MJ Lenderman treated his fans to a cover of Counting Crow‘s ‘A Long December’ at his show last week.
The musician took over The Orange Peel in his hometown of Asheville, North Carolina last Friday (December 20), as one of his rescheduled shows due to the damage caused by Hurricane Helene back in October.
The show was in support of his latest album ‘Manning Fireworks‘ and saw him and his band – The Wind, which features Lenderman’s Wednesday bandmate Xandy Chelmis – play a string of tracks from that LP including ‘Joker Lips’, ‘Rudolph’, ‘Wristwatch’ and more.
To close out the gig, Lenderman treated the crowd to a rendition of Counting Crows‘ 1996 track ‘A Long December’, a fitting song considering the natural disaster North Carolina had recently faced.
As per Stereogum, his cover followed his other Wednesday bandmate, vocalist Karly Hartzman performing her own rendition of ‘A Long December’. The moment took place during a gig at Cat’s Cradle in Carrboro, North Carolina on December 17, where she was joined by Wednesday bassist Ethan Baechtold.
Unlike Lenderman’s version, which felt true to the original song, Hartzman took a stripped-back approach and performed an acoustic version of the track, making the song much more emotional than it already is.
The track was first released on December 2 1996 as the second single from Counting Crows’ second album ‘Recovering the Satellites’. It peaked at Number Five on the US Billboard Modern Rock Tracks Chart and Number One on the Canadian RPM 100 Hit Tracks charts. The following year, the song was re-released in the UK and peaked at Number 68 on the charts.
In other news, Lenderman recently joined the lineup for ØYA Festival‘s 2025 edition, alongside Chappell Roan, Khruangbin and Wet Leg.
Lenderman released ‘Manning Fireworks’ this year, which NME gave four stars, with Mia Hughes writing: “‘Manning Fireworks’ is an album that aches for its cast of freaks and losers, and its success in walking that line is a sign of MJ Lenderman’s richly developing voice.”
Elsewhere, his song ‘She’s Leaving You’ landed the Number 15 spot on NME‘s 50 Best Songs of 2024 list, with Daniel Peters writing: “Breakup songs can contain multitudes: despair, uncertainty, full-throated resentment. MJ Lenderman’s writing on ‘She’s Leaving You’, on the other hand, is characterised by a shrugging, clear-eyed sadness, leaning into the abject silence of heartbreak in its refrain: “It gets dark, we all got work to do.” Slacker rock melancholia at its most enlightened.”
‘Manning Fireworks’ also earned the Number 14 spot on NME‘s 50 Best Albums of 2024 list, with editor Karen Gwee writing: “‘Kahlua shooter, DUI scooter,’ MJ Lenderman drawls on ‘Joker Lips’. Economy is the Wednesday guitarist’s watchword on solo album ‘Manning Fireworks’. That devastating precision gives his portraits of sad-sacks, losers and egotists either a withering edge or empathetic nuance – sometimes both in the same song. An understated triumph.”
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