In Communion With MJ Lenderman

There’s something cathartic about a room full of strangers singing the words, “You don’t know the shape I’m in.” It’s not that the crowd wasn’t singing along to most every other song MJ Lenderman played at Montreal’s Fairmount Theatre, but it’s those lyrics – “What else can you say to help/A friend with a broken heart/You don’t know the shape I’m in” – sung not long after a hurricane devastated Lenderman’s home state of North Carolina, that seemed to encompass the questionable shape we are all in. 

Lenderman, 25, is currently on tour with his five-piece backup band (MJ Lenderman And The Wind) to promote his fifth album, Manning Fireworks. I had meant to see this show in Toronto, but it sold out almost immediately. I guess fewer people know Lenderman in Montreal, even though there’s something about him that fits in better there. I saw him on the street a couple of hours before his set, while getting dinner with a friend – a tall guy with a small entourage, he is hard to miss, but he looked like any university student in the city, with his T-shirt and shaggy curls. “That’s him,” I told my friend, who wasn’t familiar with him or his music. I felt silly immediately—Lenderman is so unassuming in person that just pointing him out somehow felt intrusive. 

“Why’s he so shy?” I overheard this kid ask his friends a song or two in. And it’s true that Lenderman didn’t interact much with the audience. He was actually the most subdued of the dudes on stage, functioning as the eye of the band’s storm. But lo-fi Lenderman seemed fitting – hunched over his guitar, closing his eyes, almost incantating rather than yelling, he reminded me of the indie frontmen of the ’90s, like Kurt Cobain and Elliott Smith. Lenderman belongs to that category of musicians who give the impression they aren’t all that thrilled to be on stage. From another angle, he was like the folk musicians of the ’60s or ’70s, in the casual way he handled the stage. Lenderman would speak to his band mid-performance, as though we weren’t there, as though they were just in some empty coffee house or bar jamming for each other. At other moments it felt like we were at one of those hippie festivals where everything is porous, with disparate bands playing together at the drop of a hat, sprawling across the stage and off, famous musicians commingling with the crowd. Amanda Petrusich captured this weird time-straddle that characterizes Lenderman and his music in her recent New Yorker profile: “Manning Fireworks could have been released in 1975, or 1994, or 2003, but that is not to say it’s deliberately nostalgic; Lenderman is simply making the kind of warm and astringent rock and roll that has felt untethered from time since 1968, when Neil Young released his self-titled debut.”

In The Ringer, Eric Ducker described Lenderman’s sound as “a blend of ’90s indie scrappiness, rangy ’70s rock, and classical country that’s woozy with pedal steel guitar.” And there was something unsurprising about him announcing during the encore that he was going to do a cover from Silver Jews’ 1998 album American Water (“The Wild Kindness”), after having already covered Smog’s “37 Push Ups” (from the 1993 album Julius Caesar) during the show. For his final encore, Lenderman brought his opener, Ryan Davis and the Roadhouse Band, back onto the stage for a rendition of “Werewolves of London,” Warren Zevon’s 1978 lark of a track. The two bands occupied the entirety of the stage; Davis really howled while Lenderman faded back. Lenderman mentioned he had learned songwriting from Davis, a “good-natured barfly” of a journeyman musician with his own impressive body of work, and he happily shared the spotlight. 

Like a lot of older Lenderman fans (when I say older, I mean over, like, 35), I found him through Waxahatchee, particularly his work on “Right Back to It” (Tigers Blood, 2024). He comes into the song a minute in, floating in the background (“Been yours for so long, come right back to iiiiit”).  The way Katie Crutchfield’s twang sails alongside his mournful gravel satisfies a yearning I didn’t know I had. It’s so rare to hear a man’s voice supporting a woman’s, and yet settled in the back there, Lenderman boosts the track somewhere higher. Without his voice, the song would be incomplete. It reminds me of those old folk tunes that work just fine on their own, but are somehow more affecting as a duet. “Girl from North Country” with Bob Dylan and Johnny Cash is one example that comes to mind, two guys mourning the loss of their one “true love,” but together.

From “Right Back to It” I listened to Lenderman’s more DIY stuff, from before Manning Fireworks (for which he consciously went more studio). I have to say I prefer the earlier sound— it’s got a grunginess that seems to suit him better. “Knockin” is my favorite if you want to hear what I mean. Seeing Lenderman live, where his voice became part of the wall of sound, I missed that bedroom quality. The show being sold as MJ Lenderman and The Wind, implying a  separation, made sense. It’s that solitary vulnerability, at his core, that seemed to have him saying with shock more than once in response to the rowdy audience: “Damn, y’all.”

At the same time, at various points in the show, there were lengthy expanses of jamming that seemed almost mystical. At first, during these extended instrumentals, I thought Lenderman might be losing the audience, which already seemed kind of in the dark with the Smog cover. But then something opened up in the unfamiliarity of that formless, all-surrounding sound that didn’t provide the dopamine hit of a hook. My eyes drifted to the ceiling, then closed, and slowly it started to feel like I was part of some kind of collective meditation I never wanted to end. I’m pretty sure that was the reason when the lights went up after two hours – during the encore Lenderman kept “one more song”-ing to the point that someone in the audience yelled his own lyric back at him: “We’ve heard that one before!” – the show felt so epic. He played so many great songs, but it was the atmosphere he created, an almost holy communion, that stuck.