Written In Reverb: Annette Geneva falls hopelessly for MJ Lenderman’s Manning Fireworks, a gloriously scuffed collision of country-rock, crooked humour and unexpected tenderness; an album where the guitars speak louder than words, the characters are gloriously flawed, and every listen reveals another reason to fall a little deeper in love.

A LOVE LETTER TO MANNING FIREWORKS

There are records you review, and then there are records you develop a small personal religion around. Manning Fireworks is the latter. I have tried, several times now, to write something definitive about this record, which is probably the wrong way to approach it. Definitive is not really the point. I don’t want to pin it to a corkboard and explain why it is good. I want to keep finding reasons to spin it. Again and again.

I want to talk about the songs like they are places I’ve been, people I met and things I missed out on doing. I want to talk about MJ Lenderman’s guitar until somebody tells me I have already made the point, and then I want to make it again. I want to talk about the particular kind of American sadness that lives inside these songs, the kind that has a six-pack beside it and a stupid joke ready to deploy whenever things get too emotionally revealing. I want to talk about how funny this record is without ever becoming a comedy record, and how heartbreaking it is without ever asking you to feel sorry for anyone.

Mostly, I want to talk about 'Wristwatch'. Because I have become completely, hopelessly obsessed with 'Wristwatch'. Not in the normal “this is my favourite song on the album” way. In the way where I have started measuring the rest of the record against it. And particularly that ending.

That little stretch where the song seems to know exactly when to stop explaining itself. That is the bit I keep coming back to over and over.

Manning Fireworks arrived in September 2024 as MJ Lenderman’s follow-up to Boat Songs, and on paper it is almost absurdly easy to describe: nine songs, a little over half an hour, country-rock guitars, pedal steel, fiddle, deadpan vocals, jokes about terrible men, references to pop culture, loneliness, drinking, technology and the general indignity of being alive. But that description makes it sound like a novelty. It isn’t one.

Lenderman has this strange ability to write about people who are objectively ridiculous without treating them as disposable. His characters are losers, narcissists, drunks, creeps, sad sacks and men who have somehow turned their own emotional vacancy into a personality. Yet there is always some tiny opening through which you can see the person underneath. That is the trick. He doesn’t romanticise them. He doesn’t completely condemn them either. He just leaves them there, standing in the fluorescent light of their own terrible decisions. And somehow, you recognise them. Sometimes you recognise someone you know. Sometimes you recognise a guy you saw at the pub. And sometimes, horribly, you recognise a little bit of yourself.

Jake’s world is full of broken-down machinery and bad decisions, but it isn’t nihilistic. There is warmth underneath the grime. His songs have the generosity of somebody who has spent enough time around weird people to understand that being a fuckwit and being human are not mutually exclusive conditions.

That is what makes Manning Fireworks so addictive. It laughs at people without laughing them out of existence. And musically, it is gorgeous. There is magic drifting around the edges. There are fiddle lines. There are guitars that sound lived-in rather than polished. There are moments where the band seems to lean backwards and let a song breathe. And then there is that guitar. I’ve written before about Lenderman’s guitar playing feeling conversational rather than performative. I still think that is the best way I can describe it. His solos don’t feel like someone stepping forward to show you what they can do. They feel like somebody finishing a sentence. That might be why I am so obsessed with this record. Nothing feels like showing off. Even when it absolutely is.

1. Manning Fireworks

The title track opens the door. It is immediately funny, but there is something meaner underneath. The song sketches a person who has somehow travelled from innocent child to adult asshole and Jake delivers the central insult with such casualness that it becomes almost affectionate. The great thing about the title track is how little it needs to tell you. A few details. A particular kind of guy. A particular kind of failure. Then the guitar comes in and suddenly this person’s pathetic little existence becomes lore. That is Lenderman’s gift to us throughout the record.

He can take somebody who would normally be background scenery and give them three minutes of screen time.

The production is fuller than Boat Songs, but it doesn’t lose the looseness that makes Lenderman’s music feel human. The guitars don’t sparkle. They scuff. The whole thing feels like Americana with the good bits left out. And I mean that as a compliment.

2. Joker Lips

'Joker Lips' is where the record really establishes its particular sense of humour. There are songs where the joke is the point. Here, the joke is camouflage. Underneath the Kahlúa shooters, DUI scooters and bizarre little images is someone desperate to be wanted. The song keeps presenting itself as this scruffy, funny, slightly idiotic thing and then suddenly there is a line that reveals the emotional machinery underneath.

That is Lenderman’s recurring move.

He’ll make you laugh and then, while you’re still laughing, quietly point out that the person speaking is incredibly lonely. It is why his songs feel like portraits. Messy portraits, usually.

The sort you would find in the bottom drawer of a motel bedside table.

