Thoughts on MJ Lenderman's Manning Fireworks
Twenty-five year-old Asheville, North Carolina songwriter and guitarist Mark Jacob (MJ) Lenderman releases his fourth album, Manning Fireworks, on ANTI- Records this week. For music fans that have deep love for a scraggly, Neil Young and Crazy Horse-indebted strain of indie rock, this is cause for major celebration. Lenderman is also influenced by a cluster of beloved Gen X indie musicians that form a kind of canon of idiosyncratic, rootsier, male songwriters: Drive-By Truckers, Jason Molina/Songs: Ohia/Magnolia Electric Co., Sparklehorse, David Berman/Silver Jews/Purple Mountains, Bill Callahan/Smog, Will Oldham/Palace Music/Bonnie “Prince” Billy, and Vic Chesnutt. There is a palpable sense in independent, fuzzy guitar music circles that a torch is being passed to a younger generation, and that a distinct sensibility is continuing on in the music of a young wunderkind. I think rock critic Steven Hyden captures this feeling in his new, glowing review of Manning Fireworks when he notes that, at the time of Lenderman’s ascendance, he felt that he had “been waiting for an artist like this for a long time.”
Lenderman first popped up on my radar in the spring of 2022 when he released the album Boat Songs on Dear Life Records. Boat Songs is easily one of the best front-to-back indie rock records of the last 10 or 20 years. The record—along with Lenderman’s sideman work in the countrygaze band Wednesday and his star-making turn on Waxahatchee’s beautiful single “Right Back to It”—deservedly blew his stature up over the last couple years. In terms of curatorial taste, wry humour, and writerly vision, the album is miles ahead of the Spotifycore, post-DeMarconian “indie” pablum designed for passive listening that echoes meaninglessly through the cafés and other artisanal retail establishments in whatever gentrifying neighbourhood the fashionable people frequent in your city.
I only recently learned that Lenderman was influenced by Bob Dylan and The Band’s underrated collaborative 1974 album Planet Waves on Boat Songs, and this comes through sonically on tracks like the infectiously choogley “You Have Bought Yourself a Boat,” where a clavichord part honks away like Garth Hudson sat in on the session. On other songs like the aching “TLC Cage Match” and “Under Control,” Lenderman allows himself to be more vulnerable, even if, on the former, he happens to be writing about the brutality of pro wrestling. Opener “Hangover Game” and “Dan Marino” trade in madcap sports references: the former takes up another potential explanation behind a different MJ’s legendary “Flu Game,” while the latter imagines the moment the titular Dolphins’ QB notices that he has been succeeded by Tom Brady on Wheaties’ cereal box packaging. Fragile closer “Six Flags” is a note-perfect homage to the kind of sad junk shop music soundscapes of Sparklehorse’s Mark Linkous. I could go on at great length about the genius of this record—in particular, the way Lenderman lovingly plays with a variety of indie rock styles on the album, marrying them to an equal parts funny and devastating regional perspective to brilliant effect.
What is fascinating about Lenderman’s new album, Manning Fireworks, is that he could have easily remade Boat Songs to considerable adulation, but he has decided not to do so. Manning Fireworks is a markedly more restrained affair. The record’s sonic fidelity is higher—likely a result of a bigger budget from ANTI-—and Lenderman uses that fidelity and sonic space to different effect, bringing new sounds and textures into his palette. Refreshing acoustic instrumentation opens the record on its title track as well as on “Rip Torn” and the astonishing “You Don’t Know the Shape I’m In.”
The riffy “Rudolph,” gutwrenching “Wristwatch,” and raw “On My Knees” indulge in guitar workouts worthy of Neil and The Horse. The Guitar Sound Explainer YouTube Channel Industrial Complex will be well-supplied with content by parsing Lenderman’s delicious tone in these tracks.
Lead single “She’s Leaving You” has been in my rotation constantly since its release in late June, becoming a kind of bizzaro world song of the summer for me. Somehow, the song manages to be a ridiculously catchy anthem written about an unsuspecting man in the the throes of a devastating midlife crisis: he’s been abandoned, but he’s sleepin’ in drivin’ a hot car, singin’ the blues, proselytizin’ about Clapton, and feelin’ lucky in Sin City. What could possibly go wrong?
Manning Fireworks’ side B is particularly stunning to take in. “Rip Torn” starts off the side in an understated folk mode with a sawing fiddle part and Lenderman’s lyrics about another hapless loser “passed out in your Lucky Charms.” After this, we move to “You Don’t Know the Shape I’m In,” a re-recording of a song that Lenderman gave to a charity compilation in 2022. While I enjoyed the 2022 version in the past, this new version is simply gorgeous. On Manning Fireworks, the song becomes a gentle wonder that, for me, recalls Wilco’s sonic experimentation on Yankee Hotel Foxtrot and A Ghost is Born. Shaufian clarinet parts1 meld beautifully with all kinds of weird phasing and droning instruments that I can’t even attempt to credibly identify or name here. Apparently, in the album liner notes, Lenderman lists instruments like “slide bebo” and “bass clarinet abuse drone,” which could be what we hear on the song. The aforementioned “On My Knees” follows and takes us back into the crunchy Neil Zone before the epic album closer “Bark at the Moon.”
“Bark at the Moon” made waves amongst the Lenderman faithful2 back when Manning Fireworks was announced, because people immediately noticed its runtime of 10 minutes.3 As it turns out, “Bark at the Moon” artfully sidesteps breathless fan expectations for guitar pyrotechnics by, essentially, starting out as a lovely little 3-minute 30-second slightly melancholy guitar bop—containing, it must be said, one of the most moving references (if not the only moving reference) to Guitar Hero in a song—before effortlessly morphing into a 6-and-a-half-minute drone that ends the record. The “Bark at the Moon” drone is a big swing that will, undoubtedly, prove to be divisive. There will be those who will feel shortchanged by the drone, and wish for the “Bark at the Moon” that they imagined in their minds over the past several months. I will even admit that, upon first hearing the song, I may have been one of those people. But, once you get your head around the drone and come to live in it a little bit, conceiving of it as the record slowly easing you back into your everyday life, then you can come to love it, and to respect the sheer bravery of Lenderman and company going for it.
As with Boat Songs before, clearly I could go on way too long about Manning Fireworks, and I’ve only been listening to it for a few days. It is a goddamn brilliant album, well-deserving of the near universal acclaim that is has been garnering, and I can’t wait to hear what Lenderman does next. Until then—who knows?—maybe I’ll dig out my red plastic Gibson SG controller, and I, too, will be up too late with Guitar Hero playing “Bark at the Moon.” A-wooooo!
Incidentally, Andy Shauf is also signed to ANTI-. Collab when???
I don’t know if the MJ Lenderman fanbase has an official name, but I’d like to put forward Lendermaniacs.
A TEN MINUTE MJ SONG?!?! How freaking insane was this going to be to close out the album?