MJ Lenderman
about the artist
MJ Lenderman writes songs that are amorphous and elastic, rising to fill the venue they're in, generous to accommodate the number of players on stage (an often unpredictable affair), less concerned with replicating the studio version than they are with meeting the crowd where they're at. On his records, the Asheville-based Lenderman handles most of the playing, but with The Wind, it's a multi-headed beast.
Over the last several years Lenderman, alongside guitarist Jon Samuels (Friendship, Second Grade), drummer Colin Miller, and his fellow Wednesday bandmates Xandy Chelmis (pedal steel) and Ethan Baechtold (bass), have built out a number of…
MoreMJ Lenderman writes songs that are amorphous and elastic, rising to fill the venue they're in, generous to accommodate the number of players on stage (an often unpredictable affair), less concerned with replicating the studio version than they are with meeting the crowd where they're at. On his records, the Asheville-based Lenderman handles most of the playing, but with The Wind, it's a multi-headed beast.
Over the last several years Lenderman, alongside guitarist Jon Samuels (Friendship, Second Grade), drummer Colin Miller, and his fellow Wednesday bandmates Xandy Chelmis (pedal steel) and Ethan Baechtold (bass), have built out a number of beloved MJ tracks into something else entirely. The songs on Lenderman's 2021 release, Ghost of Your Guitar Solo, are lo-fi, almost skeletal; "Gentleman's Jack" a sleepy bedroom mumble, "Catholic Priest" akin to an early Molina ballad. But in the non-stop churn of "And the Wind," they've become boisterous, unwieldy, outgrowing their sparser starts — and now, finally, here the rollicking definitive versions of these songs live outside of the ether of YouTube bootlegs.
MJ Lenderman And the Wind (Live and Loose!) is culled from sold-out summer 2023 shows on a brief headline run during what some might call a wild-ass couple of months. A nine-week international Wednesday tour, stints in studios with a number of other artists, Lenderman's own signing with storied indie ANTI-. Taped live at Chicago's Lincoln Hall and Los Angeles' Lodge Room, Live and Loose captures a near-euphoric moment in time — dizzying and exhausting and, most of all, having some real true-blue fucking fun with your best friends.
Even the newer songs, like the just-released "Rudolph," have room to grow here — namely with a shredding guitar solo courtesy of Samuels that stretches out the second half of the song into a euphoric jam. Boat Songs' homespun "Dan Marino" is a high-octane ride on Live and Loose. "Someone Get the Grill Out of the Rain'' punches up its weepy pedal steel, while yowling set list highlights "Tastes Just it Costs" and "Hangover Game" both come out swinging when played in a roomful of people screaming it back.
It feels like a full-venue affair on some of these songs, especially encore/album closer "Long Black Veil," a take on the classic country ballad performed alongside tour openers Styrofoam Winos. It's 90s college rock meets americana hootenanny, an electrifying piece of the MJ Lenderman lore that needs to be experienced live with a light beer in-hand — but in the interim, MJ Lenderman and the Wind (Live and Loose!) does its best to commit the scene to tape.