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3. Rudolph

'Rudolph' might be one of the clearest examples of Lenderman’s ability to make cultural references feel strangely profound. There is a Lightning McQueen. There is Dylan. There is a man wandering around inside his own life trying to work out what the hell happened. And somehow all of these things coexist. That is what I love about Lenderman’s writing. Bob Dylan and Cars can occupy the same emotional universe.

Why shouldn’t they?

For anyone who grew up consuming the weird soup of modern culture, this feels much more honest than pretending our inner lives are built entirely from great literature and classic cinema. Sometimes your deepest memories are a Pixar character, an old rock song and some completely meaningless thing somebody said when you were nineteen. Jake understands that.

He makes the debris of contemporary life part of the poetry.

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4. Wristwatch

Oh my… 'Wristwatch'. My problem with this song is that I don’t think I will ever act normal about it. It is funny. It is sad.

It is incredibly catchy. It is about technology and loneliness and male insecurity and status and self-delusion. It contains one of the funniest objects ever placed at the emotional centre of a song: a stupid wristwatch. And then, somehow, that stupid wristwatch becomes devastating.

The character boasts about imaginary wealth, a beach home in Buffalo and a houseboat at the Himbo Dome. He has transformed his possessions into proof that he has made it. But the more he lists them, the more obvious it becomes that none of them have solved the actual problem. He is alone. And his watch knows it. Lenderman has said he found the character on YouTube, which somehow makes the whole thing even better. He wasn’t inventing an abstract archetype. He saw a person and turned the strange modern performance of masculinity into a song. He specifically connected the character to the Brendan Schaub/Joe Rogan ecosystem, which explains a lot about the particular flavour of confidence being satirised here.

But the genius is that Wristwatch doesn’t stay outside the character and point. It gets inside him. The boasts become sad. The technology becomes sad. The whole performance of being a man becomes sad. And then there is that guitar. The gruffness of the electric guitar sits against the pedal steel, which seems to mourn underneath everything the narrator says. There is a contradiction at the centre of the song. The narrator is trying desperately to convince you that he has everything. The music is quietly telling you that he has nothing. And then the ending. Jesus. That ending. I have listened to it enough times that I have stopped hearing it as an outro and started hearing it as part of the architecture of the song.

It doesn’t feel tacked on. It feels like the emotional reveal. The song has spent all this time talking about what the man owns, what his watch can do, what his life supposedly looks like, and then the music loosens its grip. The joke stops being funny for a second. You are left with the loneliness underneath it.

And I love that Lenderman doesn’t suddenly turn earnest. He doesn’t need to. The restraint makes it hurt more. There is something incredibly MJ Lenderman about taking a piece of technology designed to measure your steps, your heart rate, your sleep, your notifications, your productivity, your entire increasingly quantified existence, and turning it into a tiny electronic witness to the fact that you are alone. The wristwatch knows. The man doesn’t. Or maybe he does.

I keep coming back to the outro because it feels like the moment the character’s bullshit runs out of road. The song has nowhere else to go. So it just lets the guitars sit there. And I sit there with them. Again. And again. And again.

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5. She’s Leaving You

'She’s Leaving You' is one of those songs where the premise sounds simple enough to fit on a beer coaster.

A woman is leaving. The guy is terrible.

He doesn’t understand why. Except he probably does. The brilliance is in how Lenderman refuses the traditional rock-song response to heartbreak.

There is no noble suffering. No grand romantic gesture. No sudden moment of personal growth. Instead, the character is basically handed the consequences of being himself. And then he just stands there.

Karly Hartzman’s backing vocals give the chorus an emotional dimension that the narrator himself seems incapable of accessing. The irony is almost cruel: the song is about a man losing somebody, while the person singing alongside him sounds like the one who actually understands what is happening. It is one of the album’s great examples of Lenderman’s empathy. He can write an absolute dickhead and still make you feel the sadness of what happens to him.

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6. Rip Torn

'Rip Torn' is weird. Which is precisely why I love it. The song seems to operate according to its own internal logic, bouncing between references and strange observations until you realise that the confusion is part of the point. Lenderman’s characters don’t explain themselves. They don’t arrive with neat psychological profiles. They talk. They remember things.

They make connections that make sense to them. They lose you. Then they say something unexpectedly beautiful. It feels like listening to somebody talk at 1:30 in the morning when they have had just enough to drink to become philosophical but not enough to become coherent. And underneath all of that is this wonderfully understated band performance. The record is full of these details. Nothing screams for your attention. Everything rewards it.

