It’s been one hell of a year—or 20 months, if you’re really counting—for Jake “MJ” Lenderman. As the certified six-string badass in Asheville creekgaze quintet Wednesday, he’s helped put out two albums (2022’s Mowing the Leaves Instead of Piling ‘Em Up and 2023’s Rat Saw God); last April, he released his own solo record Boat Songs. Earlier this summer, he dropped the double A-side singles “Knockin’” and “Rudolph” to much critical fanfare. He even made an appearance on a duet with Kara Jackson at the end of Kevin Abstract’s new album Blanket. Now, he’s putting out a live album, as any rock god worth their salt is wont to do at some point or another in their career. If you don’t know Lenderman’s name by now, I don’t know what to tell you. It’s time to get hip.
Lenderman is a unique character in the movie of contemporary indie music. He’s Jimmy Buffet for millennials, Neil Young for zoomers. His songwriting is a wet dream for folks like me who love a good, obscure pop culture reference paired with a devastating line delivery about being a cog in the machine of labor, romance and rural living. “Still, I can’t believe I’ll have it all, Jack Nicholson’s courtside seat, purple foam imprinted with celebrity asscheek,” Lenderman sings on “Live Jack.” “And if the Lakers get beat, well, it won’t mean much to me. ‘Course I know that we are in charge, eight billion little bosses doin’ eight billion little jobs.” There’s something about his poetry—about his lyricism—that cuts through the sometimes-exhausting, rudimentary, cyclical nature of storytelling that’s portrayed so often in modern rock and folk music. When I crank up an MJ Lenderman album, I imagine it being the sonic equivalent to a bunch of guys sitting around and naming as many obscure NBA players as they can. Sure, singing about heartbreak and romance is fine and dandy here and there. But, sometimes, you just want to think about how great drinking is through the lens of Michael Jordan’s “Flu Game.”
And the Wind (Live and Loose!) is a modern-day Live Rust. If you don’t like that comparison, I don’t care. In recent years, live records have lost their luster. For so long, they were not just merely companion pieces to more polished, audible studio albums. They used to be singular achievements that captured a distinctive portrait of a beloved artist on-stage. And much of that change comes via musicians preferring to track live projects in a stripped-down sense, attempting to breathe a much more discernible, acoustic life into songs that exist in more ferocious measures elsewhere. In MJ Lenderman’s case, (Live and Loose!) could standalone as its own unique release, and I say we oughta let it. All of these songs, save for the Wind’s cover of “Long Black Veil,” exist someplace else in Lenderman canon already. We’ve heard these tracks before and we love them all dearly, but an album like this casts a wide net of imperfections, tweaks and vignettes of finesse that could only truly exist in the confines of a live recording. Though it’s true that this is not a “new” record, it’s still a crucial addition to not just Lenderman’s discography, but to the compendium of contemporary live material altogether as we know it.
The album captures performances from Lenderman’s summer show at the Lodge Room in Los Angeles and his Pitchfork Music Festival afterparty in Chicago, two monumental gigs smack-dab in the middle of an equator-sized tour itinerary for Wednesday. For this project’s iteration, Lenderman recruited Jon Samuels and Colin Miller to join him and his Wednesday bandmates Xandy Chelmis and Ethan Baechtold. Karly Hartzman also joins in on the fun with some harmonies on “Toontown” midway through the set. And, to no one’s surprise, (Live and Loose!) was mixed and mastered by Alex Farrar at Drop of Sun Studios in West Asheville. Despite the tracks coming to life on stages in faraway, bustling cities, Farrar’s engineering imprint gives the record a film of dust that sounds like it was aged in a barrel for 20 years right at home. Lenderman’s propensity for bold rock ‘n’ roll sounds as raw and unpredictable on this effort as a Stray Gators show might have in 1973.
It’s a near-career-spanning compilation for Lenderman, who plays 90% of Boat Songs and adds in three tracks from his 2021 LP Ghost of Your Guitar Solo along with “Rudolph,” “Knockin’” and “Long Black Veil.” We didn’t review Boat Songs last year, but the magic of (Live and Loose!) is that the album is so good that it can, essentially, allow us to play catch-up on our oversights (even if it did appear on our year-end best albums list). That’s my endorsement of the star-power of these tracks; their timelessness shines through so greatly that, when crowd applause and hollers come ringing in at every fadeout, you suddenly remember that this is, after all, a live album. And each chapter from Ghost of Your Guitar Solo and Boat Songs was built with such freewheeling elasticity that, at any moment, Lenderman and his bandmates could turn each song inside-out with extended melodies, differently paced lyrics and impromptu sonic economics you might find on a Fillmore East recording from half-a-century ago.
And it’s all there on the tape: Lenderman and his crew enter the scene shredding on the distorted, roaring riff that opens “Hangover Game.” While musing about Michael Jordan’s initial desire to sign a shoe deal with Adidas, not Nike, his vocals are placed front and center—to the point where I wouldn’t fault you for thinking Lenderman’s singing is overdubbed. That’s how crystal-clear it is. From the jump, this album is a pristine document of why Lenderman should’ve been included on Rolling Stone’s recent list of the 250 greatest guitarists of all time. When he and the boys bang out a torrential downpour of acidic, six-string static on “Knockin’,” it’s obvious that he’s been playing this track live for quite some time now (and he has, as oldheads know that the original recording of the song came out in 2021). The vocals are worn-in and worn-out, as Lenderman strains even more with every decibel he climbs. It’s a glitch most would consider a blemish but, in the world of MJ Lenderman, it’s firmly an antiquated mark of confidence.
