Shroom Club #005: on MJ Lenderman, late summer, and speed dating

and why "She's Leaving You" is the perfect song of the summer

I have decided to give up on dating apps in order to instead try and find the love of my life via its ultimate philosophical opposite: speed dating. I am weaning myself off of the dating apps, since the only worthwhile things I have gotten from dating apps are tears and stories to make my therapist laugh. 

MJ Lenderman’s latest record, Manning Fireworks, is one of my favorites from this year. The album came out a little after Labor Day, a perfect way to bookend the end of summer and the gentle approach of autumn. I’ve been a fan of MJ Lenderman and the band he plays lead guitar for with his ex-girlfriend, Karly Hartzman, and I’ve also been a fan of the solo records he’s slowly been putting out over the last couple of years: “Hangover Game” and “You Are Every Girl to Me” are some all-time favorites of mine. Lenderman got a surge of popularity this summer, a result of his success with Wednesday, playing guitar on the excellent new Waxahatchee record Tigers Blood and the summer lead-up to the release of Manning Fireworks, which included an abundance of “dudes rock” memes. I see lots of people christening Lenderman as the “next” Alex G, maybe because of their same brown hair and skinny frame and introspective nature and country-influenced slacker rock guitar playing, but I like thinking of Lenderman as his own entity. Lenderman wears his Southern roots on his sleeve, acting as narrator in his songs, his lyrics taking on the perspective of a horny priest or a depressed motel worker cleaning cum out of the shower drain. He writes through the eyes of many different characters, but they all share a similar feeling: they are sad, however deeply or flippantly, about love. They are not love songs, but they are songs about love. 

I think it’s funny when male music writers have a collective circle-jerk about MJ Lenderman, joking about how he is the next Neil Young or whatever, that he is their indie rock messiah. He’s just some guy who writes songs about love. Lenderman’s stories make fun of the male ego, and he rolls his eyes at his male characters who think they are just too cool for love because of their own falsified notion of their own bravado. A big majority of the male writers over-enthusiastically praising Lenderman are just writing themselves into his songs without ever realizing it.

I started going to a few speed dating events in Ridgewood this summer because I needed to just not be endlessly swiping on the apps. The first ever speed dating event I went to was last year, hosted by the NYC DSA, and I met a tall man who lived in Bushwick. He was funny, and I thought it was funny that I met a man at a NYC DSA speed dating event. But when we went on our first official date, everything felt weird. Part of the thrill of meeting him was that it was all organic, or as organic as a speed dating event can be: I guess when I mean I met him “organically,” I mean that I hadn’t swiped on him through an app. Sure, the speed dating was an event to meet other people, but we made the decision to talk to each other. Once we got on the date, however, everything felt off: suddenly, we were doing the things that were expected of an app date, and it suddenly all felt robotic and formulaic: drinks, dinner, more drinks, Uber back to his place. I think the chemistry wore off once we found ourselves subconsciously subscribing to this formula we were so used to following with app dating. Everything suddenly felt forced, and I realized that it was hard to shake myself from following the prescribed “schedule” I had also internalized for myself. It felt unnatural, and we decided to just be friends. I wanted to take the time to get to know him, but I think it’s hard to remember how to do that after spending your life swiping, swiping, swiping.

I loathe app dating because it makes you anxious about things you shouldn’t have to be anxious about. You forget to treat each other like people. You start talking to one person on an app, and suddenly, you are competing with every other single woman in New York City. There is the pressure to be interesting and charming and witty when responding to “prompts,” and you’re supposed to figure out if you want to fuck someone after meeting them for the first time, over drinks. If Jane Austen had been aware of Tinder she’d probably have an aneurysm. It erases all feeling of romance, decorum, or intrigue. There is no such thing as a “slow burn” if you meet on an app. You are forced to decide if you like someone as soon as your thumb swipes on your phone screen — we are not afforded the patience or grace to decide if we want to take our time in getting to know that person, for fear of getting ghosted or rejected or left on read or ignored or whatever. We have normalized being treated like objects and disposable by total and utter strangers, thanks to these dating apps, and trained to want the affections of a man who uses 3-1 shampoo conditioner and body wash, in the name of what? Fear of being “alone”? I’d rather be by myself. It got to the point where I was on the dating apps to kill time when I was bored, falling victim to the societal pressures of feeling like I needed a boyfriend, a partner, to be whole. I still do want to be with a person, but app dating makes you obsessed with finding “it” that you’re more obsessed with finding someone, anyone, as soon as possible, than actually considering the actual person you’ve convinced yourself is The One. 

I used to hate summer growing up, disliked the feeling of the humidity and sweat hugging my skin. But I was heading into summer after a fresh breakup, ending something with someone I was seeing casually. I’d realized that I’d wanted more than our current set-up, and wasn’t prepared to wait until he was ready for a relationship, so we broke it off amicably.

Cassette, fka Sundown, is my local wine/ cocktail bar, and I’m there at least once a week for their ramen pop-up with my friend Jesse. I am there so often that the ramen chef, Ryuma, knows my name and order, and I am friendly with the bartenders. We sometimes participate in their Wednesday night karaoke. So when I saw that they were having a speed dating night hosted by Vanessa, owner of Tiny Arts Supply, I figured why not. It’s hard to say no to things when it’s summer.

