Album of The week – Staff Review
This week sees the reissue of Boat Songs, MJ Lenderman’s third studio album, originally released in 2022. Its reissue arrives on the back of Lenderman’s speedy ascent as one of indie-rock’s most celebrated and talked-about songwriters. Though Boat Songs earned widespread critical acclaim on release, its home on the small Dear Life Records meant that finding a physical copy the first time around proved fairly difficult. Thankfully, this fantastic album, which is superior, to my ears, even to the excellent Manning Fireworks (2024), is finally back on vinyl and CD with much wider distribution.
While his self-titled debut and Ghost of Your Guitar Solo, both also reissued this week, laid the groundwork for his indie-rock spin on country and folk, Boat Songs is where the Asheville, North Carolina musician truly perfects his craft. As we’ve come to expect from Lenderman, the record is full to the brim with pathos, melancholy, wit, and just the right amount of slacker charm in both production and performance. There’s an effortlessness to his writing that makes it so fresh and fluid, and ensures Boat Songs is such a joy to listen to, and frequently a genuine rush.
Many of these tracks have become live staples over the last three years, as captured on his superb Live & Loose! album from earlier this year. And they still hit just as hard on re-listens here. Opener Hangover Game finds Lenderman giving his own version of Michael Jordan’s infamous 1997 “Flu Game,” insisting, with a knowing smile, that Jordan, despite scoring 38 points, was simply hungover like any regular person, and the official excuses weren’t fooling anyone. Another American sports icon, Dan Marino, takes centre stage on the lo-fi, fuzzed-out, country-rocking Dan Marino, a wry, yet touching lament about seeing his image on a cereal-box replaced by successor Tom Brady.
But Boat Songs isn’t just jokes and smart observations. TLC Cage Match ponders the very real toll of professional wrestling, how scripted outcomes do nothing to soften the damage done to bodies for the sake of entertainment. Elsewhere, the failures and false promises of the American dream haunt another stand-out track, the cathartic Toontown.
Further release comes in the fantastic Neil Young & Crazy Horse-like crunch of You Are Every Girl to Me, and the superb penultimate track Tastes Just Like It Costs, which further presents Lenderman’s ongoing preoccupations with everyday consumerism and things never quite living up to expectations, bleeding briefly into the political with the sharp couplet: “what did I tell you / about wearing that dumb hat / you know the one I’m talkin’ about.” I think we all know which hat.
Across Boat Songs, Lenderman carves out his own corner within the vast landscape of American music, wading into the ditch with the distorted glory of Neil Young, basking in the glory of ’90s American alt-rock, and orbiting traces of Jason Molina, Mark Linkous (Sparklehorse), and David Berman (Silver Jews).
Boat Songs is the followup to Lenderman’s 2021 label debut, Ghost of Your Guitar Solo, and subsequent release, Knockin’, with Dear Life Records, both of which were critically acclaimed for their off-the-cuff alternative country sound. But with Boat Songs, Lenderman emerges confident as ever, an innovative yet unassuming artist, straightforward and true.
Recorded at Asheville’s Drop of Sun with Alex Farrar and Colin Miller, Boat Songs is the first album Lenderman made in a professional studio. WWE matches and basketball games were silently projected on the studio walls during recording sessions. And you can hear their power in these ten unapologetically lo-fi tracks, each brimming with pent-up energy and the element of surprise.
A clavichord honks throughout ‘You Have Bought Yourself A Boat’ with the playfulness of a live Dylan/Band set. ‘SUV’ screams with My Bloody Valentine distortion. When Xandy Chelmis beautifully bends his steel guitar on ‘TLC Cage Match’ you can’t help but think of Gram Parsons. And ‘Tastes Just Like It Costs’ howls with the intensity of Crazy Horse era Neil Young. Boat Songs is fearless and it’s exciting. It challenges the perception of what modern day country music is supposed to be and where it can go.
But no matter where Boat Songs goes sonically, the album is deeply rooted in Lenderman’s natural gifts as a storyteller. Someone once asked Hank Williams what made country music successful and he said, “One word: sincerity.” Filled with everyday observations ripped straight from his journal, Lenderman’s lyrics are sincere in their absurdities, with the vulnerability and honesty of Jason Molina and Daniel Johnston. There are moments of humor (‘Jackass is funny like the Earth is round’), admission (‘I know why we get so fucked up’), and recognition of beauty others might not stop to see (‘Your laundry looks so pretty…relaxing in the wind’). Read alone on the page, ‘Hangover Game,’ ‘You Have Bought Yourself A Boat,’ and ‘Dan Marino,’ stand out as perfect little poems, unpretentious and real. Simply said, these songs are unforgettable.
Or you could also say it like this: listening to Boat Songs by MJ Lenderman is like joining your best friends out on the porch. The neighbors might be yelling and the bugs might be biting. But y’all are shooting the shit and letting loose, telling the same old stories again and again. But it don’t matter how many times you’ve heard them, because they’re from the heart—and in the end they always make you feel alive again.
