MJ Lenderman – Manning Fireworks | Album Review

On Monday, June 24, 2024, I woke up to great news. For one, it was my birthday, and I was thrilled to be turning a supple 31 years old… but that wasn’t the news. After making sure I was sufficiently awake, my girlfriend alerted me, “MJ Lenderman dropped a new song and has an album coming out in September.” Perfect. It felt like a little gift delivered right to me. 

Together, we watched the video for “She’s Leaving You” and basked in the bummer lyrics, soaring chorus, and charismatic talent show visuals. As MJ shredded a guitar solo while his band moved around him at half-speed, the song immediately felt like yet another masterstroke in Lenderman’s already full canvas of fruitful fuck-ups and off-putting weirdos. The melody is immaculate; the instrumental is covered in a layer of grit, while the lyrics embody a type of dejected divorcee energy that you’d usually find in a Drive-By Truckers song or, at the very least, penned by someone about twice Lenderman’s age. It's not like this is MJ’s first brush with these types of broken-down boomerisms (“TV Dinners” would like a word), but even still, it’s shocking to hear sentiments like these from the mouth of someone only midway through their twenties. Above all else, “She’s Leaving You” is catchy as hell and has remained on repeat all summer long, soundtracking sunny trips to the beach, lackadaisical days in the park, and sweltering excursions into the city. It was an excellent way to start my 31st year.

Between the record’s first three singles and MJ’s contributions to the incredible new Waxahatchee record, I was fully having an MJ Lenderman Summer. Blessed with an early advance of Manning Fireworks, I waited until just the right moment to crack this LP open and enjoy it to its fullest capacity. Turns out what that looked like for me was a sweaty day in Brooklyn on the Fourth of July. After spending the morning scraping and cleaning my girlfriend's family’s grill, I escaped to Prospect Park with a beach blanket, a half-smoked joint, and my AirPods. I spent a little while walking around the busy park, taking in the swirl of conversations, volleyball games, and family get-togethers. I absorbed all the smiles of passersby and inhaled deeply, feeling the sun on my skin and relishing the smell of hot dog smoke in my lungs. I found a nice little secluded spot under a tree, laid out my blanket, and hit play to enjoy all 38 minutes and 54 seconds of Manning Fireworks uninterrupted and unimpeded. It was one of my favorite music-listening experiences I’ve ever had in my life. 

If you’ve followed this blog for long enough, you probably know I’m a bit of an MJ Freak. While I’d been following his work for a minute, it wasn’t until a fateful Fourth of July a few years ago that I found myself kicking back to Boat Songs over the course of a relaxing four-day weekend on the Oregon Coast and felt everything click. From there, I became infatuated with his country-flavored guitar fuzz, one-of-a-kind observations, and funny-ass lyrics. If he wasn’t so thoroughly North Carolinian, he felt exactly like the types of dudes I grew up with, obsessed with wrestling, Jackass, and rock music. Over time, I tended to drift more towards the dirty lo-fi stylings found on his early work, like Knockin’ and Ghost of Your Guitar Solo, but Boat Songs grew on me more and more with each listen until I considered myself a pretty hardcore MJ fan. A couple of years later, a knockout live album helped his entire body of work coalesce into one hour of personable alt-country indie rock. A patio album through and through, And The Wind (Live and Loose!) offers a quick way to get up to speed with MJ’s body of work, acting as a career-spanning already-greatest-hits that feels like both an introduction to prospective new listeners and a celebration of everything Lenderman had released up to that point.

If you’re familiar with any of the three albums or four EPs that came before this, one of the first things you might notice about Manning Fireworks is how cleanly produced these songs sound. Gone is the garage rock haze of “Tastes Just Like It Costs” and sub-fi strums of “Dan Marino,” which were oftentimes more artistic affectation than technical limitation. Also gone are the winding runtimes found on MJ’s self-titled first album, where most of the tracks clocked in around 7 minutes. On his fourth LP, virtually every song hovers around the three-minute mark, save for the ten-minute closing track, “Bark At The Moon,” and even that’s kind of cheating since it ends with a long stretch of wordless drone. To that end, I’ve found Manning Fireworks feels much more spiritually parallel to Ghost of Your Guitar Solo than Boat Songs, but maybe that’s just because both lean into Lenderman’s impulse to throw a scratchy instrumental track into the mix. 

