The first time I ever heard John Prine’s “Angel from Montgomery,” I thought it was ridiculous. I couldn’t get past the song’s opening lines: “I am an old woman / named after my mother.” Prine, who’d been a Chicago-area postal worker before taking up music full time, was in his mid-twenties when he wrote and recorded that now-classic song for his 1971 debut. Hearing him sing those opening lines on the classic-rock station years ago, all I could think was: This guy sounds nothing like an old woman.
I’m not proud of this. These days, there are few artists in any genre whom I love as much as I love John Prine. I miss him, maybe more than anyone else I’ve never met. His death from Covid-related complications in April 2020 still feels like the loss of a shrewd, funny, beloved older relative. The last song he ever recorded, “I Remember Everything,” puts me on the verge of tears every time. In Prine’s later years, marked by serious health struggles and an enduring love for his wife, Fiona, his music somehow seemed to get warmer, deeper, and wiser with each successive recording.
After his death, though, I finally began to understand and appreciate the astonishing achievement of his debut album. One of John Prine’s many generous gifts as a songwriter, I realized, was his empathy. Where many singer-songwriters of the seventies relentlessly examined their own emotional lives, Prine often explored the lonesome longings of neglected characters—the unnoticed, unloved, and unfulfilled. Songs like “Hello in There,” “Sam Stone,” and “Donald and Lydia” endure as works of genius precisely because of Prine’s remarkable ability—Chekhov via Chicago—to channel the voices, desires, absurdities, and difficulties of lives very different from his own.
“Angel of Montgomery” might display this ability more than any other song. Prine assumes the perspective of an aging and unfulfilled woman, married to “another child who’s grown old.” She spends her time dreaming of an old rodeo cowboy she once loved (“He weren’t much to look at / Just a free ramblin’ man”). Even when I’m not listening to this song, I occasionally think of these devastating verses where she describes her life and her marriage:
There’s flies in the kitchen
I can hear ’em there buzzin’
And I ain’t done nothing
Since I woke up today
How the hell can a person
Go to work in the morning
Then come home in the evening
And have nothing to say?
How can you not feel for this woman, even if she exists only in melody and words? Prine manages to fully imagine her daily existence and deep frustrations within the narrow limits of a song. (He also offers a useful reminder to spouses everywhere: You better come home with something to say.) And he somehow achieved this empathetic and artistic feat at the age of twenty-five.
I thought of young John Prine while listening to Manning Fireworks, the new album by MJ Lenderman. Lenderman, too, is in his mid-twenties, although this album isn’t his debut. (Nor, to the best of my knowledge, has he ever been a mailman. He did work in an ice-cream shop, though.) Like Prine, Lenderman has a gift for odd, perfect details and an ability to conjure characters through a single line or verse. And like Prine, you never quite know what he’s going to say next.
Released in early September, Manning Fireworks yielded immediate raves from critics I trust. In the Times, the always-stellar Lindsay Zolandz named it one of her favorite albums of the year so far, while Steven Hyden, writing for UPROXX, described the album as a “precious commodity.” I knew about Lenderman from his guest appearance on my favorite album of the year so far, Waxahatchee’s Tigers Blood, so I was pretty excited to check out this new one.
Lenderman, who hails from Asheville, North Carolina, makes shaggy, off-kilter, guitar-heavy, countryish indie rock. He plays most of the instruments on the album. (He’s a pretty great and unpretentious guitar player.) Listening for the first time, I thought of Pavement, Neil Young, Wilco’s first album, and a bunch of alt-country bands I used to listen to when I was Lenderman’s age. But I didn’t fall in love with the album right away. In fact, I didn’t really get what the fuss was all about, until I started thinking about early John Prine.
I’d expected Lenderman to be one of those sincere indie songwriters whose songs are more or less about himself, but that’s not really what he’s up to. Like those early Prine songs, Lenderman’s songs more often seem to be about imagined others, offering little windows into the lives and minds of unfulfilled and overlooked characters. There’s a crucial difference, though: the characters that populate Lenderman’s album are mostly men, and many of them are jerks.
That last word is Lenderman’s, not mine. It appears several times, including a couple times on the ramshackle acoustic title track that opens the album. In his boyish and endearingly imperfect voice, Lenderman addresses a character who “once was a baby and now a jerk / Standing close to the pyre, manning fireworks.” Other verses give us more details. This is a character who likes to bet on horses, who makes a display of reading his Bible in public places (opening it “to the very first page”), who likes to sneak backstage “to hound the girls in the circus,” and who will one day “kill a man / for asking a question you don’t understand.”
