"every day is a miracle, not to mention a threat"

On apathy, tragicomedy, and MJ Lenderman

The first couple weeks back in my apartment I’m sleeping like shit. My new upstairs neighbors are fond of stomping around at all hours of the night. Even with all the lights off and the black-out curtains drawn, my eyes have adapted to see in the dark like a bat’s. Like something in my room is trying to pry them open. I can’t lie in the same position for more than a minute without it feeling unnatural to be so still. 

Night becomes morning after hours of futile rotation and kicking the sheets off only to pull them back around me again, and now I can see a sliver of early light slicing through the corner of the window. I’m not falling back asleep anytime soon, so I get up and go for a walk, passing the soccer fields and tennis courts by my apartment and heading towards campus. 

This routine is the best thing to come out of my frequent bouts of insomnia, the mornings where I drag myself out of bed at a time that feels grotesquely early and trick myself into believing I’m being productive, because at least I’m using the time to be half-asleep while standing upright. Maybe this is how I finally turn myself into a morning person.

On this one particular morning, I end up stumbling into what appears to be some sort of sorority initiation ceremony, or the prelude to it. Campus tends to be pretty empty this early, but today I’m weaving through groups of girls in matching sundresses color-coded by affiliation. From a distance they’re just clusters of blue, pink, red, black, and white. I crouch down and speedwalk hunchbacked so as to not accidentally spoil any of their group photos, only to end up in a different group’s photo. When I say “excuse me” it feels like I’m apologizing for my bedhead and bare face and far-from-formal attire. 

After escaping the crowd, I continue on my usual path around the pond and stroll until the fog lifts and melts together with the late-August sun. By now the morning is so unbearably bright and heavy it almost seems to sweat. Not a cloud in sight, but I feel like I could lick the condensation from the air. My dehydration and sleep deprivation are finally catching up with me in the form of a headache slowly hammering through my skull.

“This morning wants to kill me,” I text a friend. It’s a line from MJ Lenderman’s song “Joker Lips,” and it’s become something we say to one another on days where things are less than ideal. We use the line “Every daughter of God has a little bad luck sometimes,” from another band that MJ Lenderman is also in to express a similar sentiment. I don’t actually think this morning wants to kill me, but I doubt it would care all that much if I died of other causes. 

I’ve had an advance copy of MJ Lenderman’s forthcoming album Manning Fireworks for over two months, but didn’t listen to it much until I returned to North Carolina. Save for a first listen on the 4th of July in Brooklyn, one with my best friend while visiting him in Chicago, and one during a road trip to Niagara Falls, I deliberately chose to abstain from it as much as possible.

I first got into MJ Lenderman the summer that I moved to his home state. Boat Songs stayed on my rotation as I settled into a college town on the river. I discovered that this record of jangly, observational fuzz-country songs paired well with John Jeremiah Sullivan’s essays and Ashleigh Bryant Phillips’s short stories and the two Wednesday albums that came out in the years before and after it. From there, I dug into Lenderman’s back catalog, where the songs were instrumentally denser but lyrically more sparse. 

I’ve been thinking about how we’re nearing the halfway point of the 2020s (if you can believe it) and that my favorite albums of the decade so far fall into two camps. First, there are the albums that I love but rarely revisit, perhaps because they’re emotionally or thematically fraught in a way that feels like a big commitment or something I should save for a special occasion. Like I’m not going to just throw on Fetch The Bolt Cutters or Ants From Up There or Why Does The Earth Give Us People To Love? on some random Tuesday. On the opposite end of the favorite albums spectrum, there are ones like Blue Rev or Cha Cha Palace or Natural Brown Prom Queen, all masterpieces in their own right, and ones that are imminently replayable. Boat Songs falls into the latter category. 

I’ll listen to Boat Songs pretty much anytime the sun is out, and since I’ve mostly lived on the Carolina Coast since it dropped, it’s usually Boat Songs weather. This isn’t to say that I don’t find depth or profundity in that album—there’s a wistfulness that comes over me whenever I hear the “Do What you Gotta Do” interpolation in “TLC Cage Match,” and sometimes I think that “You Are Every Girl To Me” is one of the most romantic songs ever written. But my main associations with Boat Songs are holding up a glass of whatever I’m drinking (even if it’s just water) in a phantom toast when Lenderman shrugs “Yeah, I love drinkin’ too” at the end of “Hangover Game,” or puckering my face like I’ve just sucked on a lemon and singing along “mmmmmmHONEY!” at the chorus of “Tastes Just Like It Costs.” Boat Songs has its dark moments, but it’s mostly good, goofy fun. It isn’t the kind of record I feel the need to really sink into.

Manning Fireworks doesn’t have the same jaunty, high-fiviness of Boat Songs—what I’d call the “hell yeah” factor, i.e. moments that make you say “hell yeah.” At least, they’re not celebratory “hell yeahs,” Perhaps in some of these moments a serious nod and a deferential “hell yeah” muttered in a “peace be with you” cadence, or maybe a 21-high five salute would be more appropriate. 

Since his last record, Lenderman’s songs have slowed in tempo and in mood. As he’s expanded his backing band—which he gave us a taste of on last year’s live album, And The Wind (Live and Loose!)—he’s leaned into wider, more ambling instrumentation, inching into “jam bands for people who aren’t into jam bands” territory (your Built To Spills, your Yo La Tengos, y’know jam bands but without everything that makes most jam bands fucking insufferable). Sometimes Manning Fireworks is meandering in the way that Ghost of Your Guitar Solo and self-titled are, though Lenderman’s work’s gotten progressively more hi-fi and more narrative-driven with each record.

The characters that populate Manning Fireworks feel realer and closer than those on previous records, often uncomfortably so. While Boat Songs mostly dealt in passing snapshots of sports stars and strangers, Manning Fireworks examines the bad fortune and bad behavior of its inhabitants warts-and-all. Lenderman’s always had a bit of a Sad Clown thing going on (probably a big part of why he gets compared to Neil Young and David Berman all the time), but on Manning Fireworks his one-liners are drier than they were on previous records, and they cut a hell of a lot deeper. If someone’s spent the day “draining cum from hotel showers,” as the protagonist of “Joker Lips” has, you don’t need to ask how they’re doing—you already know. The sardonic declaration, “I’ve got a beach home up in Buffalo” feels akin to Frank Ocean brushing over his feelings of unrequited love with the line “Got a beach house I could sell you in Idaho” on “Thinkin’ Bout You.” I don’t know what the “Himbo Dome” is or why the guy from “Wristwatch” has a houseboat docked there, but Lenderman makes it sound so steely and sinister. 

The image of a tire-torn “beautiful doe” makes “Rudolph” the bloodiest Christmas song since “Grandma Got Run Over By A Reindeer,” and it’s rendered even sillier when Lenderman reveals that Lightning McQueen from the Cars franchise is the one with Rudolph’s blood on his hands (or, more accurately, his wheels). The violent scene is followed by a love confession from a Catholic priest: “I wouldn’t be in the seminary if I could be with you”—a line that I recently quoted while trying to explain the appeal of the “Hot Priest” archetype popularized by Fleabag. It all hinges on the idea that a man of the cloth could love you more than he loves God. Stealing someone’s man? Easy, predictable, overdone. Stealing God’s man? Now that is true power AND true romance!

There seems to be an unwritten law that if you write about MJ Lenderman you must use the phrase “Dudes Rock” at least once. While Lenderman’s become the semi-reluctant patron saint of Dudes Rocking, it’s safe to say that the Dudes whose stories fill out the world of Manning Fireworks are, for the most part, not rocking. They are suffering in silence. 

Or, they are causing others to suffer—usually not as part of some meticulously-laid plan, but laissez-faire thoughtlessness. “Once a perfect little baby / who’s now a jerk,” Lenderman sings on the title track, about a Christian wanna-be womanizer convinced of and blinded by his own piousness. It’s implied that everyone around him sees through his shallow proselytizing (“You’ve opened the Bible in a public place / You’ve opened the Bible to the very first page”). The extremely-divorced protagonist of “She’s Leaving You” is a schmuck in a way that’s more pitiful than diabolical. His midlife crisis decision to rent a Ferrari and drive around Vegas blasting Eric Clapton and believing that the showgirls are in love with him makes him seem more like a Make-A-Wish kid than a deadbeat. As for the slippery tech bro making lofty promises in “Wristwatch,” he seems to barely even believe in his own grift. 

A few days ago, after a series of conversations with a few friends of mine who’ve gone through relatively recent breakups, I wrote in my journal about how sometimes it can be easier to tell yourself that someone who hurt you was actively plotting on your downfall than it is to admit that you were a casualty of their careless mistakes. I sometimes think that I’d rather have someone I care about sabotage me deliberately than hurt me by making me an afterthought. At least active cruelty requires some kind of careful, focused attention. 

In an essay I wrote a few months back, I said that all the men who’ve hurt me most—regardless of the nature of each of our individual relationships—did so in ways that weren’t calculated or attentive, but unsophisticated, insensitive, and oftentimes incidental. At the time it felt good to retroactively deny any of them the ability to claim some kind of emotional or intellectual superiority, but now I think that being sidelined might actually be worse. A male friend of mine read this essay and made a joke to me that went something like, “If I ever fall out with you, I’ll make sure to do it in the smartest, most complex way possible.” My point still stands: If you’re gonna be an asshole, at least do it with intention. Make it personal. 

The song on Manning Fireworks that makes me the saddest is its closer, the Ozzy Osbourne-by-way-of-Guitar-Hero-referencing “Bark At The Moon.” It’s technically ten minutes, but calling a three-and-a-half minute song with a six-and-a-half minute drone-solo outro a “ten-minute song” feels like a bit of a misnomer. Then again, I’ve recommended The Texas-Jerusalem Crossroads by Lift To Experience to two different people in the past week, so I’m not really one to talk.  

The heartbreak of “Bark At The Moon” is lazy and indifferent, and that’s what makes it sting: “You’re in on my bit / You’re sick of the schtick / Well, what did you expect?” It’s the equivalent of a pair of hands tossed up in the air, and it devastates like only apathy can. It leaves me with a stale taste in my mouth, thinking about how sorry and/or easy an existence it must be to care so little. The momentary cure to this melancholy is to howl along with the outro: “Awooooooo / Bark at the moon”

You could argue that Manning Fireworks follows an “idiot plot”—a literary concept in which the events of a story are necessitated by everyone involved being an idiot. Both its tragedy and comedy lie in the incompetence of its characters: too stupid to try to fuck people over and succeed, just stupid enough to fuck people over without trying—and fuck themselves over more than anyone else can. 

Or maybe I’m projecting far too much onto an album that rhymes “kahlua shooter” with “DUI scooter,” and using it all as an excuse to over-intellectualize my own feelings. 

To quote Michael Jordan Lenderman: “Please don’t laugh / only half of what I said was a joke.” It’s up to you to guess which half. I’m still not sure. 

Woof. Woof. Awooooooooooooo.