The last time Fleetwood Mac played “Silver Springs” live was in 2015. Stevie Nicks took the stage at Auckland, New Zealand’s Mount Smart Stadium and sang, as she had hundreds of times before, the greatest break-up ballad ever put to tape. Mere feet away was Lindsey Buckingham, the man she’d written it about nearly 40 years prior, harmonizing on the chorus. Such feats of sustained annihilation are, by definition, tenuous—Buckingham himself has quit Fleetwood Mac twice, once of his own volition and once of Nicks’—so it wasn’t entirely surprising when, in a GQ profile earlier this year, MJ Lenderman confessed that a recent Wednesday show had been his last with the band. A banner 2024 took its toll on the guitarist: Wednesday embarked on five separate tours; Lenderman put out the solo album Manning Fireworks; and one March night in Tokyo, he and Karly Hartzman mutually decided to end their romantic partnership.
On the barnburning, joyriding “Chosen to Deserve,” from Wednesday’s 2023 breakthrough Rat Saw God, Hartzman took account of her youthful misdeeds, “just so you know what you signed up for, what you’re dealing with.” The glow of love makes shadow puppets of shame, guilt, and self-recrimination, only for new fears to take their place. What if you wake up one day and realize I’m not everything you thought I was? The sixth Wednesday album is called Bleeds, and so Hartzman does for 12 tracks, as guitar strings and lap steel wires snag her words like rusty nails. Her writing is as richly fetid as ever—replete with bar brawls, murder-suicides, Afrin addictions, and serial killers—but a bright red yarn of heartbreak wends its way between these songs, little cuts coming together to form one gaping wound.
Unlike, say, Rumours, Bleeds isn’t all explicitly about Lenderman. The album is collage portraiture; from the faces of many men emerges a composite subject, a perennial golden boy who comes away unscathed from confrontations with biker gangs, who could drink nothing but Pepsi and never lose a tooth. Buckingham famously gave as good as he got, but Lenderman lets his guitar fill in for his lines. You can hear every shitty basement gig he’s ever played in the lovers’ quarrel of a solo at the climax of “Bitter Everyday.” When Hartzman does address Lenderman directly, as on “Elderberry Wine,” it’s devastating: “Said I wanna have your baby/Cause I freckle and you tan.” Sweet song is a long con, indeed.
