In 2023, the North Carolina indie band Wednesday released Rat Saw God, and it was our favorite album of the year. That record was the culmination of a huge rise for Wednesday. Up until recently, Wednesday leader Karly Hartzman and guitarist MJ Lenderman were a couple, and Lenderman split his time between Wednesday and his solo career. Since then, Hartzman and Lenderman have broken up, and Lenderman's solo career has taken off. In 2024, he released Manning Fireworks, our second-favorite album of the year. Now, Lenderman says that he will no longer tour with Wednesday.
Lenderman breaks the news in a new GQ profile written by Grayson Haver Currin. It doesn't mean that he's out of the band. Currin writes that Wednesday are nearly finished with their follow-up to Rat Saw God and that Lenderman and Hartzman's breakup was "kept hidden from the other members of Wednesday for months," including some of the time that they were recording the new LP. Apparently, the two of them broke up while on tour in Tokyo, and then they kept working on the new LP. Hartzman says, "I was numb during those sessions. I had to be. Jake and I had written so many songs about each other and our relationship over the years, including these, and I just needed to get them out."
Lenderman says that he had a hard time trying to be normal about it: "Karly’s writing style, it’s almost like diary snippets. Pretty much every song, it’s maybe something that happened to me. But I don’t remember it that much now, aside from going home each day exhausted."
Lenderman will apparently play on future Wednesday records, but he won't tour with the band anymore. He mentions a Tokyo show and says, "Oh, that was my last show in Wednesday... The guy that’s replacing me? His name is Jake, too." Read the GQ story here.
In other MJ Lenderman news, Drive-By Truckers leader Patterson Hood, who plays a major supporting role in the GQ story and whose new solo album Exploding Trees & Airplane Screams features Lenderman, recently joined Lenderman onstage in Portland. Together, they played a version of Hood's 2004 solo song "Uncle Disney"; check it out below.