I think it’s easy to see Manning Fireworks as less raucous and “fun” than Boat Songs, but this really is an album of halves. There’s no song as upright and victorious as “Hangover Game” or as bright-eyed and loving as “You Are Every Girl To Me,” but this record still has plenty of energy, ideas, and riffs to dole out. I also think it’s easy to lose sight of how incredibly fun each of these singles have been since they’ve been strategically doled out over the course of 14 months. 

The origins of Manning Fireworks technically started back in 2023 with the release of “Rudolph” smackdab in the middle of July. Originally positioned as a standalone single meant to accompany his signing to ANTI-, the song signaled a level-up in more ways than one. Boasting an infectious four-beat countdown and whining pedal steel, the track recounts an ill-fated meeting between the famously outcast reindeer and Lightning McQueen of Pixar’s Cars franchise. Like all great MJ songs, these pop culture references mainly serve as goofy totems the listener can grasp onto as Lenderman uses them to ladder up to a more profound point. In the case of “Rudolph,” the song mounts up to a pathetically lovestruck confession as he sings, “I wouldn't be in the seminary if I could be with you.” 

A month later, “Rudolph” was revealed to be a 7” single that gave Lenderman an excuse to revisit “Knockin,” the original version of which is, on a good day, my personal favorite MJ song. While it’s obviously different than the scrappy rendition from a couple of years prior, MJ has a history of re-recording his own material: he’s got alternate versions of “TLC Cagematch,” “SUV,” and “Tastes Like It Costs,” just to name a few. This is an artistic quirk that I like a lot; it rewards longtime fans and offers the artist a new way to interface and interpret his own work. [Fun Fact: he does just this on Manning Fireworks, turning “You Don’t Know The Shape I’m In” from a crunchy homespun groove off a Bandcamp comp into a Beat The Champ-esque waltz adorned with clarinets, upright bass, and something called a “slide bebo”]. While I initially thought this “Rudolph b/w Knockin” package was just another in a long line of these re-recordings, I actually think it was MJ tipping his hand a bit in terms of shifting away from that lo-fi sound. It’s not exactly a rejection of the original “Knockin,” but it’s a revisitation that almost implies this is how the song was always meant to be heard. Maybe it was a primer for this record; maybe it was just a send-off to that era. 

This upgraded fidelity is noticeable throughout Manning Fireworks, but not a knock against it (see what I did there?). On the contrary, this record sounds impeccable. It was recorded by Alex Farrar at Drop of Sun Studios in Asheville, NC, which currently feels like an absolute hotbed of scene-shaping indie rock. Not only have the last few MJ releases gone through Drop of Sun, but Fararr has also touched records from Wednesday, Squirrel Flower, Indigo De Souza, Hotline TNT, and Horse Jumper of Love. Drop of Sun’s output ranges in scale from local North Carolina talent like emo punks Kerosene Heights and Durham folksters Fust all the way up to indie rock household names like Angel Olsen, Snail Mail, and Plains. The place also looks incredible; I’ll drop a gallery of photos here just in case you’re as struck by the vibes as I am. 

When all’s said and done, you have a very pretty album that feels like a clearly realized version of what MJ Lenderman’s music can be when he lets his singer-songwriter tendrils unfurl. Manning Fireworks is a fairly traditional-length album that posits a familiar structure. You’ve got a slow-starting opening, a Side A that’s slammed wall-to-wall with singles and heaters, then a more introspective (but still rockin’) back half, all capped off with a meditative six minutes of feedback. I’m here for it. 

