MJ Lenderman’s new single unfolds like a private joke, or some weird take on Chekhov’s gun: Mention a cover of “Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door” in the first verse, and you must sing a line from it by the end. Over some rangy open chords on distorted electric guitar, Lenderman remembers golf legend and self-proclaimed “crazy man” John Daly’s version of Bob Dylan’s hit, which Daly sometimes performed live, often while wearing a stars-and-stripes jacket. In the song, Daly singing Dylan is just another fragment in a depressing landscape, a place where you can only hear bird calls “coming from the rafters of the hardware store” and where love looks more like mutual codependency: “You’re all I need, babe/Yeah, you’ve heard that one before.”
Lenderman’s universe is a familiar one—you could take the old Modest Mouse line “The malls are the soon-to-be ghost towns” and put it in the mouth of any character in his songs—but he moves through it with the grace and conviction of someone born into it. And when he reaches for that “Knockin’” quote, scaling up an octave to sing the song’s title hook, he touches the root note of all great American indie rock, where exalted feelings mingle with banal surroundings, where a shrug and scream suddenly become indistinguishable.
