MJ Lenderman joins rock and roll’s lineage of heartbreak kids

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MJ Lenderman's fifth solo album, Manning Fireworks, finds inspiration in The Band and the Drive-By Truckers. / Courtesy of the artist

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Can you remember the worst place where someone broke up with you? I think mine was my own San Francisco flat, during a New Year’s Eve party I was throwing — there I stood, stranded at midnight, nursing my plastic cup of André. Maybe your painful dumping happened at a show by your favorite band, or in the hallway outside an important class or meeting, or at a fancy restaurant before the second course came. These days, most breakups seem to unfold virtually; I’m not sure if this is a merciful development. A devastating text message allows for better camouflage when the tears well up. But it’s a closed casket. Facing reality can be harder when those ruinous words aren’t delivered directly from the mouth you will never kiss again.

MJ Lenderman, the North Carolina-based indie-rock bard who has just released his fifth solo album, Manning Fireworks, locates its most poignant moment of heartbreak in a perfectly pedestrian location. I’m reading “You Don’t Know the Shape I’m In” as a breakup song, though its wry poeticism fogs up the narrative a bit; the album abounds with stories of people who can’t maintain connections, and this one stands out as particularly tender, a love song sung after the reason for its existence has petered out. “We sat under a half-mast McDonald’s flag,” Lenderman sings in his crackly tenor as Shane McCord plays some mournfully deflating clarinet lines. “Broken birds tumble past my window.” Parking lot birds, the grimiest, most depressing kind.

As always, the perspective in this song is as fractured as the imagery; it’s unclear whether he’s doing the dumping, or if the partner from whom he’s drifted is the active party, or if he’s imagining the heartache of a friend. The scene feels as real as a tumble of mixed-up emotions, but that little dash of gritty realism — the fast-food emblem serving as a witness — turns out to be borrowed from a meme: Images of lowered flags at the fast-food giant’s franchises have been reposted on social media to signify everything from the death of a dignitary to a broken ice-cream machine, That’s Lenderman’s style: He’s a homespun magical realist, always throwing in something off-kilter to elevate his tales of lovable losers.

“You Don’t Know the Shape I’m In” is one of the quieter moments on Manning Fireworks, and possibly one of the more personal ones. Lenderman eschews straight-up confessional writing, but he and his ex (and — more people should be saying it — major songwriting influence) Karly Hartzman, both members of the beloved Asheville band Wednesday, severed their romantic bond during a grueling year as both the band’s and Lenderman’s solo star were on the rise. The sweet thing about this ballad, surrounded by other songs about emotional failure from the edgelord-eviscerating “Wristwatch” to the road-dog insomniac ramble “On My Knees,” is the way it forgives its wayward protagonists. Though someone punches a wall in the third verse, the song concludes in a disorganized flurry of woodwinds that scatters away any blame. The song itself heals the wound. “Clarinet singin’ its lonesome duckwalk,” Lenderman intones. “What else can you say to a friend with a broken heart?” Hartzman’s singing harmony.

Comparing Lenderman’s account of a deflating dream with its clear inspiration, The Band’s 1970 stomper “The Shape I’m In,” exposes a multi-generational shift in rock’s prevalent attitudes. Robbie Robertson’s portrait of a rogue in distress is a standout track on the Canadian-American ensemble’s third album, Stage Fright, released at the height of its stardom and colored by the troubles a rise like theirs (and, though things are different these days, Lenderman’s) can bring. After its Dylan-assisted debut Music From Big Pink and even more popular self-titled second album, the group was prospering financially and artistically, but heroin had infiltrated its ranks, with keyboardist Richard Manuel and bassist Rick Danko struggling particularly hard. The cleaner-living Robertson wrote “Shape” as a vehicle for Manuel, eerily predicting his bandmate’s eventual breakdown. (Manuel died by suicide in 1986.)

