MJ Lenderman & The Wind
Cain's Ballroom
September 5, 2025
Of all the contemporary records I’ve listened to in the last year, none has kept me coming back like MJ Lenderman’s Manning Fireworks. It’s eminently quotable, sounds great wherever you are, and fully realized for what it is: a catchy, midtempo country rock album from a wildly talented young songwriter who’s tapped into a rich reservoir of doofuses.
The doofuses in particular have brought me a lot of joy on repeat listens. Lenderman’s characters suffer everyday indignities and often find themselves alienated by their poor decision making, whether they’re catching DUIs on those awful motorized scooters that litter walkable entertainment districts across America, or punching holes in hotel room walls.
If you’ve ever retreated from real-world heartbreak into the glowy comfort of late-night video games or bought scam merchandise because it had your sports hero’s name on it, a Lenderman song has probably already found its way to you. The 26-year-old North Carolinian has risen to upper-tier indie-rock fame in the last year mainly upon the strength of Manning Fireworks and an aggressive touring schedule. (The millennial/Gen Z alliance around Lenderman appears to be pretty strong, from scanning the crowd at Cain’s Friday night.) Musically, you’re getting a lot of reverb and pedal steel guitar, occasionally evoking the most poignant moments of Drive-By Truckers records and rock riffs from a crew schooled on every Neil Young bootleg ever recorded.
I saw Lenderman live at the Tower Theater in Oklahoma City in February, in addition to the Cain’s show. The onstage personnel had changed a bit and they moved the song furniture around some, but the biggest difference between the two shows was the superiority of the acoustics inside Cain’s, where the mix is nice and roomy, perfect for following the lyrics even if three different guitars are all cranked up and the singer’s voice sounds beat to hell. It did, not that that seemed to matter to Lenderman or anybody else in the room.
Revisiting my notes from the Oklahoma City show, I’d scribbled “somehow every song has an absolutely killer line in it.” Here are a few of my favorites:
once a perfect little baby, now he’s a jerk
don’t move to New York City babe it’s gonna change the way you dress
‘cause I know going on vacation brings the worst out of everyone
I could go on. In retrospect, the high hit rate comes from Lenderman’s understated approach to songwriting, so much so that on the rare occasion that he’ll include a chorus, it really pops. “She’s Leaving You” was the mid-set highlight from the OKC show, a bleak character sketch about the same type of guy catalogued by this headline in The Onion, but it creates a moment of catharsis for anybody who’s ever been dumped by a woman, which is the kind of universal feeling that Lenderman extracts from his doofuses.
It’s worth pausing here to clarify that this reverb-heavy doofus resource extraction enterprise that Lenderman’s involved in is cruelty-free and even morally admirable. There’s a richness to the interior world of these characters bubbling underneath the surface-level stuff about basketball, not to mention the cartoons and semen. His doofuses (doofusii?) may or may not reflect on the social annoyance, distress or harm they cause others, but they still desire, longing for a better world than the one they inhabit. “Yeah you know I love my TV,” Lenderman sings on “Joker Lips,” about a loser who seems bored, insincere and generally dissatisfied with how his life’s turned out. “But all I really wanna see, is see you need me.”
Overall, Friday night’s Cain’s performance showcased a mastery of rock dynamics and pacing, as Lenderman and his band The Wind modulated between delightfully slopped-up originals, wave after wave of rich guitar tones and well-selected covers of his songwriting heroes.
After announcing themselves with the high-energy blast of “Hangover Game,” Lenderman slowed the band down for an endearingly loose, slower-than-usual version of “Rudolph,” onto the end of which he tacked a dreamy, cosmic country rock jam that eventually snapped back into the form of “Toontown,” from his 2022 album Boat Songs. That three-song opening suite moved quickly through a host of different moods, showcasing an impressive range for such a young band.
A downstream effect of the Bob Dylan Center’s opening around the corner is that bands now play a Dylan cover whenever they stop at Cain’s, and Lenderman’s choice of a deep cut from Planet Waves, “Something There Is About You,” melded beautifully with his band’s own sound in addition to producing deep satisfaction among the other Dylan nerds I know in the audience. It added some welcome color to Lenderman’s imagery, transporting us to the Great Lakes of the upper midwest for a happy, romantic fling.
The band saved its most truly powerful song, “Wristwatch,” for the middle of the set, playing it slower and heavier than it appears on Manning Fireworks, more appropriate to the song’s crushingly lonely weight. Here is where the expertise the band had developed touring these songs so extensively met perfectly with Cain’s acoustics, elevating dudes jamming onstage into real drama. Like his rock forebears in Crazy Horse, Lenderman knows you don’t have to always play a guitar solo fast to bring down the house.
The back half of the night opened things up more, with the band moving through some lighter moods like “Bark At The Moon” and a hypnotic, starry version of “The Shape I’m In” and some dry humor before kicking into “On My Knees.” They could’ve ended the show with “Knockin,’” an explosive (and extremely funny) riff on “Knockin’ On Heaven’s Door,” but they came back out for an encore that ended with a cover of Neil Young’s hopeful “Lotta Love.” They played it sultry, heavier on the keys than guitars.
Lenderman introduced “Lotta Love” by saying the Canadian singer of the opening band, Nap Eyes, sent it to him upon the news of Trump’s reelection in 2024. That song’s longing for a better world is present in Manning Fireworks, not to mention a few of Lenderman’s real-world choices, like playing a benefit earlier this year for New York City’s Democratic mayoral nominee Zohran Mamdani.
So, which way, Western man, I guess? Are we to be one Lenderman’s doofuses, disaffected and stumbling about, feeling lonely at the waterpark? Or one of his concerned friends who checks in on them? We’re all both, of course, but sometimes virtue comes when we tilt a little more toward the latter than the former.