Throughout the album, Lenderman phrases his words in endlessly mystifying and charming ways. Sometimes, the thing he’s Actually Talking About feels like it’s veiled in fifteen layers of mystery; other times, it’s only ten. Pretty consistently, Lenderman is obtuse to the point where it almost feels like its own language. You can parse his phrasing in a few different ways and get vastly different interpretations. Even when he’s just singing something as commonplace as Guitar Hero, there’s a specificity to it that suggests there could be a deeper layer. Other times, it’s just meant to be funny. No matter which way you interpret it, there’s an undeniably benign beauty to a lyric like “We sat under a half-mast McDonald’s flag.” 

This is not just esotericness for esotericness’ sake. In fact, it’s all so earnest that the listener is encouraged to take it all at face value, which becomes just one possible way to read the album. Lyrics on Manning Fireworks often feel like brief little barbs or self-dispensed idioms, leaving the listener to either laugh or fill in the gaps. As soon as one line lands, the next one is already there to sweep you off into a separate thought or tasty riff. Whenever Lenderman happens to settle in and tell a story, things are gripping and compelling. They usually depict down-on-their-luck people who are pathetic to various points of return. Are they losers for life or just in that moment? Did we happen to catch them on a bad day, or is this their irredeemable day-to-day existence? On the opening title track, Lenderman depicts a guy who’s ultimately surmised to be a “jerk.” 

Some have passion
Some have purpose
You have sneakin' backstage to hound the girls in the circus

Interestingly enough, he also chooses to address this all directly to the audience, sketching this caricature while attributing every quality to you. He continues on in a biblical batch of lyrics that hit me as Father John Misty-esque on first listen. 

You’ve opened the Bible in a public place
You’ve opened the Bible to the very first page
And one of these days
It will all end
Your tired approach to original sin

As this story unfolds, the rest of the band slowly emerges behind him: guitar, drums, and a fiddle that carves its way through the mix beautifully. This track also features an upright bass and trombone courtesy of Landon George and backup vocals from Karly Hartzman. Other than a handful of assists like these, the guitar, drums, and bass found throughout Manning Fireworks were all played by Lenderman himself. Many familiar occupants of the Wednesday Cinematic Universe still appear throughout the album: you’ve got Xandy Chelmis on pedal steel, Ethan Baechtold on piano, and Colin Miller on trumpet as well as the aforementioned “slide bebo.” 

For all the talk of Lenderman’s Rorschach-like lyrics, there are moments when even Lenderman himself seems befuddled by others. At one point in “Rip Torn,” he recounts a confounding exchange

You said, “There’s men and then there’s movies.
Then there’s men and ‘Men in Black’”
You said, “There’s milkshakes and there’s smoothies.”
You always lose me when you talk like that

It’s nice to know that sometimes Lenderman gets turned around too. Usually, you’re not sure if he meant what he said to be so profound or funny, but usually, somehow, it’s both. I think the man himself addresses this pretty succinctly on “Joker Lips,” where he sings, “Please don't laugh only half of what I said was a joke / Every Catholic knows he could've been pope.”

On his early work (especially), it was easy to draw a clear connection between MJ and artists like Jason Molina. Some of that’s vocally, but a lot of it is spiritual, too. I think there are similar connections to be made between Lenderman and Neil Young, David Berman, Jim James, and Doug Martsch. Across his discography, there are in-song nods to classic rock legends like Dylan, Clapton, Zevon, and The Band, so this dude obviously knows his stuff. Even with all those reference points in mind, above all else, MJ Lenderman sounds like himself.

Nobody else could pen a line like “Kahlua shooter / DUI scooter” and deliver it like that. Only this mind could come up with, “I’ve got a houseboat docked at the Himbo Dome.” Only MJ Lenderman could write, “It falls apart / We all got work to do / It gets dark / We all got work to do” and make it sound that revelatory. The balance between these two polarities is what makes him one of my favorite songwriters to emerge this decade. 

Throughout these incredible lyrical flexes, there are a handful of artistic throughlines. Religion comes up a few times, as does romance and separation or misinterpretation. While you could read into the interpersonal stuff any type of way, I tend to think of those examples as little brush strokes that add detail to each individual character and, ultimately, MJ as a narrator. When all’s said and done, I take Manning Fireworks as a depiction and rejection of being a jerk. On “Rudolph,” the record’s lead single, MJ bemoaned

How many roads must a man walk down til he learns
He’s just a jerk who flirts with the clergy nurse til it burns?