In under three minutes, a sketch emerges of a tiresome, pathetic, and apparently dangerous figure setting off fireworks somewhere. We certainly don’t feel for him the way we feel for the protagonist of Prine’s “Angel from Montgomery” or “Hello in There.” But for the duration of the song, simultaneously accusatory and tender, Lenderman compels us to pay attention to this man, as if the jerks among us deserve a look, too.
Other songs add more depictions of comically absurd masculinity, from the insecure and lonely narrator of “Wristwatch” who brags about having a watch “that’s a pocket knife and a megaphone” and “houseboat docked at the Himbodome” to the clueless character addressed in the opening verse of “She’s Leaving You”:
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
Each time I hear this verse, and everything that comes after it—the highly singable chorus, a guitar solo that makes me want to use the word incendiary, the coda where Lenderman’s bandmate and ex-partner Karly Hartzman sings the chorus alone—I love this song a little more. This is casually great rock music with a healthy suspicion of dudes who take rock music a little too seriously. (The album is full of playful references to iconic rock figures, from Bob Dylan to Warren Zevon.) Lenderman is equally capable of ripping a guitar solo and making fun of the vanishing culture that once idolized young men who could rip guitar solos. He knows that the classic “Clapton is God” graffiti just seems like a joke now, almost as funny as the image of a guy singing the blues in a rented Ferrari.
And yet “She’s Leaving You” is full of real feeling, just like all the other songs on Manning Fireworks. A gentle-hearted sadness pervades the whole album. The lyrics can be absurd, hyper-specific, and moving all at the same time (e.g., “Passed out in your Lucky Charms / lucky doesn’t mean much” or the detail of a couple sitting “under a half-mast McDonald’s flag”). If Prine was the Chicagoland Chekhov, Lenderman might be DeLillo via Carolina. “You need to learn how to behave in groups,” he sings at one point, a line that made me laugh out loud. But the more I listen to him sing that line, drawing out the words, the more it strikes me as sweet and sad, even if it’s still pretty funny.
As the album progresses towards the end, it begins to feel less character-driven and more blurrily autobiographical, though still animated by offbeat and affecting images (“Everybody’s walking in twos leaving Noah’s Ark / It’s a Sunday at the water park”). The last three songs might be my favorite stretch of the whole thing. I could see myself eventually going straight for side two of the vinyl, not wanting to reckon with the unsettling characters of the first half (and a few grotesque lyrics that go along with those characters, which I won’t quote here). But avoiding those songs might also be missing the whole point.
The cover art for Manning Fireworks features small portraits of three men from the neck up, with an exploding strip of fire behind them. One of the men appears to be shirtless and is guzzling a beer, a second wears sunglasses and has a cigarette dangling from his mouth, while the other appears to have a mustache and a mullet. Somehow the cover reinforces the sense that Lenderman has a very intentional aim for this album. These might be portraits of the characters who populate his songs, just as they might be guys we come across in real life, hovering near the pyrotechnics on the Fourth of July or blasting “Sunshine of Your Love” as they speed by in their rented convertibles.
Like its cover art, Manning Fireworks is offhandedly and pleasingly strange, worth listening to for its low-key but memorable melodies, its unpolished and unexpected instrumental details, and its surprising, surreal, and often hilarious lyrics. (Skip the six minutes of feedback appended to the excellent final track, a lame attempt to pad this already-short LP.) The album may be irreducible to a thesis, but there’s definitely a consistent undercurrent suggesting a larger purpose. Whether he’d admit it or not, Lenderman is a rare male songwriter who skewers male behavior, taking an observant and critical eye to modern masculinity in its many peculiar and sometimes disturbing forms.
It’s unclear, though, whether he places his own behavior under this critical eye. Is there some of Lenderman himself in his characters? Does he brag about his wristwatch and his beach house in Buffalo? Does he hound the girls in the circus? Probably not. (Though he may be the character at the end of the album who stays up late playing an Ozzy Osbourne song on Guitar Hero.) But maybe those aren’t the right questions to ask. Maybe what matters more is whether the men who count themselves among Lenderman’s listeners—myself included—can achieve enough self-awareness to avoid ending up as characters on his next album.
