Released in tandem with 'I Will Swim to You: A Tribute to Jason Molina', this limited edition 7” features MJ Lenderman’s contribution to the compilation (a cover of Songs: Ohia’s 'Just Be Simple') alongside a rarity pulled from the Jason Molina Archives. This demo version of 'The Last Three Human Words' runs just over 5 minutes, but captures the intimacy of Jason’s entire catalog perfectly well. MJ Lenderman’s cover of 'Just Be Simple' brings a fresh urgency to the song, blending its twangy confessions with bursts of full-band energy. His distinct North Carolina drawl trembles with poetic conviction, reimagining Molina’s original with reverence and grit. The cover plays to the emotional depth of both artists, setting the tone for a project rooted in tribute and transformation.

TRACK LISTING

1. Jason Molina - The Last Three Human Words (Demo)
2. MJ Lenderman - Just Be Simple (Songs: Ohia Cover)

Dear Life Records and Dinked are proud to present an limited edition deluxe repress of MJ Lenderman's breakout album Boat Songs (DLR031). A little over three years after its release, 'Boat Songs' is now commonly read as the keystone to the 2020s renaissance of alt-country (or whatever you want to call it), and features some of his most enduring hits and live set staples.

“The thing about loving your own frailties is that it deepens your ability to love the rest of it, too. Lenderman renders suffering and joy in the same gentle, unhurried deadpan, dragging all those heightened feelings back down to the ground where they can sprout” - Pitchfork

“There are few eternal truths in this world, but drinking beer with your buddies is always a good time. Asheville’s MJ Lenderman understands this. His third LP Boat Songs doesn’t get bogged down with intellectualism or make apologies for its love of Southern ephemera. These 10 tracks of countrified indie rock sound primed to soundtrack plenty of beer-battered bull sessions” - Flood Magazine.

TRACK LISTING

Side A
Hangover Game
You Have Bought Yourself A Boat
TLC Cage Match
Toontown
SUV

Side B
Under Control
Dan Marino
You Are Every Girl To Me
Tastes Just Like It Costs
Six Flags

Mj Lenderman is the project of Asheville native, Jake Lenderman, whose 'Boat Songs' was released to wide acclaim on Dear Life Records in 2022. Now Dear Life is proud to offer a vinyl reissue of MJ's 2021 label debut, 'Ghost of Your Guitar Solo,' a collection of nine songs recorded and performed entirely by Lenderman, and one live band track. The record was written and recorded quickly, songs often being fully constructed and recorded within frenzied single day sessions. Songs were born out of freewheeling jam sessions with his roommates, with Lenderman often freestyling lyrics that would later become the foundations of the finished songs. Lenderman would write 20 disconnected lines a day, scrapping most of them but preserving a few to be used later. This process aided in what became an extremely prolific writing period for the artist in the spring of 2020. The record sounds like country music being played by a noisy punk band, unkempt and imperfect like the characters in his songs. Here, Lenderman broadened his lyrical scope beyond solemn introspection, adding humor to scenes larger than his own life. He points to authors Harry Crews and Larry Brown as inspirations, both of whom were southern, self-taught writers who balanced empathy, humor, and darkness. This leads to the erosion of the line that separates humor and sadness. The resulting songs are about over-indulgence and drug/alcohol abuse, full of self-loathing and pity while celebrating the absurdity of it all.

TRACK LISTING

A1 Ghost Of Your Guitar Solo
A2 I Ate Too Much At The Fair
A3 Someone Get The Grill Out Of The Rain
A4 Inappropriate
A5 Gentleman’s Jack
B1 Another Place
B2 Infinity Pool
B3 Catholic Priest
B4 Ghost Of Your Guitar Solo 2
B5 Live Jack

MJ Lenderman writes songs that are amorphous and elastic, rising to fill the
venue they're in, generous to accommodate the number of players on stage,
less concerned with replicating the studio version than they are with meeting
the crowd where they're at. On 'And the Wind (Live and Loose!)', the Asheville-based Lenderman handles most of the playing, but with The Wind, it's a multi-headed beast.

TRACK LISTING

1. Hangover Game
2. Knockin
3. You Have Bought Yourself A Boat
4. TLC Cagematch
5. Rudolph
6. Toon Town
7. Dan Marino
8. Under Control
9. SUV
10. Catholic Priest
11. Gentleman's Jack
12. Someone Get The Grill Out Of The Rain
13. You Are Every Girl To Me
14. Tastes Just Like It Costs
15. Long Black Veil (feat. Styrofoam Winos)

TRACK LISTING

A1 Come Over
A2 Heartbreak Blues
B1 Left Your Smile
B2 My Baby Says
B3 Southern Birds
C1 Space
C2 Grief
D1 Basketball #1
D2 Ghost Town

In 2021 Douglas Dulgarian of the band TAGABOW issued the very first cassette release on his brand new label project Julia’s War Recordings. It was a collaborative EP by friends Jake and Karly called Guttering, issued under their pseudonyms MJ Lenderman & Wednesday. Upon it’s initial release, Stereogum put it perfectly when they said that “Guttering‘s six self-recorded tracks present some of the best aspects of both artists’ work, setting sighing harmonies against dense power chords and occasionally seasoning the mix with some twangy lead guitar.”

