crushing universality to it, a resignation to something that cannot be undone, captured in the chorus’ freefall: “It falls apart, we all got work to do.” Lenderman’s voice is traced by that of Hartzman – in the end, everything falls away and she is all that’s left. Since their separation, the song has taken on an exceptional poignancy, an unintended knife-twist for anyone who has had to watch someone walk away.

Lenderman naturally deflects from any question I pose that searches for something personal:

What headspace were you in as you wrote the album?

“I don’t know if I can answer that.”

Do you look back on any of your songs as see yourself unconsciously reflected in the lyrics?

“I don’t know if I want to go to deep into that, but definitely, yeah, there are certain songs I’ve felt that with…”

Do you feel that your music can help people process things that are hard to deal with?

“Um, yeah, I try not to go that deep with that I’m intending to do.”

Lenderman has no illusions of perfection. “I’ve had to recognise that it’s normal to not have the best ideas every day,” he tells me. “And that’s okay.” Manning Fireworks is an ode to those human fractures, the troubles we’ve always known – and arms us with the radical empathy to live with them.