MJ Lenderman

Asheville

Mark Jacob Lenderman, who also goes by Jake, was born on February 4, 1999 in Asheville, North Carolina, into a family of musicians. He started on guitar at about seven or eight, and his great-grandfather was the saxophonist Charlie Ventura. He posted music to Bandcamp in high school and studied for three semesters at UNC Asheville. He also plays guitar in the band Wednesday, whose albums include Twin Plagues (2021), Rat Saw God (2023) and Bleeds (2025), played drums for Indigo De Souza, contributed to Waxahatchee's Tigers Blood (2024), and sings backing vocals on Mavis Staples' Sad and Beautiful World.

His early solo releases were self-released and then came out on Dear Life Records: MJ Lenderman (2019), Ghost of Your Guitar Solo (2021) and Boat Songs (2022). He signed to Anti-, whose first single from him was "Rudolph" in 2023, followed by the live album And the Wind (Live and Loose!) in November 2023. His backing band is The Wind: Landon George, Jon Samuels, Xandy Chelmis, Ethan Baechtold and Colin Miller.

Boat Songs and Manning Fireworks

Boat Songs came out on April 29, 2022 and was his first record made in a professional studio. Pitchfork gave it 8.3 and Best New Music, Uncut four out of five, and it appeared on many 2022 year-end lists, including Stereogum's at number 11 and Pitchfork's at 35. Stereogum described it as a chooglin' convergence of alt-country, classic rock and peak 90s slacker indie, and said it led to his Anti- signing.

Manning Fireworks followed on September 6, 2024, produced by Lenderman and Alex Farrar at Drop of Sun in Asheville. It has a Metacritic score of 88, Pitchfork 8.7 and Best New Music, and topped the New Yorker's year-end list, with the Stereogum, BrooklynVegan and Rolling Stone lists placing it second to third. In the United Kingdom it reached number two on the country albums chart and 85 on the main albums chart. In January 2025 he played an NPR Tiny Desk concert, and on television he performed "Joker Lips" on Jimmy Kimmel Live and "Wristwatch" on The Tonight Show.

On stage and influences

Setlist.fm's most-played songs are "Knockin'" (185 performances), "Wristwatch" (176), "Rudolph" (174), "You Have Bought Yourself a Boat" (174) and "Joker Lips" (169), across about 237 shows, 203 of them in the United States. Recent dates have included the Ryman Auditorium in Nashville on October 14, 2025 and January 31, 2026. He names Neil Young, Dinosaur Jr., Drive-By Truckers, Jason Molina and Tom Petty, and Uncut compared him to John Prine, Neil Young and Patterson Hood. Katie Crutchfield of Waxahatchee calls him one of her most trusted collaborators.