A wristwatch that's a compass and a cell phone
Legally, I’m already behind on my responsibility to write about the new MJ Lenderman record, Manning Fireworks. I write about music, I’m a culture critic to some, a journalist when it matters, a writer who often writes about music when I tell people what my job is. Music people across the spectrum love this record, are writing about it and think piecing about it, and rightfully so. It’s a gorgeous, tender and sad album that sounds a lot like the lamentations of someone with too much time to think about the ghosts of their anxious memories circling the air like buzzards. For my money, you can’t go wrong by reading the great Ann Powers, who wrote this line I will think about for the rest of my life in her NPR writeup of the record
Facing reality can be harder when those ruinous words aren’t delivered directly from the mouth you will never kiss again.
Lenderman’s voice hits before anything. Not a voice like a weapon, a voice as a presence, the tones of an unreliable narrator. It cracks and wavers on the opening title track like a ship slowly broken apart by towering waves, wafting between perfectly lazy chords and barroom fiddle. Lenderman's voice echoed by ethereal harmonies from Karly Hartzman — Lenderman’s bandmate in Wednesday and now former partner — as he sings you once was a baby, and now a jerk, standing close to the fire manning fireworks. I wonder how much projection is a reflection of the self.
I’ve been doing voice training lately, something I’ve put off time and again as I’ve moved along my own path. It’s always been something I could put away in favour of more urgent dysphoria or the anxiety of a nice pressing deadline. If you ever need an excuse, I’ve got bags of them at home. Truth be told, I hate my fucking voice. An ex-girlfriend once told me I often sound like a surfer with a smokers cough recently rescued from drowning, and it's the only time I’ve appreciated anything about it. My default state for the decades of my adult life has been a voice I let fall deep and haggard to match the appearance I was desperate to hide behind. The unreliable narrator to a lie of a life, my voice is not mine, it’s just the one I use. A borrowed tool wrapped in old tape and copper wire, an imperfect device that works but who knows for how long and at what risk.
I think people assume that your voice will change in transition, or at the very least, I thought this in the innocence of my wild years. I thought something would unlock once I decided to change and I’d wake up new, speaking in tones that felt like mine. Every stage, every injection, every surgery and shift in my body has left my voice the same and as the years creep on it feels like I’ve dug my claws into a lie. Lysh told me once when we were getting rid of a bunch of my old junk in Whitehorse that it felt like my brother had died and we were taking his shit to the dump, and in many ways my voice is the same. Some old shit my brother left behind in his passing, ready to be thrown away and waiting for me to be bold enough to let go.
I have to let go to change my voice, and if and when I do I don’t know who I will be, and that is terrifying. Transition is a series of actions you undertake without knowing how you will feel, or what you will look or sound like on the other end. Transition asks you to trust that desire and intention will save you when you don’t know what’s next. It asks you to know yourself well enough to know when it is time to let the parts of your life that hurt too much to carry anymore fall away.
My favourite voices all have peeling wallpaper on all their load bearing walls. Cracks in the foundation, or a hiss escaping from somewhere. Character like sandpaper, as if life can tattoo the air in your lungs. There’s a lot to be said in pop music of the vocal trends of any given decade, the autotune of the hip hop and pop of the indie sleaze era or the aggressively masculine grunge years. Pop music vocals right now feel a little too clean and pristine, their edges sanded off and cracks filled in and painted over. No imperfections, nothing you might cut yourself on. Like public art outside a mall, it doesn’t mean anything, but it seems impressive all the same.
I’ve been listening to Manning Fireworks in spurts, as each track turns over another taste of the record emerges. I find myself getting stuck on songs, and then finding lost highways in turns of phrases. I wasn't terribly familiar with his work before now, I came to Wednesday later than most and I only recently learned of his previous solo works, and that’s on me for not engaging. I’m just not always one for the hype train, last year's Wednesday album Rat Saw God deserved every length of track it was given, it's just that I didn’t buy my ticket until it was already moving at breakneck speed.
Lenderman paints a picture of the world in his work, filtered through prisms of familiar influences. You can hear Jason Molina in his voice and Sparklehorse in the subterfuge of his poetic impulses. Songs that are tender and pained at times, and winking in others, never falling too far into despair or becoming obsessed with the grandeur of pretending to be okay. It’s a performance of contrast to the most recent Waxahatchee record that he strummed and sang on, where Katie Crutchfield is heart on sleeve, Lenderman at times feels like the hint of something hidden beneath layers.
Self deprecation can get in the way of change. I have been cautioned time and again that I need to let my guard down if I’m going to know how to move on and I wonder if that too is something tied to my voice. This need to find something funny, or to turn a word into a blade with which to cut tension or lost connections. I worry that if the tones in my voice change so too does my spirit. Will I lose myself and the parts of me that I like when I learn how to hold pitch and resonance and open quotient just right? Will I still be me, was I ever me to begin with? How much of all this is an act.
It’s funny to be someone who has been passively suicidal my entire life and also afraid of change. I think there is a lot of charm and humour found in all the dark corners and all the shadows of this life and after being here for 40-some-odd years any memory that hasn’t claimed me has become something that has details in it that can make me laugh. I think this is why I like to tell stories; I like to remember details because the details feel more alive than the painful parts of the past and this is what keeps me going. The prospect of memories to recall on some day in the unknowable future.
Someday vocal lessons will be something funny I recall, and I only hope that in whatever voice I tell these stories the jagged edges of the painfully funny parts remain.
On “You Don’t Know The Shape I’m In”, a half-mast McDonald's flag looms overhead, broken birds tumble by as lives are lived and lost in the shadow of liminal spaces. A kind of magical realist Rockwell painting. Lenderman’s guard is never fully down, there is always a word and there is always a distraction and this is part of the beauty of it all, never letting himself get too lost in the mire of a desperate heartache. It’s hard to let go sometimes, and it’s hard to not find these things funny at the same time.
There is no better proof of this than “Wristwatch”, a cautious rock and roll ballad driven by pedal steel and Neil Young flavoured chords. An earnest lamentation of loss paired by the persistent presence of an ever-connected world driven by Apple Watches and find-my-friends. So you say I’ve wasted my life away, well, I got a beach home up in Buffalo, and a wristwatch that’s a compass and a cell phone, and a wristwatch that tells me you’re all alone.
More than anything, I’ve been enraptured by Lenderman’s voice and songwriting, these wry and beautiful songs wrapped in unserious imagery. I like a voice that tells a story, I like a story that comes alive in a voice and both of these work here. I’m not here to say whether the pristine vocals of a perfect pop song are better than what we are witness too on Manning Fireworks , I only know for me and my heart I appreciate a voice that falters and soars like a broken bird tumbling by a half-mast McDonald's flag because it feels like the promise of remaining true of how you want to tell your own bitterly charming stories. let go and allow yourself to be perfectly true to the intentions driven by your hearts desire. Disarm the pain with poetry on your tongue, live to sing just once more.