On lead single “You Have Bought Yourself a Boat”—and the entire record, frankly—Chelmis’ pedal steel comes roaring in on a gilded magic carpet woven from silk. Lenderman’s singing and axe-weilding are especially bright and moving. It’s a roaring precursor to the gentleness that arrives one song later on “TLC Cagematch.” Now, I’ve long maintained that “TLC Cagematch” is the best song of the last five years, and I’m likely responsible for it being Lenderman’s most-streamed song on Apple Music. It’s one of those tracks that I find precious and, ultimately, fear it not sounding as cosmic in any non-album setting. But doubting Lenderman’s ability to transpose its surreal intimacy into an on-stage format would be a foolish errand to run. What Jake does as MJ cannot be overlooked; it’s some kind of Asheville punk sorcery. That’s my only explanation for how a record like Boat Songs and a track like “TLC Cagematch” could have hit such a shot of stardom. But, then again, you could just chalk it up to Lenderman being one of the best in the biz. That’s probably the real truth.
And, much to my chagrin, the (Live and Loose!) rendition of “TLC Cagematch” is sublime and dynamite. Chelmis’ pedal steel deviates ever so slightly from how it sounds on Boat Songs, this time working in direct tandem with Lenderman’s guitar. It’s the kind of duet that human voices just will never be able to replicate, as you can hear a genesis of emotions in every bent note and every chunk of chord. If you’ve ever been to a Wednesday show, then you know that Lenderman’s role is fine-tuned to best serve the unit altogether. He plays stage right with Baechtold while Hartzman performs front-and-center and Chelmis sits stage left. And that’s what works best. His guitar work is meant to add dense volume to Wednesday’s already humongous sound. That’s why the band isn’t called Wednesday w/ MJ Lenderman; it’s a symbiotic, five-piece organism. But, when he’s doing his own thing and performing a song like “TLC Cagematch” to the masses, Lenderman indulges his eccentricities and displays the slacker finesse he’s so deeply harnessed over the last decade, falling into breakdowns of animated solos and embracing the untangled knots of on-the-spot strokes of genius.
Recent single—and Paste Song of the Summer pick—“Rudolph” gets a live upgrade in the form of an added three-minute guitar solo. Miller’s drum patterns are so spread out robust that the whole percussive undercurrent sounds like a wet T-shirt. Hartzman hits the stage to sing harmonies on “Toontown,” and it’s so evident that, no matter what, she and Lenderman’s voices just go together. The three-part mid-show riot of “SUV,” “Under Control” and “Dan Marino” is a perfect stretch of music-making done in reverse order, as we get to hear Lenderman and the band skate across sub-genres with eclipsing ease, exploring everything from honky tonk bar tomfoolery to bootgaze balladry to fuzzy, grungy, grimy garage rock. “I think Dan will be alright, for he’s a hall of famer,” Lenderman sings on “Dan Marino.” “The next day we saw dolphins from a friend of ours’ boat.” This rendition, in particular, sounds lightyears away from the lo-fi skeleton of the original that appears on Boat Songs. It’s one of the many moments on this album where, against all odds, Lenderman improves on the good work he’s already been lauded for.
After nearly finishing all of Boat Songs, Lenderman and the Wind pivot their focus towards Ghost of My Guitar Solo, performing “Catholic Priest,” “Live Jack” and “Someone Get the Grill Out of the Rain” in succession. It’s a reward for the longtime fans who’ve stuck around long enough to watch Jake and his buddies cross the threshold of indie stardom—and it’s an immediate look at where they were before Boat Songs sent their trout rock and creekgaze sound into the stratosphere. The emphasis of “Catholic Priest” and “Live Jack” especially is on that dueting style of Lenderman and Chelmis again, the former arriving as a bare-bones country track akin to something from Shakey’s On the Beach or, even, something he might have performed on the Tonight’s the Night tour in 1973. “Welcome to Miami Beach, where everything’s cheaper than it looks,” he said in-between songs long ago. Lenderman’s answer to that is “Tastes Just Like It Costs,” a sludgy, chaotic track about buying expensive meat from a butcher shop. “Mm, honey,” he hums in harmonics that punch just above the waist and carry the same tigerish hunger as any other vocal moment on (Live and Loose!).
To close the record, Lenderman calls upon the Styrofoam Winos (Ross Collier, Joe Kenkel, Trevor Nikrant and Lou Turner) to perform a rendition of Danny Dill and Marijohn Wilkin’s country standard “Long Black Veil.” Once made famous by Johnny Cash and Joni Mitchell in 1969 and then, later that year, performed by The Band at Woodstock, Lenderman and co. completely rewrite the ballad into a romping show finale. Fit with background laughing and an instrumental fashioned like a sewn-together, impromptu jam, “Long Black Veil” is a dashing vignette of five of the best musicians in the world having fun and sounding damn good while doing it. “Nobody knows, nobody sees,” Lenderman cries out. “Nobody knows but me, nobody knows but me, nobody knows but me.” Don’t let the title of this record fool you; MJ Lenderman and the Wind are anything but cumbersome. “All our heroes now are dead,” he sings at the end of “TLC Cagematch.” “‘Cause all things go.” While (Live and Loose!) is a fitting conclusion to his whirlwind year—one that signals how massive 2024 might just be for him—MJ Lenderman is still kicking and screaming. So say it with me: Dudes rock.
Matt Mitchell reports as Paste‘s music editor from their home in Columbus, Ohio.