Fast forward to 2025, MJ Lenderman and Wednesday are two of the biggest names in indie rock. Wednesday had a break out 2023 with the release of their excellent Dead Oceans debut ‘Rat Saw God’, which landed on a numerous year end lists. In 2024 MJ Lenderman released his Anti debut with ‘Manning Fireworks’, which catapulted him into indie stardom. A string of sold out tour dates and an equally impressive list of year end accolades followed the album’s release. With both bands garnering rabid fanbases over the last four years, the release of this early collaborative EP demonstrates just how far the two have come, and showcases the magical spark the two had in those early days before the world was watching.

TRACK LISTING

1. Big Money
2. Terminex
3. Phish Pepsi (ft. Advance Base)
4. My Voice Is A Little Horse
5. Sacrifice (For Love)
6. Christiane F

The anatomy of an MJ record might go something like this: warped pedal steels and skuzzed out guitar; crackin' a cold one with some buds; a voice reminiscent of the high- lonesome warble of a choirboy. Songs snake their way from a lo- fi home recording to something glossier made with longtime friends at Asheville's Drop of Sun studios, but the recording setting doesn't seem to matter much - at its core, a Lenderman song rings true.

Manning Fireworks is a remarkable development in MJ Lenderman's story as an incredibly incisive singer-songwriter, whose propensity for humour always points to some uneasy, disorienting darkness. The punchlines are still here, as are the rusted-wire guitar solos that have made Lenderman a favourite for indie rock fans looking for an emerging guitar hero. There's a new sincerity, too, as Lenderman lets listeners clearly see the world through his warped lens.

STAFF COMMENTS

Laura says: An absolutely beautiful album full of country tinged melancholy.

TRACK LISTING

Manning Fireworks
Joker Lips
Rudolph
Wristwatch
She's Leaving You
Rip Torn
You Don't Know The Shape I'm In
On My Knees
Bark At The Moon

A Wednesday song is a quilt. A short story collection, a half-memory, a patchwork of portraits of the American south, disparate moments that somehow make sense as a whole. Karly Hartzman, the songwriter/ vocalist/guitarist at the helm of the project, is a story collector as much as she is a storyteller: a scholar of people and one-liners. Rat Saw God, the Asheville quintet’s new and best record, is ekphrastic but autobiographical and above all, deeply empathetic. Across the album’s ten tracks Hartzman, guitarist MJ Lenderman, bassist Margo Shultz, drummer Alan Miller, and lap/pedal steel player Xandy Chelmis build a shrine to minutiae. Half-funny, half-tragic dispatches from North Carolina unfurling somewhere between the wailing skuzz of Nineties shoegaze and classic country twang, that distorted lap steel and Hartzman’s voice slicing through the din.

Rat Saw God is an album about riding a bike down a suburban stretch in Greensboro while listening to My Bloody Valentine for the first time on an iPod Nano, past a creek that runs through the neighborhood riddled with broken glass bottles and condoms, a front yard filled with broken and rusted car parts, a lonely and dilapidated house reclaimed by kudzu. Four Lokos and rodeo clowns and a kid who burns down a corn field. Roadside monuments, church marquees, poppers and vodka in a plastic water bottle, the shit you get away with at Jewish summer camp, strange sentimental family heirlooms at the thrift stores. The way the South hums alive all night in the summers and into fall, the sound of high school football games, the halo effect from the lights polluting the darkness. It’s not really bright enough to see in front of you, but in that stretch of inky void – somehow – you see everything.

The songs on Rat Saw God don’t recount epics, just the everyday. They’re true, they’re real life, blurry and chaotic and strange – which is in-line with Hartzman’s own ethos: “Everyone’s story is worthy,” she says, plainly. “Literally every life story is worth writing down, because people are so fascinating.”

But the thing about Rat Saw God - and about any Wednesday song, really - is you don’t necessarily even need all the references to get it, the weirdly specific elation of a song that really hits. Yeah, it’s all in the details – how fucked up you got or get, how you break a heart, how you fall in love, how you make yourself and others feel seen – but it’s mostly the way those tiny moments add up into a song or album or a person.