One thing I love about Ridgewood is that a lot of musicians live here. One thing I hate about Ridgewood is that a lot of musicians live here. I often joke that Ridgewood is like a glorified, extended campus, in that you are bound to run into someone you know at a coffee shop/ restaurant/ show. In time, I’ve learned to appreciate the possibility of running into a familiar face as you’re ordering an iced latte at Milk & Pull or Honeymoon. But it also means that it’s impossible to attend something as innocuous as speed dating without bumping into multiple people you already know there. Eventually, though, I was able to appreciate that these speed dating events were less about literally finding the love of your life, and more about meeting even more like-minded, kind, and friendly people within your community. And yes, this does mean musicians.

I wasn’t wasted at the speed dating event, but I was very drunk, and when I get drunk, I get very chatty, and when I am drunk in an environment that literally requires you to be chatty, I become something like the Easter Bunny on crack. Pretty much all the men blended together for me in the room, because they were all white and living in Bushwick and into techno, save for one very kind, very lovely British man who was in town for the summer. This British man had come to the speed dating event after meeting people who were also going at Sunday dinner at Woodbine, a Ridgewood-based community hub that a lot of my friends are involved in. I, naturally, was extremely excited to meet a British man in the very exotic setting of the basement of Cassette that I very enthusiastically told him all about how I lived in London and did he also take the 176 bus to Penge? I showed him my iPhone wallpaper, which was a photo of Damon Albarn and Liam Gallagher squaring up against one another in the famed Britpop Derby. He told me that he did not know who they were. My colleague later told me that he considered this a green flag.

A funny coincidence is that a few weeks prior to this speed dating event, I’d told my therapist that I wanted an impassioned and intense summer fling. I had never had the kind of short-term romance that, because we had limited time, had us wanting to spend every moment with each other, determined to make every second last. A cruel coincidence — or, irony, maybe — is that I was headed to Indonesia for the first time in five years to attend my cousin’s wedding roughly four days before he was due to return to London. We always knew that we had a time limit on our time together, but there was something devilish about the fact that it was me who had to leave first, and that was to attend a wedding, of all things.

I wrote about it briefly for Dirt, but I couldn’t help thinking that the universe was playing a cruel trick on me by having me board a plane to spend two weeks with my family for a wedding, when the closest thing I had to romantic intimacy lived in London and was not aware of my existence just eight days earlier. I couldn’t even watch anything on the 13-hour flight, or read my book. My eyes were swollen from crying all morning, and even when my AirPod batteries died, I didn’t bother taking them off and putting them in my charging case. I just sat up straight in my seat in the middle row at the very back of the plane, staring into the void. We said that we weren’t going to do the pining and desiring thing, but everyone knows that most things are easier said than done.

I was nervous about being in Indonesia with my family. I was nervous about being one of the only older grandchildren without a plus one, and I was nervous about what people would say once they’d found out the second-oldest grandchild was at the wedding without a partner. Turns out that nobody cared that I was by myself, and that everything had been in my own head — I don’t give my extended family enough credit for being so cool. I was sad, though, to not have a partner, or even a buddy, to have with me at all times, a person whose hand I could have held or squeezed during some of the more stressful moments. But that isn’t specific to Bali, though. I just want a partner who is able to hold my hand and have my back for every hard moment. It’s a foreign concept to me.

I thought it was going to be hard watching my cousin get married while I was on my own, and that I would feel some kind of envy or jealousy or sadness, but in truth, I was just so happy for her that day and happy that I could be there and didn’t feel the negative emotions I was expecting to feel. If anything, I was grateful and appreciative of the broad scope that life had to offer. I wasn’t anywhere near walking down the aisle — nor do I have any interest in doing that, if ever — but I was able to have an incredible, wonderful, life-changing experience with a wonderful person, however brief our time together was. I don’t have any regrets about that.

I love listening to MJ Lenderman because his songs are about people being sad, but they do not sound sad. I’ve written about Morrissey and The Smiths and how listening to Morrissey and The Smiths on shrooms caused me to have ego death. But MJ Lenderman is not sad the way Morrissey is sad. Because he writes his lyrics from the perspective of the narrator, he is talking to another person, telling them to get their life together. Sure, all these characters have come from Lenderman’s psyche, but it’s an interesting tool for him to use, especially in this time of fans becoming overly parasocial with their favorite musicians. No, it’s not MJ Lenderman draining cum from hotel showers and hoping for the hours to pass a little faster; he’s just writing about a guy who is.

It’s why I love his song, “She’s Leaving You,” so much. I wrote a bit about this for The FADER, but it’s been one of my songs of the summer just for its sheer melancholy and slacker coolness that is empathetic and compassionate. You’re not going to be listening to Sabrina Carpenter’s “Espresso” when you’re grieving a failed summer situationship, or sad about a man who lives in London. You’re going to sit with your friends, listening to Manning Fireworks, because summers are also for celebrating the end of these summer flings. In “She’s Leaving You,” Lenderman tells the tale of a divorced dad type who commiserates over his heartbreak through listening to Eric Clapton and driving Ferraris, as well as gambling so much in Vegas that, as thank you, his room is free. Lenderman is sympathetic to his pain, but insists that he needs to get up and get over it: “It falls apart, we’ve all got work to do.”

Because isn’t that what life is all about in the end — having these experiences and telling funny stories about them?