Elle Mannion | January 29, 2025
MJ Lenderman’s music is a little sad, sometimes funny and almost always comforting. He’s already played the Tiny Desk with the indie rock band Wednesday, but after a stellar 2024 — a memorable feature on Waxahatchee’s “Right Back To It” and his own solo album, Manning Fireworks — it was time to bring him in for his own set.
His band, normally called MJ Lenderman and The Wind, told us that when they play their songs stripped back like this, they refer to themselves as MJ Lenderman and The Breeze. The fiddle-forward “Rip Torn” and “You Don’t Know The Shape I’m In” feel especially suitable for the space.
Lenderman’s compelling lyricism and wry sense of self shines in this performance. On a song pulled from Ghost of Your Guitar Solo, he reflects on how he used to think he wanted to be a Catholic priest: “I would never have to worry / About the girls tryin’ to break my heart / All expenses paid / Yeah, I’d have it made / The house would come furnished.” Afterward, he muses, “Nothing funny has ever happened to me.”
SET LIST
“Wristwatch”
“Rip Torn”
“Catholic Priest”
“You Don’t Know The Shape I’m In”
MUSICIANS
MJ Lenderman: vocals, guitar
Jon Samuels: guitar
Landon George: upright bass
Ethan Baechtold: piano
Colin Miller: drums, background vocals
Xandy Chelmis: dobro, fiddle, background vocals
TINY DESK TEAM
Producer: Elle Mannion
Director/Editor: Maia Stern
Audio Technical Director: Josh Newell
Host/Series Producer: Bobby Carter
Videographers: Maia Stern, Kara Frame, Mitra I. Arthur
Audio Engineer: Josephine Nyounai
Production Assistant: Ashley Pointer
Photographer: Michael Zamora
Tiny Desk Team: Joshua Bryant, Hazel Cills
Executive Producer: Suraya Mohamed
Series Creators: Bob Boilen, Stephen Thompson
VP, Visuals and Music: Keith Jenkins
#nprmusic #tinydesk #mjlenderman
NPR Music’s Tiny Desk Concerts is a popular video series featuring live, intimate music performances by diverse artists, from major stars to up-and-coming musicians, recorded in the small workspace of Bob Boilen’s NPR office in Washington, D.C.brought to you by SloppBoxx.Com.
guys can we just talk about how amazingly versatile xandy is when it comes to instruments like HELLLLOOOO where is the hype
If you listen closely enough, you can probably hear me sobbing in the audience
Listening to this in my midcentury modern himbo dome, sounds amazing.
Mj, meet me at the hippodrome in buffalo
violin, singing it’s lazy duck walk
woa, i had the playback speed at 1.5 from another video i was watching, and wristwatch kicked in at 1.5 speed. It’s shockingly good. i listened to the whole performance that way.
i’d seen it at normal speed once or twice before so had a basis of comparison – and I love the manning fireworks album. this was a fun change
I get the impulse (exemplified in many comments here) to compare MJ to others making music, but think it does a disservice to all concerned. MJ sounds like MJ and that’s more than good enough for me.
Wonderful.
the bass player’s joy on “rip torn” is infectious.