Friday night, I was on a flight back to Seattle from NYC with my six-year-old daughter, emailing MJ Lenderman’s PR team with bated breath, eagerly refreshing my emails, to see if he could get me into the months and months and months and months sold out MJ Lenderman show at The Neptune.
MJ, aka Jake Lenderman, nearly two decades younger than me, is still, somehow, the voice of my generation.
Early last summer, a darkly funny, mopey, post-teen-angst, hook-ridden masterpiece of a song came on my Spotify. “You can put your clothes back on, she’s leaving you. No time to apologize for the things you do. Go rent a Ferrari and sing the blues. Believe that Clapton was the second coming.”
“She’s Leaving You,” Lenderman’s second most popular song with over 5 million streams, would soon own my 2025 Spotify wrapped, pulling at me like Smells Like Teen Spirit did when I was ten or eleven. It hardly sounds like Nirvana, but hearing it made me feel everything about discovering something personally new, something that twitchingly pinches your heart and stomach–even in mid-life.
MJ Lenderman is a brilliant songwriter. If you’re still unfamiliar (see GQ’s profile from last week) you may recognize his voice from Waxahatchee’s Right Back To It – one of Barack Obama’s favorite anthems of 2024 — the perfectly imperfect vocals that drop in and out to make a monumental song even better.
His band, MJ Lenderman and The Wind eloquently mixes classic Americana with the sharpest singer-songwriters of the late 60s, 90s, and early 2000s. Think Neil Young meets Songs Ohia and most noticeably, The Weakerthans. But also a heavy handful of Dinosaur Jr and maybe some Built to Spill.
MJ’s words and music are carefully crafted yet not too precious. Raw enough, humbly self-conscious, and funny. And also, as I recently learned, crooning dad rock for those of us who grew up going to basement punk shows. Or, as Leah Weinstein tweeted back in January,
“Wilco dads of today pave the way for the MJ Lenderman dads of tomorrow.”
Let’s keep moving.
After a solid, War On Drugs-inspired set from tourmates Wild Pink, MJ Lenderman and The Wind took the stage, a couple of sticks of incense filling the air on stage right, appropriately opening with Ghost of Your Guitar Solo. It’s an older, slow build of a song, basically an instrumental with few sleepy lyrics at the end that gradually bled into the title track off his 2024 album Manning Fireworks.
What is so special about seeing MJ Lenderman and the Wind play live is the balance of melancholy with pure–even silly– joy. These are sad and introspective songs, but there’s also humor in them, and we see that mix in how the band jives on stage. MJ croons while Landon George, sometimes with a light or wry smirk, delivers pulsing bass lines. Xandy Chelmis, aka “pick up the fuckin’ fiddle, Xandy!’ harmonizes equally crooning lines on the dobro (Lap steel) and fiddle, in tune with Ethan Baethtold’s piano, and occasionally stands up to rock the fuck out on tambourine, shaking it like Will Ferrell with a cowbell.
All the while, in his own corner, guitarist Jon Samuels, looking like Faith No More’s Jim Martin if he played with Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Young, is wailing, headbanging, and having the time of his life, just like the fans, who hang on MJ’s every word.
Some of these fans included childhood friends–now living in Seattle– who came out to show their support, one with a recognizable charm. “Woah, that’s my Catholic school sweatshirt! Fuck you, Patrick Wilson” Lenderman screamed when he recognized an old classmate in the front row.
And then there are the pulsing, drawn-out jams where a song ends yet keeps going – kinda like Smashing Pumpkins’ Drown, soaked in feedback and hemorrhaging notes, often laden with a flange and delay, somehow never feel wanky. We just soak it in.
MJ Lenderman and The Wind’s twenty-two-song set covered all of Manning Fireworks, with a few songs from earlier albums like Boat Songs, Ghost of Your Guitar Solo, and Lucky. While I was a little bummed he didn’t do a Neil Young cover this time around, his renditions of Smog’s “37 Push Ups”, and Patterson Hood’s haunting and super relevant “Uncle Disney” rounded out the end of his set quite wonderfully.