TRACK LISTING

01. Hot Grass Smell
02. Bull Believer
03. Got Shocked
04. Formula One
05. Chosen To Deserve
06. Bath County
07. Quarry
08. Turkey Vultures
09. What’s So Funny
10. TV In The Gas Pump

I Was Trying to Describe You to Someone is Wednesday’s second full length album & first as a full band. The Asheville, NC quintet (guitarist/ vocalist Karly Hartzman, lead guitarist Daniel Gorham, pedal steel guitarist Xandy Chelmis, bassist Margo Schultz & drummer Alan Miller) maximizes the dark dissonance of a three guitar attack to highlight the emotionality of Hartzman’s bell-clear vocals & wisps of half-recalled memories & literary references that make up her lyrics.

I Was Trying to Describe You to Someone’s eight songs meld elements of shoegaze, grunge, indie pop & southern American culture into a uniquely personal style of modern rock music that resonates with power & tenderness. The ever-darkening & deepening of Wednesdays’ sound on I Was Trying to Describe You to Someone owes a debt of influence to The Swirlies, Arthur Russell, Red House Painters, Tenniscoats, Ana Roxanne, Acetone, & their continued collaboration with MJ Lenderman (who lends backing vocals to the songs “Billboard” & “November”).

I Was Trying to Describe You to Someone was recorded at Hartzman’s home with engineering assistance from her roommate Colin Miller. The depth & clarity of the recordings balance the distorted volume of Wednesday’s live performances with the intimacy of Hartzman’s voice. Her words hold the center of the chaos, unobscured by the power of the band. Hartzman describes her lyrics as “attempts to access old personal memories & do them justice through prose, with inspiration from the writings of Richard Brautigan, Flannery O’Connor, David Berman & Tom Robbins, & movies like Steel Magnolias.”

TRACK LISTING

1) Fate Is…
2) Billboard
3) Love Has No Pride (Condemned)
4) Underneath
5) November
6) Maura
8) Coyote
9) Revenge Of The Lawn

In a long and emotionally exhausting year of being inside (alone, in my case,) I have found myself thinking about mirrors. How to avoid spending too much time in them, most days. Taking inventory of the real, physical self is difficult work, work that I’m not entirely opposed to but work that became immediately more treacherous for me when I had to witness the very real toll that time, modern anxieties, isolation, and boredom were taking on me. It was easier, it seemed, to spiral into a not-so-distant glorious past, to use memory as a tool of both excitement and healing. But, speaking of excitement, I like to stumble towards a band with no agenda, no purpose, uncovering sound almost on accident. This is how I first heard Wednesday. The band came to me and I don’t remember how, or why. They simply arrived, as if we’d been traveling toward each other our whole lives.

I Was Trying To Describe You To Someone soaked into my summer of 2020, and in sound, in spirit, in central concerns and the execution of them, it took me back to an era before the current era, which I’d needed at the time. The past can feel less hellish than the present if we are, sometimes, not fully honest with ourselves. There is the trick of nostalgia that I spend a lot of time playing with in my own writing, and somewhat tormented by in my own living. The very real idea that nostalgia is both a useful tool and also a weapon if it isn’t paired with something that approaches a type of rigorous honesty.

But if I may go back to all of these ideas of nostalgia and our old, tricky, past selves that are, indeed, a part of the house of bricks that make up our present self, what I also hope you, listener, might adore about this album is the exact moment at the start of “The Burned Down Dairy Queen” when Karly sings I was hiding in a room in my mind / and I made me take a look at myself. Because if you, like me, have been avoiding mirrors – both metaphorical and real – this is where the album becomes a lighthouse, echoing bright across the darkness of my otherwise dark and empty chambers.

So much of these songs meditate on the past in far less romantic ways than I have found myself meditating on the past, and I was desperate for the recalibration that this album provided. So, yes, the songs are good. You will maybe roll down your windows on a comfortable day on the right stretch of road in a warm season and turn the volume up when “Birthday Song” gets good and loud and singalong-able. You might sit atop a rooftop at night, closer to the moon than you were on the ground, and let “Ghost Of A Dog” churn and rattle you to some nighttime realization that you couldn’t have had in silence. But, even on top of all of this, on top of all the pleasures and the mercies that the sounds on this album might afford. I hope and think, too, that it will remind anyone who listens that we are a collection of many reflections. All of them deserving patience. —Hanif Abdurraqib

TRACK LISTING

1) Twin Plagues
2) Handsome Man
3) The Burned Down Dairy Queen
4) Cliff
5) How Can You Live If You Can’t
Love How Can You If You Do
6) Cody’s Only
7) Toothache
8) Birthday Song
9) One More Last One
10) Three Sisters
11) Gary’s
12) Ghost Of A Dog