How a simple daily habit made the music world stop and listen

The 26-year-old who is being hailed as “the next great hope for indie rock” is currently smoking a cigarette outside a mechanic’s garage near where he lives in Chapel Hill, North Carolina. His 2008 Toyota mini-van has a dead battery. World domination will have to wait an hour or so.

He makes music under the name MJ Lenderman, but everyone calls him Jake. Last year his fourth studio album in five years, Manning Fireworks, ended up on just about every top 10 list that mattered. He’s been breathlessly compared to Bill Callahan, Drive-By Truckers and Neil Young. And he’s on a massive tour that started in October last year, will get to Australia in March, and doesn’t end until September.

As if that wasn’t enough, he also sang and played guitar on the equally adored 2024 album Tigers Blood, by his friend Katie Crutchfield, who uses the musical moniker Waxahatchee. Right Back To It, a beautiful ode to the push and pull of a long-term relationship, drew special attention, in no small measure because of Lenderman’s reedy harmonies, which take the melodic road less travelled, but somehow work perfectly with Crutchfield’s high-wire twang.

“Well, thanks,” he says. “But, honestly? I think she suggested a melody for me to sing, and then in the time it took me to walk over to the vocal booth, I had forgotten it already. So I sang something totally different. And I guess she ended up liking what I did anyway. So that worked.”

He offers a bashful smile, shrugs and takes a drag on his cigarette. The next great hope of indie rock isn’t big on overthinking things.

MJ Lenderman performs in New York as part of a global tour than lands in Australia in March.Credit: Rolling Stone via Getty Images

He grew up in Asheville, an artsy, alternative city in the Blue Ridge Mountains that’s a 3½-hour drive from where he’s now living. His parents were big music fans. Lenderman remembers them playing CDs by everyone from Dinosaur Jr. to Drive-By Truckers in the family car. His first live music experience was when they took him to see the Dandy Warhols, and every Thanksgiving the family watched The Last Waltz, Martin Scorsese’s acclaimed 1978 concert film featuring the Band. With folks like that, how on earth does a kid rebel?

“Yeah, there was a lot of good music in the house, but there was also the Dave Matthews Band, so, you know,” he says, grinning.

There’s a line in his song Joker Lips that goes: “Every Catholic knows he could have been pope.” He borrowed it from an interview with Harry Crews, one of the gritty US Southern writers whose work he has devoured and admired, along with Larry Brown, Barry Hannah and Charles Portis. But there’s some personal experience in there too.

“My childhood was pretty heavily Catholic. I went to Catholic school and was an altar boy when I was a kid. I thought maybe one day I could be a priest or something. But that didn’t last too long. Pretty much as soon as I was confirmed, I got out of there.”

He released his self-titled debut album in 2019. It was a collection of measured, introspective songs. What he has become today crystallised on 2022’s Boat Songs and blossomed on Manning Fireworks, which both highlight his ability to mix pop culture references with tales that have depth and pathos.

‘I typically start a song with something that will make me laugh.’

MJ Lenderman

You’ll hear him reference playing video game Guitar Hero (Bark at the Moon), describe a sad-sack passed out in a bowl of Lucky Charms cereal (Rip Torn) and, bizarrely, detail a dark fantasy in which Lightning McQueen, one of the animated automobiles in the Pixar film Cars, goes on a rampage that involves running over Rudolph the reindeer. It sounds too kooky for words, but somehow Lenderman makes it work. It could have something to do with his writing methods.

“I picked up a way of working where I write 20 lines a day,” he says. “It’s been a really fruitful practice for me. I have this bank of ideas to work with, so I can later sit down to write a song, and I realise that multiple things I’ve written down can be connected. Writing can be such a mysterious thing. A lot of the stuff is from my childhood. And I typically start a song with something that will make me laugh.”

It’s what he does with it after the initial laugh that makes the difference. On Manning Fireworks he writes a lot about male characters who are flawed, self-obsessed, toxic, deluded, or a combination of all of the above. In Wristwatch, he sings, “I’ve got a houseboat docked at the Himbo Dome and a wristwatch that’s a pocket knife and a megaphone.” The song uses the expensive, flamboyant timepiece on the guy’s wrist as a symbol of his emptiness and desperation to be noticed and lauded. Lenderman has said that he was thinking about men like Andrew Tate, the so-called king of toxic masculinity.

The album’s title track has a more sinister protagonist. Lenderman leaves a trail of telling details such as “sneaking backstage to hound a girl in the circus” and “one of these days you’ll kill a man for asking a question you don’t understand”. The character may be anonymous, but there are traits shared by the current US commander-in-chief.

Collaboration remains a key for MJ Lenderman: “I would probably get bored with myself if my own music was the only thing I was doing.″⁣Credit: NYT

“I think that ... a lot of people feel like they’ve been given the OK to be a certain way and do it out loud and not in secret any more,” he says. “I spend a lot of time on the internet and YouTube, and I see how much power male podcasters and influencers have now. So I guess I was thinking about that a lot when I wrote these songs.”

In the middle of last year, Lenderman and his partner, fellow musician Karly Hartzman, broke up. Lenderman joined her band, Wednesday, in 2020, playing guitar and singing backing vocals. The split was amicable. Lenderman plays and sings on the next Wednesday record, but is not sure he’ll be able to tour with them. He also plays live with Waxahatchee whenever his schedule permits.

“I love being a part of recording and playing and just serving other people’s music,” he says. “I think it’s an important muscle to have. And it definitely informs what I do with my music. With all the time playing with Wednesday, I feel like it’s made me a much better guitar player.”

He takes another drag on his cigarette.

“To be honest,” he says, exhaling smoke, “I think I would probably get bored with myself if my own music was the only thing I was doing.”

MJ Lenderman plays Melbourne’s Forum on March 21; Meadow Festival, Bambra, March 22; Sydney Opera House, March 25; Brisbane’s Princess on March 27; and A&I Hall, Bangalow on March 28.