Rising Star

Mark Jacob Lenderman is technically homeless.

As we’re walking to a bar near his hotel, he explains that after moving to Durham, North Carolina, he’s been staying with friends while also shacking up at the occasional rented room during those vanishingly rare moments when he’s not on tour. He wants to find a permanent home, but he’s got a lot going on at the moment.

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I’ve caught him at a weird time, it seems.

“I’m having trouble with…. the space to do anything that’s not right in front of me at the moment,” he says, after ordering himself fries and a Narragansett beer. Not having a home to call his own, he says, is “contributing to maybe putting off dealing with everything else going on in my life. But maybe that’s just an excuse.”

He’s wearing a gray pullover and a blue cap he got playing for New Orleans college radio station WTUL. His wiry shoulders seem to hold more expectations about the future of rock music than he ever signed up for, and the slight gap in his front teeth makes his already boyish face seem almost cherubic.

The 25-year-old has been a welcome and ubiquitous presence for a certain kind of music fan for the past few years. It’s mid-September, and he just got back from the American Honors & Awards, and learned that he will be playing The Tonight Show with Jimmy Fallon two days hence, to promote Manning Fireworks, one of the most acclaimed albums of the year. Last year, his band Wednesday released the well received Rat Saw God, a picaresque account of frontwoman Karly Hartzman’s Southern upbringing. He also played guitar and sang on Tigers Blood, the acclaimed recent album by Waxahatchee, the songwriting project of Katie Crutchfield; she reached out about collaborating after seeing him play SXSW.

There’s a lot of MJ Lenderman in the air these days, but he swears he didn’t plan it this way.

“Over the past couple of years, I was working on stuff that’s now all hitting at the same time,” he says. “So that’s been interesting to see. It’s a lot of attention, and it’s pretty uncomfortable. But it’s all good stuff, right?”

Wednesday recently wound down an 18-month tour; and MJ is about to start his own 18-month tour. His life is an overstuffed box he’s trying not to drop. (And, he points out, all his clothes are in a tub in his car.)

“I just have a lot of things tangled up in my head, between my living situation and how busy I’m about to be and just doing interviews and sharing my personal life… trying to do as little of that as possible,” he says.

He sounds hesitant. “I don’t know. It’s not something I’m used to, I guess.”

MJ Lenderman’s pandemic years were a golden age of self discovery in cheap housing on the edge of town. (Credit: Karly Hartzman)

When MJ was eight, his dad showed him a DVD of My Morning Jacket’s 2004 Bonnaroo performance. And that was pretty much all it took.

“They’re playing this really melodic, cool, country music, and their energy was really exciting to me.” His dad, a local family doctor, was a huge music fan, and he grew up to be a truly rad father. They’d watch Jackass together (MJ remembers thinking, “This is maybe a little too edgy to be watching with my dad,”), turned him on to Pavement, and bought him Sonic Youth’s Murray Street for his 13th birthday. MJ says “Unmade Beds” has been a source of comfort lately.

He dropped out of guitar lessons as soon as he learned what he needed and then started forming bands and releasing records via Bandcamp in high school. He made it through three semesters studying audio engineering at UNC before dropping out in 2019. “Honestly, I didn’t really want to go in the first place.”

In 2019 he released his self-titled debut album (he doesn’t acknowledge anything he released in high school and has tried to scrub it from the internet). The year before, he met Karly and started collaborating with Wednesday — they later started dating — and began drumming with local songwriter Indigo De Souza. “We started touring a decent bit, which was a little bit of proof that maybe this could be a job.”

When the COVID lockdown hit, Karly and MJ moved in together, and members of Wednesday and other local artist friends moved in next door. They were living on the edges of town in cheap housing owned by “an old Buncombe County boy” named Gary King, who became a surrogate grandpa. “He loved us. He chain-smoked cigarettes in his kitchen all day. He would tell us crazy stories and say pretty profane things. Like maybe you shouldn’t take him out in public, but he would do anything for us.”

This is where MJ learned to be a songwriter and a bandmate and figured out what kind of musician he wanted to be. “We would wake up and just sit on the porch all day and we would sometimes play music together, it just felt very creative in the house,” he says. He was particularly inspired just by watching Karly. “She’s always working on something. Whether it’s sewing, or drawing, or writing, she doesn’t let a day go by without doing something. She’s a true artist. It’s really inspiring,” he says, with reverence.

“A lot of music came out of that. Ghost of Your Guitar Solo and Boat Songs were made at the same time,” he says of his second and third solo albums, released in 2021 and 2022. “We’re out on this huge field. The mountains right in front of us, and a small roadway down the hill.” Everyone kept their doors unlocked and popped by whenever.

Karly and Wednesday pedal steel player Xandy Chelmis worked at the nearby club The Mothlight, so the owners allowed the band to rehearse there while it was shuttered and later introduced them to the owners of local studio Drop of Sun, where everyone started recording.

It was a wonderful, formative time for him, one that couldn’t last. Gary King and his wife passed away earlier this year, and the property was sold; Karly and MJ broke up and she moved to Greensboro, a few hours away. He misses the times he could just drop by on people. Now everything is scheduled so far in advance. Today, he’s debating whether to hang out with his drummer later or call it an early night.

“I miss being so physically close to my friends,” he says, wistfully. “It still feels so recent to me.”

MJ Lenderman is fascinated with jawzrsize, the dubious online fad of chewing a rubber ball to gain movie star cheekbones. (Credit: Karly Hartzman)

In 2021, MJ Lenderman released Ghost of Your Guitar Solo, and Wednesday put out Twin Plagues, the first full album of theirs he played on. He found himself in the position of generating buzz for two separate projects at the same time, a neat trick if you can pull it off.

On Twin Plagues, he showed how confident he’d become as a lead guitarist, drawing from Gram Parsons, Neil Young, Dinosaur Jr., and My Bloody Valentine in equal measure. “For everybody around my age who plays music, genre doesn’t exist,” he says of his heterodox approach. During the pandemic he began reading more and “becoming more interested in fiction and what you could do with that,” he says, “and how to use humor as a flavor in the songs.” He began zeroing in on his great subject: delusional, oafish men who use blusterous chest-thumping in an attempt to hide their shortcomings. Like fellow Southern auteur Danny McBride, he loves finding humor in fast-talking, macho bullshit.

On Boat Songs, he skewered Michael Jordan and Dan Marino. On Manning Fireworks, his first for the major indie Anti-, his guitar playing is more fiery than ever and his writing even sharper. He looks at losers caught cheating while in Vegas (“She’s Leaving You”), a dude whose fancy consumer goods can’t disguise his existential loneliness (“Wristwatch”), and a poor sap struggling with the indignity of getting dumped at McDonald’s (“You Don’t Know The Shape I’m In.”) He’s a young master at setting a scene with sharp details and wordplay but even as he examines the performative nature of modern masculinity, he is never without pity.

“One of my favorite authors is Larry Brown, and he’s known for having a level of empathy for all his characters, no matter how bad they are,” he says. “That’s just good writing to me, giving somebody a full, well-rounded context.”

MJ, who has two older sisters and one younger, was in high school when Trump was elected president and is part of the generation of young men who grew up with #MeToo as a cultural backdrop. “People started talking about gender and sexual harassment and how prevalent that stuff is,” he says. He admits, with prodding, that he’s a feminist, even if that’s a loaded term in some online circles.

Lenderman has a fascination with dysfunctional men and monitors the so-called online manosphere — home to maladjusted cranks, propaganda shills, Joe Rogan superfans, and misogynists. “It’s just so hard for me to imagine a brain that could look at somebody like Nick Fuentes or Tim Pool talk and be like, ‘This guy is saying it like it is.’”

He’s lately become morbidly fascinated with jawzrsize, the dubious online fad of chewing a rubber ball to gain movie star cheekbones, and he recently watched a lengthy BBC documentary on incels. “It just makes me ask how people ended up where they were. What were their circumstances beforehand? Were they always that way? Or were they influenced by something else?” 

Society has become increasingly fragmented and isolated, and MJ strives to have compassion for people who feel lost in the modern world. “Maybe I’m just naive, but I tend to feel like people can be good if their circumstances were different.”

Suddenly he bursts out laughing. He is looking at a shirtless, tattooed dude jogging while punching a small rubber ball that’s hanging from a contraption attached to his head.

“You’re going to write a song about that, right?” I say.

“That’s better than jawzrsize, for sure,” he responds.

Earlier this year, Wednesday toured with the noisy New York band Hotline TNT, and Lenderman joined them nearly every night to cover “Quiet,” a Smashing Pumpkins cut. But before that, Wednesday once crashed at Hotline TNT frontman Will Anderson’s place in Brooklyn, and Will and MJ played a game of hoops after they discovered a shared passion for basketball.

“He said, ‘Oh, yeah, I played a little bit in high school. I actually hit a game-winning shot. I might have the video somewhere,’” Anderson says, “and then, within three seconds, he had the video ready to show me. His dad or mom took the video from the stands; he actually did hit a game-winner.”

Lenderman presents himself as unbothered and a good hang. But you don’t casually push yourself to learn to play guitar like a young Neil Young, and no one can maintain (and tour in support of) two increasingly popular indie projects by accident.

“I think that the vibe that MJ puts out is the slacker rock ’90s guy,” Anderson says.

Lenderman concedes: “I’ve been accused my whole life of not caring about anything. I think just maybe because of my demeanor. But as far as music goes, that is where I put all my energy.”

But he’s thrilled his hard work is paying off, and loves that people might find solace in his music the way he’s found it from his favorites, like Jason Molina. But everything else that comes with indie success is getting to be a bit much. He wishes the music could just exist in a vacuum, “but that isn’t really super realistic,” he says. “I definitely get frazzled.”

He’s aware that there are fans who were invested in the idea of him and Hartzman as a couple and are now discussing the end of their relationship. “That’s the kind of stuff that’s really weird. People talking about it is a totally different thing than what’s actually real,” he says, haltingly, clearly choosing his words carefully. “Of course, me and Karly have a good relationship still. We still play music together and collaborate. We have a good creative relationship and friendship at the core. So I’m not really too worried about all that.” She would sing back-up with him when he played The Tonight Show.

He spent 200 days on the road last year, and he’s eager to get back out “because that’ll be like the most regularity I’ve had.” It’s the routine he knows best; just keep moving forward no matter what. It was tough for him to find time to record his own album between touring dates, but he’s somehow made another album with Wednesday (“probably the best one yet”). But he pushes back on the idea that he might be using work as an avoidance mechanism to work through everything going on with him, saying he’s thinking about going back to therapy.

He’s not always as unbothered as he seems.

“I’ve been accused my whole life of not caring about anything. I think just maybe because of my demeanor,” says Michael Jacob Lenderman. (Credit: Charlie Boss)

We’ve moved on to the roof lounge of his hotel for more beers. He talks about the films of John Cassavetes and Paul Schrader, who made careers of exploring difficult, flawed men, and Air, Ben Affleck’s film about Nike’s quest to sign Michael Jordan. “It’s kind of a boring movie,” he shrugs.

Last year was the first time he started getting recognized, and when he played at the Pitchfork Music Festival, he “got stopped ten times to take photos. It’s kind of embarrassing to me for some reason.” This year is the first time he’s been the face of an album cycle. “It’s a new thing for me,” he says. He’s about to finish his thought when a young woman with a septum piercing and sleeve tattoos walks over to ask for a photo.

“I’m sorry, I don’t want to be a freak, but I’m such a big fan,” she says.

“Really?”

After they take a photo, he’s bashfully grinning from ear to ear. “That was nice” he says.

He’s still debating whether to turn in early or text his drummer. Those moments to just hang out will become rarer, but he also has to pace himself before things get started up again.

He admits that maybe the whole not having a home thing is a bigger deal than he let on. He’d love to find time to buy a place, he likes the idea of not having roommates for the first time in his entire life.

“It’s something I’ve always wanted; I had a big family growing up,” he says. “So part of me is craving alone time, but as soon as I get alone, I’m not really sure what to do with myself.”

He cracks a wry smile. A busy man who doesn’t know when he’ll find the time to learn how to be alone with himself.

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