Then, on the album’s opening track, Lenderman and Hartzman harmonize as the two sing a verse that seems to explain the record’s namesake. 

Once a perfect little baby
Who’s now a jerk
Standing close to the pyre, manning fireworks

How does one start so pure and end up so muddled? Well, the answers are infinite, and Manning Fireworks delves into but a handful of examples. To me, this record reads as a tome dedicated to documenting a select few of these journeys from a faultless point of origin to a messy, conflicted, and flawed person. The record is populated with odd people who are at once relatable and sympathetic yet ultimately feel like cautionary tales of who not to be. Sometimes, it’s an outright condemnation; most of the time, however, MJ seems content just to tell these stories and let the listener take their own interpretation away from his words. Anyone can be a jerk, but there’s much to be mined from how they got that way. 

In an interview with The Guardian earlier this year, MJ Lenderman was asked about the concept of “Dudes Rock,” a term that emerged in shitposty left-leaning spaces online whenever a man was seen doing something stupid, kinda dangerous, possibly ingenious, but mostly harmless. Over time, the phrase got obscured, watered-down, and over-used to the point where it became tired and cringey. Lenderman rejects this notion outright, explaining, “I don’t really resonate with whatever ‘dudes rock’ is. I don’t want the music to come across like it’s not inclusive to everybody – like somebody who’s not a dude.” Which is totally right. 

While that phrase was once meant to evoke carefree institutions like Jackass or, musically, bands like Japandroids, it’s since been perverted into something a tad more sinister. As astutely pointed out in his essay “The Death Of The Dude,” Jay Papandreas lays out the solitary dark side of Dudes Rock, explaining an important distinction in the namesake: “The Dude cannot rock alone. It's Dudes Rock, not Dude Rocks.”

To that end, the record wraps on “Bark At The Moon.” The song begins with Lenderman in free fall and looking for a connection.

I’ve lost my sense of humor
I’ve lost my driving range
I could really use your two cents, babe
I could really use the change

This unnamed other offers some advice in return.

You said it takes revision
You said it takes finesse
Don’t move to New York City, babe
It’s gonna change the way you dress
It’s gonna change the way you dress

After throwing up an SOS, the pair within this song splits off, with one person drinking to excess and the other hopping on a plane. “You’re in on my bit / you’re sick of the schtick / well what did you expect?” Lenderman says, sounding world-weary as ever. Our narrator goes on to detail his perceived lack of experiences, singing

I’ve never seen the Mona Lisa
I’ve never really left my room
I’ve been up too late with Guitar Hero
Playing “Bark At The Moon”
Awoooo
Bark at the moon

We’re treated to one more rippin’ guitar solo, and then the instruments crash to a stop. All that’s left is a distorted singe of feedback. As this feedback sustains, it’s almost like you’re waiting for the band to come back on stage to play an encore. The air is still abuzz with energy and noise, but then… nothing. The band doesn’t come back. Instead, the drone stretches on for a little over six minutes until the song winds to a close and we’re left with silence on the other end of the record. 

I think that’s a super bold way to end an album, and I kinda love it. At first, I thought it was just a novel way to undercut a more traditional closer. I could close my eyes and practically see Lenderman’s guitar leaned up against an amp, each squealing into the other. Then I noticed something important in the album credits. 

Not only is this drone attributed to Lenderman, but practically every other featured player on the album. Karly Hartzman, Colin Miller, Landon George, Shane McCord, and Adam McDaniel are all credited on the track. To me, that attribution acts as one of the most poignant reminders of community and togetherness. This buzz that could have been achieved by one guitar is actually the work of multiple people. Imagining all these musicians in the studio (or on stage) sustaining this feedback like the shoegaze bands of yore, all building and mounting this one sound, is really beautiful. Most importantly, and most tellingly, that all-hands-on-deck feeling of bringing in all these friends and collaborators is a far cry from the jerk we heard about at the outset of the record, standing off by himself, manning fireworks.