In an MJ Lenderman song, the extraordinary is always elbowing its way into the mundane. His 2022 breakthrough album, Boat Songs, thrived on these situations. One minute someone was clinically depressed on the Six Flags log flume, the next they were locked in a spat about a “dumb hat” outside a butcher shop. “Being really sad or upset while wearing a costume,” he told Pitchfork last year, “that’s funny.” Over the last couple of years—as he signed with Anti- and remained a guitarist and songwriter in the great Southern indie rock band Wednesday, alongside his now ex-partner Karly Hartzman—Lenderman became a cult folk hero for people willing to talk about their feelings if they could couch it in a joke about Jackass.
I had originally clocked Manning Fireworks as more of the same, where Lenderman relies on this one weird trick to write sincere but ultimately unserious songs. I was wrong. Lenderman has honed his songwriting such that I’d nominate a couplet for short story of the year: “Kahlúa shooter/DUI scooter.” He’s got lines that’ll paint a stupid grin on your face: “I could really use your two cents, babe/I could really use the change,” or, “Is it the quiet hiss of a midnight piss/Or a river turned to creek?” If his folk-rock forebears, like Neil Young and Jason Molina, were drawn to the mystics of the natural world, Lenderman is drawn to the mystics of the shitty apartment, simple and unvarnished songs born of small screens in small rooms in small towns.
His writing style conjures the dark, dry wit of Warren Zevon. The men who populate Lenderman and Zevon’s songs are pure losers, divorcés, badgering or self-effacing romantics working on their last-ever heartbreak. Both artists also know how to open a song with a zinger: “Well I can saw a woman in two/But you won’t wanna look in the box when I am through,” Zevon once sang. It’s such a Lenderman line, especially if you imagine him singing it at half the speed Zevon does. “Burdened by those wet dreams/Of people having fun,” opens Lenderman, staring into the middle distance on the mid-tempo rocker “On My Knees.” This is, mind you, the second time he’s sung about cum on Manning Fireworks.
Really, it’s unfair to say that Lenderman writes about cum and piss and cartoons and video games. He does, but it’s the style and economy in which he renders them, as if he’s brushing them in gold leaf. “Rudolph” opens with this:
