The Unfussy Allure of MJ Lenderman

Rock’s reluctant rising star has always been ambivalent about fame. That just makes him all the more magnetic.

Words by Jewly Hight | Photos by Graham Tolbert

Ozzy Osbourne’s “Bark at the Moon” is part of the heavy metal canon, an embodiment of its early 1980s ideals: those muscular riffs fired off with cocky precision, the guitar solo’s eruption into shrieking pyrotechnics, the operatically over-the-top telling of a werewolf tale. Anyone who got their hands on the game Guitar Hero II in the mid-aughts could inhabit that fantasy all over again, guitar karaoke–style, and 8-year-old Jake Lenderman — not yet going by his initials, MJ — definitely did. While the game offered players a few ’90s alt-rock and grunge selections, at the core of its soundtrack and aesthetic was the arena-rock grandiosity of preceding decades. And Lenderman was obsessed. “That was kind of my first exposure to a lot of rock music, even though it’s a lot of cheesy hair metal and stuff,” he remembers, speaking on Zoom from a Durham, North Carolina, hotel room. “I really liked that music as a kid, too. I already had my arena years as an 8-year-old. I guess I just naturally started realizing how corny it is.”

Lenderman’s new album, Manning Fireworks, ends with a track titled after Osbourne’s horror-themed pop-metal hit, but otherwise the two recordings share little in common besides the fact that each is punctuated with a howl. Lenderman’s take sounds shaggy by comparison, a thicket of wah-wah, steel, and overdriven guitars chugging along. His song paints a picture of what might’ve been if his desire to perform had never propelled him beyond Guitar Hero playacting; he sings as a slacker type admitting he’s stuck — in his bedroom, his habits, his schtick.

In real life, the 25-year-old singer-songwriter and guitar slinger isn’t aspiring to anything resembling Osbourne’s level of rock stardom. He’s merely trying to adjust to his status as one of indie rock’s next great, country-inflected Southern hopes. Pitchfork singled out his 2022 album Boat Songs for its coveted “Best New Music” designation; Stereogum published a feature with the headline “MJ Lenderman Is Knockin’ on Rock Stardom’s Door,” a nod to a Lenderman tune that evokes a famous Bob Dylan, and Guns N’ Roses, number (according to the same online magazine, Rat Saw God by Wednesday, a band that Lenderman’s a member of, was one of the top albums of 2023); and his contributions to Tigers Blood — the latest collection from Waxahatchee, whose career was already at a crescendo — have drawn plentiful attention.

In some ways, Lenderman comes close to a Gen Z mentality. His contemporaries on TikTok are prone to plucking half-forgotten tunes from the dustbin — stuff they’re hearing for the first time, stripped of original context — and embracing them as new faves. He, too, treats various eras of rock that predated him as source material, but he does it in slightly more studious fashion. The self-important idealism and ambition of the ’60s and grand glam and theatrical gestures of the ’70s and ’80s give him setups for knowing jokes; the defiant unkemptness and ironic underpinnings of ’90s indie rock and alt-country are a frequent jumping-off point; and he’s been belatedly delighting in the galvanizing, economical classic rock riffing of Tom Petty.

But you won’t catch Lenderman himself on TikTok, and he’s an absentee landlord on Instagram, too. “Account maintained by mgmt on behalf of MJ,” his bio reads. He doesn’t buy into the idea that anything can, and should, become content, nor does he treat his music like a public airing of his personal story. Though his best songs telescope in on their perpetually disappointed and disappointing protagonists, he gets kind of sheepish about magnifying small details of his own life. Like the fact that his last nonmusical gig was at an Asheville, North Carolina, ice cream shop. When I mention it, he observes, “It’s funny how that job has come up so much in this [round of] press,” measuring out his words. It strikes me that he speaks the way he writes, casually deliberate and deliberately casual.

Lenderman doesn’t claim to be doing anything groundbreaking with his output. “The music’s already pretty referential,” he reasons amiably, “just the act of making guitar music at all.” What makes him such an appealing rock interventionist is how thoroughly he accepts that we’re no longer living in the time when the pop culture archetype of a consequential artist is a white guy who can shred and make what he’s singing sound profound. Lenderman’s new album — the fifth he’s put his name on, counting his wild-eyed 2023 live set — has a laid-back astuteness that adds to his unfussy allure. And his ambivalence about being in a growing spotlight has endeared him to peers, fans, and critics alike.

Lenderman grew up in 2000s Asheville, where his parents settled so that his dad could launch a medical practice. The vibe in that small mountain city was a mixture of bohemian and Appalachian, and its musical reputation leaned toward jammy string bands, a musical sensibility that might make Lenderman roll his eyes if he were that demonstrative with his feelings. The state was big on basketball — home to some of the winningest college programs in NCAA history — and on Protestant evangelical Christianity. A Pew Research study from 2014 shows that evangelical adults in North Carolina outnumbered the Catholics — a population to which the Lenderman household belonged — nearly four to one.

Young Jake started playing YMCA ball, with his dad coaching, as soon as he cleared the minimum age requirement, then moved on to travel teams. For a time, balling came second only to church in priority. He and his three sisters were all in Catholic school. “I guess it was pretty much my life,” Lenderman muses, “because going to school and then Mass on the weekends was a good amount of time. When I was younger, I was more excited about it. I was every level of altar boy you could be.”

The way that he makes casual asides in his lyrics about Catholic doctrines and practices indicates that he took the worldview seriously enough back then to lightly critique it now. In the title track on Manning Fireworks, he counters a blustery religious egotist’s “tired approach to original sin” — basically, the belief that human beings are born bad — with the observation that this guy, instead, was “once a perfect little baby, who’s now a jerk.”

There were times when Lenderman would have to get up and get dressed for his sacramental duties after playing Guitar Hero all night. By age 10 or so, he’d traded the plastic controller that had colorful buttons in lieu of strings for a real guitar. The instrument got a lasting hold on him. He spent the summer between sixth and seventh grade making the case to his folks that he really ought to leave Catholic school and attend a place with a better basketball program and music courses. Really, though, he just wanted to enroll where his friends went. After freshman year, he was ready to drop basketball, too: “Once it became a certain level of commitment, I quit because I liked music better.”

This was the iTunes era, when having most of the world’s commercially available music at your fingertips was still a new phenomenon, and Lenderman had been exploring whatever caught his interest. “I realized at one point that there was a credit card hooked up to the iTunes [account],” he recalls, “and I bought Eminem’s entire discography. And my mom, a few weeks later, she was like, ‘Hey, do you know anything about this $80 charge to our iTunes page?’”

His parents were musicheads. The first band they took him to see was the garage rock combo The Dandy Warhols. At some point, it became a Lenderman Thanksgiving tradition to watch The Last Waltz, The Band’s famous ’70s concert film, together. In the car, they might pop in a Dinosaur Jr. CD, or the Drive-By Truckers’ debut album. Says Lenderman, “I remember driving to Catholic school with the Gangstabilly CD case in the car and I’m kind of disturbed by it.” The cover image he’s talking about is a Southern Gothic cartoon of a big-haired woman clutching a beer and getting felt up by a guy in boots and a backward ballcap on the hood of a beater. “All my favorite stuff usually starts with something that was scary to me at one point.” By the time he went to see the Truckers with his dad in high school, he’d been, as he put it, “doing my own research and built my own relationship with their music.” Later on, Wednesday would cover one of their songs and open for them on tour.

One of Lenderman’s most pivotal takeaways from his teenage listening came from My Morning Jacket’s haunting, elemental Early Recordings: “That was the first time I ever heard home-recorded music. So I kind of, at an early age, started figuring out how to record just on GarageBand, trying to re-create some of those songs, because they sounded simple to me.” He eventually started trying to emulate Jim James’ songwriting, and the stark material Jason Molina penned for Songs: Ohia, too. But since Lenderman has made sure none of those recordings can be found online (“I was still figuring out how to sing”), the sole surviving artifact from that period is his artist moniker. “I thought ‘Jake’ sounded bad,” he says. “I just used my initials, and somehow I’m still using that.”

The MJ Lenderman who was beginning to emerge wasn’t burdened with a full-blown frontman’s ego. He was a true band person, into the bonding experience of creativity shared between friends in garages and basements. Xandy Chelmis, a fellow Ashevillian who became his buddy and bandmate both in Wednesday and Lenderman’s outfit the Wind, philosophizes, “A lot of musicians get their starts in big cities, which tend to have a very competitive and sometimes harsh atmosphere, and that’s very money-driven, because resources are tight. It’s just different. And I think Jake grew up in a place, as did I, that is really community-centered. And there’s a sort of working-with-what-you-have ethos. It’s just about your friends.”

For Lenderman, bands needn’t be boys clubs, either. He joined another local, Indigo de Souza, as her drummer around the time that her potent, pop-fluent indie rock started gaining a following beyond Asheville. In the live session they filmed for the online platform Audiotree in early 2019, Lenderman can be seen immediately dropping his gaze when he makes accidental eye contact with the camera. He lays down lean drum patterns in lockstep with the guitars’ syncopation, and keeps the fills to a minimum.

“Having my solo music as an outlet to keep total control over my songs, knowing that that’s always there, I feel like, makes it easier for me to work as a team player with other people,” says Lenderman. “You know, be a good supporting character or whatever. The first times I was ever in a band, [I was] learning the importance of hierarchy, a structure. Having that be really clear from the beginning doesn’t make you, like, an asshole. It’s actually better for everybody if it’s communicated clearly what everybody’s role is.”

Lenderman was initially pulled into Wednesday’s orbit by dating its leader, Karly Hartzman, who has a keen gift for capturing claustrophobic, youthful moments in the small-town South in unlovely detail. At one time, they shared a cozy house in East Asheville with their bandmates right next door, and the whole compound was a hub for making music and filming DIY videos. (At the time of this writing, Hartzman and Lenderman have recently ended their half-decade relationship, but he remains part of Wednesday. “All the personal stuff I haven’t been able to really process much yet,” he says with a hint of weariness, “because of my schedule.”)

It was Lenderman who saw Chelmis struggling to wrangle his unwieldy MIDI controller-and-laptop combo — picture a keyboard loaded with extra buttons and pads connected to a computer —and offered him a lap steel guitar on loan from a relative instead. “‘How about you play this?’” Chelmis remembers him suggesting. “‘It’s easier to set up.’” Chelmis was in the very early phases of teaching himself to slide up around the strings, plucking out his own approximations of emotive country licks and dousing it all in a dense haze of effects, and Lenderman had him play on his self-titled solo album anyhow. “I wouldn’t ask anybody else to do it,” says Lenderman, praising  Chelmis’ “inventive sense of melody.” “Having your friends there, it’s gonna be a good time. I don’t really have to explain what I’m going for to them. It’s cool if they don’t really know the rules of playing their instrument.”

Lenderman felt the urge to transcend his own limitations as a songwriter, and he recognized a promising direction in the striking, sculpted poetry of David Berman, the late leader of cult favorites Silver Jews and Purple Mountains. “I’d never listened to anything that lyrically forward,” Lenderman marvels. “A lot of his music feels like somebody looking in from the edge, or something with a really clear point of view. But it’s also funny. It just seems, for a lot of people, like a guiding voice to navigate life from somebody who’s been to every dark corner.”

Lenderman had started to feel constricted by his tendency to mine his autobiography for material. So he figured he might as well see if he could expand his perspective by trying out a literary technique endorsed by Berman that involved scribbling down 20 lines a day.

“That is actually something that David got from Stendhal originally,” explains the music critic Carl Wilson, who’s writing a book on Berman. (That’s Stendhal, the 19th-century French novelist.) “He says, ‘Write 20 lines a day, genius or not.’ And David kind of translated that for his own purpose into just, ‘Write 20 random lines a day. Come back to your notebook at the end of the month and see what you should throw out and what you can keep, and see if you can collage those things together.’ So it’s a very accessible approach to a kind of disciplined idea.”

Lenderman would jam with his roommates and toss out penetrating observations, witticisms and outlandish non sequiturs in the moment. That ramshackle process yielded his 2021 album Ghost of Your Guitar Solo, featuring droll fragments like “I Ate Too Much at the Fair” and “Someone Get the Grill Out of the Rain.” It also made way for more fleshed-out vignettes to come. More and more, Wilson detected parallels between the plainspoken agility of Berman’s writing and what Lenderman’s up to. “The way that he’ll shift between sort of casual language and something a little more poetic, and there’s sort of natural descriptions that then bump into pop culture references — all of those kinds of juxtapositions are very, very similar to the things that Berman did all the time. It was partly a way of never seeming too self-serious while also being able to sort of access language in a broad way.”

But here again, Lenderman’s not one to say that he’s doing anything all that sophisticated. When I ask if he cares about coming off as clever or poetic in his songwriting, he’s noncommittal. “I don’t know if I can use those words. I want to be a good lyricist, still working on it.”

Lenderman’s next collection, Boat Songs, got a good amount of press for a DIY act. The work he was putting in on his craft was mostly hidden beneath the shambling charm of songs like “Hangover Game,” a countrified power-pop number that humanized the lore around Michael Jordan’s inhuman basketball achievements. Around the same time, Wednesday was also on the rise. The band signed with the respected indie label Dead Oceans and turned heads with Rat Saw God, an album stocked with shoegaze-y scenes of sharply observed Southern decay.

By then, Lenderman had already achieved his exceedingly modest idea of success: no more shifts at the ice cream shop. “It took me maybe a full year of not doing anything else [besides music] to realize it,” he shrugs with a half-smile. 

To Chelmis, who’s Wednesday’s steel guitarist as well as Lenderman’s accompanist, the band’s increase in momentum was dramatic. The difference between “playing these dinky little tours” and “booking people, management, and labels coming around.” He sums up, “Just the whole nature of what we were doing, I think, really changed.”

Touring both with Wednesday and his own outfit, MJ Lenderman and the Wind, was already taking Lenderman farther from home in the company of his crew. But the call to join Waxahatchee, the increasingly country-leaning musical vehicle of singer-songwriter Katie Crutchfield, in the studio drew him outside of his circle of musical friends. He’d worked with her producer Brad Cook before, on an Indigo de Souza album. That time Lenderman was on drums. This time he was brought in to play rangy, roots-rocking guitar throughout what would become Waxahatchee’s Tigers Blood, and to sing here and there. 

He really made his mark on the track “Right Back to It.” The song is an inquiry into restlessness within a settled, secure partnership. Crutchfield’s singing is reedy. She bears down on her words with intention and releases her lines artfully, like ribbon curls. When she climbs to her upper register, Lenderman’s singing sounds stolid by comparison. Their voices meet in a way that feels close but not cozy, and the intervals between their notes conjure ineffable yearning.

In various interviews, Crutchfield has told a lighthearted tale of teaching Lenderman a harmony part only to watch him step up to the mic and sing something entirely different. He makes clear in our interview that that was no willful act of rebellion: “I will say about the harmony thing, that was not intentional. I just did it wrong, I guess.”

On de Souza’s records, he’d been listed in the credits alongside all the other musicians. But when Crutchfield went on “Late Night With Stephen Colbert” to sing “Right Back to It” in March, Lenderman received special guest billing. Clutching a vinyl copy of Tigers Blood, Colbert announced that viewers were about to hear Waxahatchee, featuring MJ Lenderman. 

“I was not expecting that,” Lenderman notes, “but it’s really, really nice of them. My grandma called me after that and she said, ‘Why did they say your name, but they never said the lead singer’s name?’” He wondered the same thing. It freaked him out a little, people recognizing his name. Like he was being sucked into the cultural discourse whether or not he chose to participate: “Rather than feeling like a star, I felt probably more confident before.”

He was accustomed to releasing his music through his friends’ tiny imprint, Dear Life Records. When he started getting interest from labels with a bit more muscle, he opted to sign with ANTI-; not only was that Waxahatchee’s home, but Crutchfield’s twin sister and onetime bandmate, Allison, handles A&R. 

Chelmis, who’s known Lenderman for nearly a decade, saw the rise in his friend’s profile coming a mile away. “Really shortly after I met him and heard his music and started playing with him, I had this feeling that he was going to be huge,” Chelmis recalls. He takes care to clarify that this hunch was in a whole different league than the delusional fantasies of any old teenage band vowing they’re “gonna be so fucking famous one day.” “There’s something to him that seemed really special and magnetic, and the songs are great. And I don’t think he’s had to really change much about himself to get to where he is. He’s just been consistently doing the same things he’s been doing this whole time, basically, and just getting better and better.” 