Musically, the song is wildly uptempo in The Band’s signature disassembling way, a manic episode fed by swagger and desperation. The song’s narrator preaches and proclaims and frantically calls for the woman who’s left him, screaming out words of advice and supplication that culminate in a lost soul’s cry for justice: “Now here I am back on the street for the crime of having nowhere to go!” Manuel howls as Levon Helm’s drums beat a quick path toward Garth Hudson’s churchy keyboards. Listening to it for the thousandth time, I suddenly realized its relationship to Otis Redding’s classic “(Sittin’ On the) Dock of the Bay” — “I can’t do what ten people tell me to do,” Redding declared in that missive from the end of the line, the triumph in his voice a last gasp in the face of defeat. He was trying to tell us the shape he was in, but in the end, he could only whistle.

In “Dock of the Bay,” Redding is on his knees. Except for that rousing moment in the bridge, he’s not a menace to anyone but himself. The voice in “The Shape I’m In,” on the other hand, could wreak havoc — there’s a masculine power behind his disorganized fury that’s compelling and frightening. MJ Lenderman imagines a guy like that in the title track of Manning Fireworks, the kind of marginal character whom people want around because he’s risky and adventurous; but the 25-year-old songwriter knows enough to issue a warning about him. "You was once a baby and now a jerk," he sings over a Garth Hudson-style organ swell. “Standing close to the pyre, manning fireworks.” Lenderman knows that wild men like that can’t be trusted near explosives, including explosive emotions.

That’s the difference between Manning Fireworks and Stage Fright, though they remain spiritually intertwined. Robertson’s songwriting always incorporates grandeur: biblical references; evocations of a mythic, weird America; the healing potential of carnival and catharsis. In “The Shape I’m In,” he’s expressing serious doubts about his bandmate’s downward spiral, but he still turns it into a hero’s journey. Lenderman doesn’t really like heroes; even at his most imaginative, he exudes a certain modesty, and his characters stumble most drastically when they’re emboldened enough to overstep. (Consider the D.U.I.-injured seminarian flirting with the nurse caring for his wound “‘til it burns” in the pathetic Christmas carol “Rudolph”) This stance is personal — rooted, he’s said, in his own Catholic shame and his education at the hands of Southern naturalists like the late fiction writer Larry Brown and Patterson Hood and Mike Cooley of the Drive-By Truckers. But I think it’s also very indie rock.

The shift in attitude that began with indie titans like The Replacements’ Paul Westerberg, who famously wrote, “God, what a mess, on the ladder of success / when you take one step and miss the whole first rung,” made rock less heroic — there was less to live up to within its mythologies, and a wider array of people were able to take them on. Women, in particular, started carving out a larger role within regional scenes and making a bigger mark globally. As much as Manning Fireworks recalls The Band and its West Coast counterpart, Neil Young’s Crazy Horse, Lenderman is unmistakably a scion of that less grandiose, more self-conscious era — Hood and Cooley learned much of their art from Westerberg and his peers.

In Wednesday, Hartzman expands on rock and roll’s glorious loser stories with a strong awareness of class and gender; her songs are rich portraits of (chosen or inherited) families and communities, often damaged but surviving by the skin of their teeth: The kids who witness all kinds of mischief in the band’s “Quarry,” for example, ultimately conclude, “we had to add it to the tab.” The songs on Manning Fireworks are more narrowly focused, but they do make room for points of view like Hartzman’s. It strikes me as almost unbearably tender that his “You Don’t Know The Shape I’m In” doesn’t name a wrongdoer in its unraveled romance. Even if the lyrics have nothing to do with his and Hartzman’s own experience, as a songwriter Lenderman keeps the “she said” side of the story in view as he tells his (narrator’s) own. That’s something Robertson didn’t do in “The Shape I’m In”; the woman is absent, part of the hopelessness at the heart of the song’s crisis.

Maybe the more modest, less alpha attitude Lenderman projects isn’t generational. Robertson could write painfully tender heartbreak ballads: Witness “It Makes No Difference” from 1975, maybe The Band’s most nakedly emotional moment. But the modesty this new rock hope projects inspires me; it leaves different doors open. As Lenderman sings in “She’s Leaving You,” another song about heartbreak and the dumb behavior that can cause it, “we’ve all got work to do.”