Karly Hartzman and MJ Lenderman get about halfway through his song “Wristwatch” when someone in the crowd at Third Man Records’ Blue Room tries to sing along. “I got a houseboat docked at the Himbo Dome,” Lenderman sings, and a voice from the audience harmonizes loudly—well, loudly enough to be captured by 1955 Scully lathe—on those last two words. Lenderman released Manning Fireworks just two weeks before this show in September 2024, and a tidal wave of raves and profiles is still crashing around him, shining a spotlight on every aspect of his life, including his recent breakup with Hartzman. People are understandably psyched to see him in such an intimate setting, and they want to sing along.
As valiantly as that audience member tries to will it into existence, that big moment in “Wristwatch” never arrives. Lenderman’s Himbo Dome boast is hardly a moment at all, but in this case merely a lyric delivered against an electric guitar strum—the definition of anticlimactic. The sing-along never materializes, and that enthusiastic voice fades away awkwardly in disappointment or embarrassment or just the dawning recognition that this is not that kind of show.
These few seconds demonstrate the shortcomings of Live at Third Man Records, for which Hartzman and Lenderman strip their songs down to the bones. They pare away the defining traits of both Wednesday and the Wind—crunching guitars, weeping pedal steel, and pounding drums—but they neglect to add anything particularly compelling in their place. There are some moments that hit hard with a ragged kind of glory: when their guitars get tangled up on “She’s Leaving You,” when their voices veer off in different directions on “TLC Cage Match,” when Hartzman puts some English on the word “fuckin’” in “Feast of Snakes.” But she and Lenderman run through it all at a slack dirge, with every song played at roughly the same tempo and most of them losing steam as they proceed. It’s about as exciting as watching a tire deflate.
That is unexpected and wildly disappointing, considering that they are two of the most distinctive songwriters and bandleaders working today, colliding a range of left-of-center influences—Vic Chesnutt, Drive-By Truckers, John Prine—into songs that traffic in skewed imagery and complex ideas. Lenderman can be sly and evasive, favoring second-person pronouns that sound accusatory even after you realize he’s usually talking to himself. Hartzman is much more traditionally confessional, almost always writing in first person as she traces complicated scenarios across multiple storylines (similar to the Truckers’ Mike Cooley). Both are aces with a turn of phrase that leavens extreme pathos with humor. They open this Blue Room set with 2018’s “How Do You Let the Love Into the Heart That Isn’t Split Wide Open,” and the song is barely even a minute of them singing that long title. It’s pretty funny in its matter-of-factness, a meta-commentary on love songs—at least in its original incarnation. In this setting, however, it’s over before it even registers as a song, which makes it less of a stakes-defining introduction and more of an awkward throat-clearing.
Assembling a set short enough to fit on two sides of a record, they draw from the darker corners of their small catalog, mixing in Wednesday songs with Lenderman songs. There are two tracks from their 2021 EP Guttering, one non-album single based on a Harry Crews novel, and one from Lenderman’s 2021 solo album Ghost of Your Guitar Solo. And, of course, there are several from Manning Fireworks and Wednesday’s Rat Saw God. That vaults-clearing approach, however, lends Live at Third Man Records a finality that the duo perhaps didn’t intend and the music can’t uphold.
Even more than a year later, it’s impossible to ignore everything that was happening around this show. Just six months earlier, Hartzman and Lenderman ended their six-year romantic relationship, officially breaking up in a bar in Kyoto. Hartzman took that heartache into the studio as Wednesday recorded Bleeds, and her account of recording “That’s the Way Love Goes” is as harrowing as the song itself. But the news was publicly announced during the promotional cycle for Manning Fireworks (“I guess I should mention me and Karly broke up,” Lenderman told The New Yorker), so when they were standing together on the Blue Room stage, it was still fresh.
Was it a relief to share their secret? Did it add new complications to their professional lives? Were they still trying to figure it out? Live at Third Man Records arrives freighted with unbearable weight, but their set gives nothing away. It doesn’t need to feed gossip to be a good live album, but there’s a strange and unsatisfying self-consciousness to the proceedings, as if they’d both learned very quickly to be more guarded. When Hartzman tells the audience they’re going to play a few numbers even after they stop recording, she adds, “I’ma talk probably a lot more when I know it’s not going to be permanent.” No doubt that’s the better set, the unrecorded one—when they can shed all that weight and everybody can sing along.
Correction: The 1955 Scully lathe used at Third Man Records’ Blue Room is not the same Scully lathe personally owned by Jack White.
