Following last year’s acclaimed live album, And the Wind (Live and Loose!), and 2022’s surprise breakthrough Boat Songs, MJ Lenderman is set to release Manning Fireworks.
The first single, ‘She’s Leaving You,’ is a “portrait of a middle-aged man cheating his way through a midlife crisis, at least until he gets caught and blasts Clapton in a rented Ferrari en route to Vegas.” The song’s accompanying video was directed by Whitmer Thomas and Clay Tatum.
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ABOUT MJ LENDERMAN
Jake Lenderman recorded Boat Songs, his third album, in 2021 and released it under his initials, MJ Lenderman. At the time, he was a 20-year-old guitarist working at an ice cream shop in his mountain hometown of Asheville, North Carolina, getting away for self-booked tours of his own songs or with the band he’d recently joined, Wednesday (with whom he recently toured Australia).
But as the pandemic took hold just as he turned 21, Lenderman—then making more money through state unemployment than he had ever serving scoops—enjoyed the sudden luxury of free time. Every day, he would read, paint, and write; every night, he and his roommates, bandmates, and best friends would drink and jam in their catawampus rental home, singing whatever came to mind over their collective racket. Some of those lines stuck around the next morning, slowly becoming 2021’s self-made Ghost of Your Guitar Solo and then 2022’s Boat Songs. With its barbed little jokes, canny sports references, and gloriously ragged guitar solos, Boat Songs became one of that year’s biggest breakthroughs, a ramshackle set of charms and chuckles. Much the same happened for Wednesday.
The new MJ Lenderman album Manning Fireworks was recorded at Asheville’s Drop of Sun Studios during multiple four-day stints whenever Lenderman had a break from the road. Co-produced with frequent collaborator Alex Farrar, Lenderman plays nearly every instrument here. It is not only his fourth full-length and studio debut for ANTI-, but also a remarkable development in his story as an incredibly incisive singer-songwriter, whose propensity for humour always points to some uneasy, disorienting darkness. He wrote and made it with full awareness of the gaze Boat Songs had generated, how people now expected something great. Lenderman is still sorting through the kinds of songs he wants to write and remembering they can go anywhere he wants—much like they did back at those late-night house jams, no matter who is now looking.