Lenderman realized there would be more eyes and ears on whatever he put out next. “So yeah, all those things were definitely affecting me recording and writing. And a lot of the recording process for me was figuring out how to not think about that stuff.” When I ask him whose expectations matter to him at this point, he fires back an answer quicker than he’s responded to anything else during our entire conversation: “Mine!” It almost seems like he’s being flippant, until he takes a breath and reaffirms, “In all seriousness, though, it is my expectations, I guess, that are important.”

The album he wound up with, Manning Fireworks, is populated with stickier, sturdier hooks than any of his previous work, a shift he credits to developing an appreciation for Tom Petty’s terse tunefulness during the Waxahatchee sessions. But nothing about it feels particularly exultant, like a dispatch from a guy on top of the world. 

The protagonists in Lenderman’s new songs just can’t seem to make things go their way — not by trickery or persuasion, strong-arming or seduction. Almost uniformly, their efforts fail, and there’s really no saving face. The rich guy in “Wristwatch” loves to talk about his beach home, houseboat, and pricey timepiece, but the more his boasts escalate, the more glaring his loneliness gets. The middle-aged philanderer in “She’s Leaving You” has squandered the intimacy in his life to the point that he’s powerless to salvage it and can only run toward the hollow diversions of Vegas. Then there are the portraits of people (of unspecified genders) whose boozy overindulgence has reached the point that it’s curdled the fun of cutting loose (“On My Knees”), become a burden to those around them (“Rip Torn”), and rendered them unreliable and unwelcome in others’ lives (“Joker Lips”).

An interviewer for the British newspaper The Guardian picked up on Lenderman’s resistance to the perception that he’s only interested in dudes as main characters. Lenderman emphasized, “I don’t want the music to come across like it’s not inclusive to everybody — like somebody who’s not a dude.”

Chelmis has observed up close how very un-alpha Lenderman’s mindset is. “I mean, his music, at face value, it’s got sort of a classical kind of ‘dude rock’ tone to it. But in his lyrics, he spends a lot of time shitting on and criticizing the male ego and the things that it creates, you know? And then as a group, the band is really awesome about being vulnerable to each other and loving. That’s really one of my favorite things about the group. It’s not what I would expect from a group of white dudes hanging out. I treasure that. I think it’s lovely.”

Lenderman seems neither impressed nor repulsed by the latest cast of characters he’s written into being. He often positions himself at the edge of a scene, watchful and amused, a narrator making sparing and wryly insightful use of his assessments. It feels like he’s truly digested the lessons of rock history, that it took generations for us to acknowledge that it’s always been full of unreliable narrators. 

“I’ve been reading this,” says Lenderman, holding up a Mötley Crüe biography. And the Ozzy Osbourne nod on his album, he notes with pleasure, isn’t the only reference of its kind. He’s borrowed other lines and titles. “‘The Shape I’m In,’ that’s the title of a song by The Band. But again, that song sounds nothing like the Band song. And also, the first line of ‘Wristwatch’ is from the Quiet Riot song ‘Cum On Feel the Noize,’ to misquote from that.” 

Child of the 2000s that he is, Lenderman also sprinkles in references of his own generation. And there are moments when he pulls off pretty revelatory things with playful pastiche, combining his grasp of old-school sensibilities with his exceedingly low-key irreverence. Take “Rudolph,” the true banger of Manning Fireworks, powered by tart, tunefully entwined guitar licks. In the first verse, he surveys the aftermath of a hit-and-run perpetrated by Lightning McQueen, the fictional, Corvette-resembling hero of the Disney/Pixar Cars franchise. Then he pivots to quoting the opening line of “Blowin’ in the Wind,” the folkie standard in which Dylan captured the earnest idealism of ’60s youth who wanted to awaken their elders to social and political injustices. Except that Lenderman ducks that gravitas entirely. “How many roads must a man walk down ’til he learns,” he sings, stretching the last word into two cutting syllables. “He’s just a jerk who flirts with the clergy nurse ’til it burns.”

Lenderman brings the inquiry right down to earth. There’s skepticism toward supposedly noble motives. The unexpected bite of a perfectly rhymed punchline. That expert use of deadpan.

“Whatever I sound like,” Lenderman muses, “is kind of what’s coming out of me now. I think it’s clearly less like I’m trying to sound like other people than maybe I was in the past. I feel like that was a good way to learn how to make music. But now that I have an idea of how to build a song, I think it just comes out more natural. It sounds like me.”  ◊