Lance Bangs Talks MJ Lenderman’s Manning Fireworks
Lance Bangs Talks MJ Lenderman’s Manning Fireworks
The legendary filmmaker and music video director stops by to talk about Lenderman's latest.
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A Quick Note from Perfectly Imperfect
This is the start of a new column where we’ll be getting some legends to do what we’re calling a “long form recommendation” on someone else’s work.
This isn’t a review (there are already enough bozo critics assigning # scores on art…) but it’s something a bit different and more in the spirit of what we do with Perfectly Imperfect - sharing what people love.
Expect to see these monthly ish.
- Tyler
Lance Bangs is a filmmaker, documentarian, and music video director that’s worked with PI favorites such as Sonic Youth, Nirvana, Neutral Milk Hotel, Guided by Voices, Pavement, Green Day, Bjork, the Yeah Yeah Yeahs, George Harrison, and Kanye West. That’s quite the resume in itself, but Lance was also heavily involved in one of the most iconic pieces of art from our time, MTV’s Jackass, and directed comedy specials for David Cross, Fred Armisen, Todd Barry, and many more. I could go on and on about his key role in various eras of comedy and indie rock. Lucky for us, Lance is here to talk about one of my favorite albums of the year.
Lance Bangs Talks MJ Lenderman’s Manning Fireworks
While it was warm in 2008, I traveled the United States with a crew of friends directing promotional videos for Rock Band 2, a rhythm and timing-based video game that came with guitars, drum kits and vocal mics. We traveled with modified Xboxes and prototypes of the instruments.
The appeal of these sorts of campaigns was that we could dash across the United States, conjuring surreal adventures. Swimming in the Ozarks with catfish grabblers. Hanging of murdered out choppers from Sturgis to the Devil’s Tower. Squishing our way through red clay of a riverside land trust that members of the Elephant 6 Collective had moved into outside of Athens, Georgia.
Johnny Knoxville had a batch of ideas to shoot back home in Tennessee, so we drove deep into the profoundly corrupt Cocke County, Tennessee. We crept past cement infrastructure inexplicably built in the undeveloped woods. Highway exit ramps that weren’t connected to any highways. Contractors being paid to build sections of bridges over no actual gap. Money being siphoned and kicked back as we tried to find Parrotsville, TN.
We spent the day with one of the last surviving moonshiners, Popcorn Sutton. Popcorn was facing charges after an undercover ATF agent from the Bush/Cheney administration had stitched him up on federal charges for illegally distilling spirits. When the year got colder, Popcorn chose to breathe the carbon monoxide of his green Ford Fairmont rather than going back to federal prison.
In each of these settings we would tell stories, make pictures, record conversations, and eventually play the Rock Band 2 video game that was funding all of this. It was, of course, stupid.
What would music mean to the kids that were tapping glossy buttons on plastic headstocks of Guitar Hero and Rock Band 2? Would they feel more connected than people who had listened over radio, loudspeakers at the pool, or bands performing live? Would they have foundational nostalgia for the playlist of “Teenage Riot,” “Alex Chilton,” and “Drain You?”
Would a 7-year-old in Asheville, North Carolina play Guitar Hero, and then start learning actual riffs on real guitars with his friend? Would Jake and his three sisters get Rock Band 2 when it came out at the end of 2008? Weirdly, yeah.
“Manning Fireworks” has the feel of Lenderman’s ongoing ease. It’s not an anxious record. He wrote a batch of engaging songs and produced the sessions along with Alex Farrar. Lenderman usually began with a scratch guitar and vocal take, then would play drums to that, then redo his guitars and vocals and play electric bass as well. A few tracks feature fiddle, upright bass, or trombone from Landon George, and Xandy Chelmis plays pedal steel. Karly Hartzman adds vocals to six of the nine songs, most notably on “She’s Leaving You” at the end of the album’s first side. Ethan Baechtold (another bandmate in Wednesday) plays piano on “Rip Torn.”
“Joker Lips” cold-bloodedly declares:
Kahlua shooter
DUI scooter
With a rolling start on the hill ‘cause
This morning's tryna kill me
This morning wants to kill me
And through that song, the tone of the album is clarified- a sort of direct combination of Lenderman’s solid, comfortable ability to play melodically in a matter of fact way immune to doubt or second guessing, but not cocky.
The album is unusual in that it works as a breezy, not strained, often effortless-feeling listen. It has lyrics that feel observational and pared down in the way that Will Oldham and David Berman and Bill Callahan were all capable of in their own ways. Insight and truisms, but with humor behind them. What we are mostly hearing is Lenderman playing along to himself (guitars, vocals, bass, and drums all being him the majority of the time) but it feels alive and not cloistered or fussy.
Lenderman unspools amiable, sometimes shaggy, sometimes insistent guitar melodies across the album. “Rudolph” was written back in 2022, the first of this litter of songs. This recording came out as a 2023 single, and a 6 minute long live version appeared on the 2023 MJ Lenderman And the Wind (Live and Loose!) album.
“She’s Leaving You” jumps out as an instant exemplar of what Lenderman is admired for, a classic song that feels like you have had it in your life for longer than it has actually existed.
I get the most out of “Wristwatch,” with its descending riffs giving way to Xandy’s pedal steel on top of the guitar lead. The lyrics open with “So you say I’ve got a funny face/It makes me money” which conjures up a character misquoting Quiet Riot’s 1983 cover of Slade’s “Cum on Feel the Noize.” Lenderman excels at characters that come across as guys not getting it right, low-key committed to not quite understanding. A denseness, a hapless but easily seen wrongheadedness. Doubling down on not wising up.
The album builds up to the 9th song, a ten minute on-the-dot song that slides from personal lyrics into drone. The songs convey a shift, a breakup, the diverging of two people. Karly Hartzman doubles Jake’s vocals, and the song (and album) end with Jake explicitly concluding
I've never seen the Mona Lisa
I've nevеr really left my room
I've been up too latе with Guitar Hero
Playing 'Bark at The Moon’
A-wooooo
Bark at the moon
Another 1983 song, from 16 years before Jake would be born. “Bark at the Moon” was the final song in the career mode of the original Guitar Hero, the one that would require a kid to keep practicing, to keep playing along, to keep trying to get to the end.
Listen to MJ Lenderman’s Manning Fireworks here
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Photos + words by Lance Bangs
Intro + graphic by Tyler
Edit by Tyler
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Special thanks to Jennie + Vivi, and our epic & cool interns Madeline + Sofia.
"Lenderman excels at characters that come across as guys not getting it right, low-key committed to not quite understanding. A denseness, a hapless but easily seen wrongheadedness. Doubling down on not wising up." Phenomenally said.
loved the new format!