7. You Don’t Know the Shape I’m In

This is where the album briefly starts moving differently. There is cheerfulness to it, but the title tells you immediately that something is wrong. That contradiction is basically the entire record. The music says: come on, this is fun. The lyrics say: absolutely not. There are backing vocals, bright guitar textures and a looseness that makes the song feel almost carefree, until you actually listen to what is being said. Sometimes it sounds like laughing at something that probably isn’t funny.

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8. On My Knees

Then the guitars get heavier. 'On My Knees' feels like the moment where the album’s restraint finally gives itself permission to become physical. The song grinds. The guitars drag themselves forward. The voice sounds buried inside the distortion. There is something almost devotional about it, except whatever god this person is praying to has clearly stopped answering.

'On My Knees' is such a perfect Lenderman phrase because it can mean almost anything. Desperation. Submission. Prayer. Exhaustion. Sex. Humiliation. Rock’n’roll. He doesn’t explain which one. He doesn’t have to.

The music does the work. And that is one reason Manning Fireworks has become such an obsession for me. The songs aren’t just collections of clever lines. They have physical lives.

They slump, stumble, explode…wait, linger. It’s like a “choose your own adventure situation” maybe thats why I keep coming back, for a new take. To hopefully hear it differently each time.

9. Bark at the Moon

And then, after eight songs of three-to-four-minute stories, Lenderman gives us ten minutes. Because apparently he had one more thing to say. Or perhaps nothing left to say at all.

'Bark at the Moon' is about a man trapped inside his room, drinking, playing Guitar Hero and watching life continue without him. The song is funny. Until it isn’t. The character talks about never seeing the Mona Lisa, never really leaving his room, staying up too late playing 'Bark at the Moon.'

It is the kind of detail that initially makes you laugh because it is so specifically pathetic. Then you realise that there is something devastating about somebody building an entire world inside one room. And then the vocals stop. Except the record doesn’t.

This is where Manning Fireworks pulls its final trick. The song dissolves into several minutes of guitar feedback, drone and ambient noise. It doesn’t resolve in the conventional sense. It simply keeps existing after the story has finished.

I love that. Because the entire record is about people who don’t know how to resolve their lives. Why should the album resolve neatly for them? The noise is what remains.

The thing I keep coming back to with Manning Fireworks is that Lenderman has found a way to make stupidity emotionally intelligent. He understands that people are ridiculous. He understands that men can be profoundly sad and incredibly stupid at the exact same time.

That you can quote Bob Dylan and reference Lightning McQueen in the same song and neither reference has to be the “serious” one. And perhaps most importantly, he understands that the things we use to distract ourselves from loneliness are often the things that reveal it. The endless cultural references. All of them are little doors.

Open one and there’s a sad guy behind it.

There is a particular kind of record that becomes more personal the more you listen to it. Manning Fireworks is that record for me. It has accumulated around itself. It has become part of the soundtrack of whatever version of my life I am currently inhabiting. I hear the opening guitar and I’m there. I hear Wristwatch and immediately want to hear it again.

I wait for the outro. I listen for the little details. I listen to the space around the voice. I wait for the moment when the joke becomes sad. And then I do it again.

That is the funny thing about obsession with music. Eventually you stop listening for discovery. You start listening for recognition. You know what is coming, but you want it anyway. You know when the guitar enters, when the chorus arrives. You know the line that makes you laugh and know exactly how 'Wristwatch' ends.

And still, when it gets there, you wait for it. Maybe that is what loving a record really is. Not wanting it to surprise you anymore.

Dear Manning Fireworks,

I don’t know exactly when you became mine. Maybe it was the first time Wristwatch made me laugh or the tenth time I listened to the outro. Maybe it was hearing MJ Lenderman’s guitar somewhere else and immediately recognising it, like a handwriting sample. Maybe it was realising that I had started describing his music in terms that sounded less like criticism and more like attachment.

The particular loneliness of modern life. All of it has become part of the lore now. And I am completely fine with that. Because some records are meant to be admired from a sensible distance. Manning Fireworks isn’t one of them.

I want to get my hands dirty with it. I want to hear the stupid jokes. I want the guitars. I want the pedal steel quietly crying underneath some idiot’s bragging. I want the guy with the boat and the watch. I want the guy playing Guitar Hero alone in his room. I want all the little failures and all the tiny flashes of grace. And, most of all, I want Wristwatch. I want that stupid watch.

I want the song’s entire beautiful argument about loneliness and masculinity and technology and self-delusion. And then I want the outro. Every time. I want to sit there for those final seconds after the joke has landed and the character has run out of things to say. Because somewhere inside that little ending is the whole record. And a guitar quietly reminding you that sometimes the things we love most are the things we have no sensible explanation for. I don’t have a sensible explanation for why I love Manning Fireworks this much. I don’t think I need one.

Put the record on.

I’ll meet you at 'Wristwatch'.

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