Its only a handful of years into his acclaimed career but to say MJ Lenderman sounds like the second coming of Neil Young has already become tired, however true, and, considering that Young himself is still alive and touring, even kind of blasphemous. Yet, sorry, but it’s hard to unhear this: There is the same weary warble tuned to permanent heartbreak, and that trudging pace that suggests the band is seconds away from resting their heads on pillows, and here are the grinding hurricanes of feedback that summon images of western plains and mesas, and a little Sonic Youth.
Watching Lenderman at the Salt Shed on Wednesday was to be reminded of the curious power of exhaustion. It’s a beautiful, humid, rickety sound. You can hear in it why the sighs of Neil Young became inextricable from Watergate-era malaise, and how Lenderman, 50 years later, sounds like both a throwback to strung-out singer-songwriters of the ‘70s and very much of his own time.
His muse is fading expectations.
He sang, “Every day is a miracle, not to mention a threat.”
He sang, “We sat under a half-mast McDonald’s flag.”
He sang, “Every Catholic knows he could’ve been pope.”
That last one, eerily prescient, got a big Chicago cheer.
It came just after another Chicago name-drop, “Hangover Game,” the show opener, about Michael Jordan’s infamous 1997 finals performance, the one where he scored 38 points despite supposedly playing through a bout of flu or something. Or as Lenderman sees it: “It wasn’t the pizza/ And it wasn’t the flu/ Yeah, I love drinking, too.” And I love a singer I can smile and nod along with.
The man is a fountain of random, biting one-liners and, despite a lanky frame and stunned backwoods grin suggesting a half-finished John Mayer, he comes across on stage with a muscular immediacy (which could be why his fanbase seems to be male Gen X dyspeptics, with a helping of depleted millennials). All of this comes across as simultaneously familiar and fresh, even if you don’t recognize the precedents. There’s the deadpan of John Prine, right there. The late-dawning self-awareness of a Charles Portis character, the non-sequiturs of Steve Martin. Every influence is set to a languid pace — entirely languid, in need of variety — but with hooks you can not shake. (Sorry, one more lyric — “So you say I’ve wasted my life away/ Well, I got a beach home up in Buffalo.”) I fear I’m making MJ Lenderman (Mark Jacob, of Asheville, North Carolina) sound more like a recipe than what his Salt Shed show proved: At 26, he’s more than ready to be the rallying point rock could use.
Like other indie stars in his orbit — Waxahatchee, Wednesday, both of which he’s recorded and performed with — he avoids coming off like a nostalgia act by drawing more on the spirit than specifics of his influences. Nobody here seems eager to get anywhere. His excellent band can walk a squall of droning guitars and pedal steel into an abrupt stop, hover a second, then surge forward as one, without sounding rehearsed. Nothing feels machine-tooled, nevermind factory-precise.
But I hesitate to say this is not fashionable in 2025 — Waxahatchee seems maybe one album away from playing arenas, and MJ Lenderman’s sold-out Salt Shed audience of 3,000 was his largest headlining show so far. I also hesitate to say Wilco, which certainly shares fans, could be a model here for the future — MJ Lenderman is still loitering in a pretty comfortable sound, and not showing a lot of eagerness to stretch. And at least right now, it’s working ridiculously well. There’s no preening, no self-consciousness, only a giant casual cosy hug of recognition at the mess we’re in.
These songs never talk at you. There’s no self-improvement plan or preaching. It’s the sound of overheard conversation, bracketed by guitar solos arrived at with minimum fanfare, every line building on a tone of uncertainty and rattling around your head. Like, “One of these days, you’ll kill a man/ For asking a question you don’t understand.” Somehow, it’s both poignant and unmoored from any specific meaning. For the first encore, MJ Lenderman returned explicitly to Neil Young to cover “Lotta Love,” but now that famous Top 40 refrain — “It’s gonna take a lotta love, to change the way things are” — repeated and repeated and repeated, no longer suggested just a tenuous romance.
It suggested: MJ Lenderman, the new poet laureate of national decline.
cborrelli@chicagotribune.com