A song on MJ Lenderman’s new album, Manning Fireworks, contains these delicious lines: “Burdened by those wet dreams / Of people havin’ fun / ’Cause I know going on vacation / Brings the worst out of everyone.” The lyric, from “On My Knees,” a sneering take on human shallowness, is on his mind because the day after our conversation, he’s heading to Italy with his family for a weeklong stay “on some lake.” “Hopefully, nobody will take that line to heart,” he says drolly.
Since the release of Lenderman’s 2022 album, Boat Songs, which topped many best-of lists, buzz has been building around the twenty-five-year-old Asheville native. Last year, he released a searing live album, And the Wind (Live and Loose!), showcasing his piercing, Neil Young–esque guitar prowess. He’s also an in-demand collaborator, best known for his work with the alt-country talent Waxahatchee, and he plays lead guitar in the indie rock band Wednesday, fronted by his ex-girlfriend Karly Hartzman, whose titanic howls over Lenderman’s licks make for a thrilling combination of rage and distortion with a dash of country twang.
In a relatively short period, he’s also established a reputation as a gifted songwriter, with a penchant for twisting bits of pop culture—basketball references, Lightning McQueen of Cars running over a deer—into lyrics that smack hard first, and then dissolve into wry giggles. “You say I’m wasting my life away / well I’ve got a beach home up in Buffalo,” he sings on the mournful highlight “Wristwatch” from Manning Fireworks. Throughout the album, Lenderman, who goes by Jake (his birth name is Mark Jacob), flips the banal into incisive commentary on male angst, drunken benders, and Catholic guilt. (At one point in his youth, he mused about going into the seminary.) Various memes have ping-ponged around social media cheekily dubbing his music “dude rock”—which horrifies Lenderman—but it’s far more nuanced than bros and cases of Natty Light. “I write about what I know,” he says, “but I want it to be inclusive.”
He’s aced that test on Manning Fireworks. As he began writing and recording the material in spurts over the past two years, he became more at ease with the notion of stepping away from biographical songs into a more observational mode. “Some of my older stuff is completely true first person,” he says. “But there’s a lot of freedom in a fictional character, where you don’t have to worry about being bad. That can be more entertaining.” Lenderman’s voice is distinct as well. His nasal drawl might take some getting used to, but it sounds equally comfortable in the tones of seventies country and nineties indie rock (the similarities to Pavement front man Stephen Malkmus are striking), with a dose of the urgency of Patterson Hood’s and Mike Cooley’s raw vocals in Drive-By Truckers, one of Lenderman’s favorite bands.
Katie Crutchfield, a.k.a. Waxahatchee, went to one of Lenderman’s solo shows on a whim at Austin’s South by Southwest in 2022 and walked out of the gig dazzled. “His voice is so unique,” she says. “It sounded so fresh to me. You could hear it across genres, and it would still really evoke something emotionally.” Crutchfield invited Lenderman to contribute to Tigers Blood, her exceptional seventh record, released in April. She thought he would stay for one session, but he played guitar and sang harmony on the whole thing. “What I am excited about for Jake is that I think his music is going to age so well,” she says. “There will be more complexity, and the poetry will have more body. I honestly believe kids now in high school will point to Manning Fireworks and say, ‘That record changed my life.’”
As Lenderman grew up in Asheville—his father is a doctor, and his mother worked various jobs while raising him and his three sisters (he’s the second youngest)—music filled the house. His dad had a massive wall of CDs and a speaker system in nearly every room, with the Grateful Dead on repeat. They took him to many shows, including two nights of the Truckers at the seminal Asheville club the Orange Peel in 2016. “The Truckers were huge for me,” Lenderman says. “I love Patterson’s melodies, but we’re always trying to imitate Cooley. His wordplay is super funny. I always have to restart his songs because I’m like, ‘What did he just say?’”
Lenderman played basketball until he was sixteen, eventually ditching it for the guitar. “Bark at the Moon,” Manning Fireworks’ jangly ten-minute closer, recalls him shredding to the classic Ozzy Osbourne tune while playing Guitar Hero as a youngster. After high school, he shared a house with friends in the city, and during the pandemic they spent hours jamming in the living room, recording everything. “It was mostly just noise,” he says. “But it was a lot of fun.” Until a few years ago, he worked in an ice cream shop, a job he loved because the owners let him control the music in the store, and they gave him time off to play shows.
Given his rising profile, he probably won’t be slinging ice cream cones again anytime soon, but he pushes back on the notion of being the “next big thing.” “Success to me means not having to do anything else but make music,” he says. Recently, feeling the itch to spread his wings, he left Asheville to live in Greensboro, with a plan to relocate to Durham, he says, to be closer to new, like-minded musical collaborators. But he already yearns for his hometown in one respect. “It is so damn hot here in Greensboro. I miss the mountains and the cool breezes. I’ve left for now, but I’m pretty sure I’ll end up back in Asheville someday.”
