We Traveled to Buffalo to See MJ Lenderman and Waxahatchee in Concert — Worth the Trip

When Manning Fireworks, the fourth solo album from MJ Lenderman, was released in September 2024, something happened. This prodigious record helped seal the trajectory at work in indie music on the other side of the Atlantic.

With a country-tinged sound, yet not strictly country, a hint of folk, at times very rock, an immaculate, moving and witty songwriting, delivered with an unapologetic slacker edge, Manning Fireworks asserted once and for all that the revival was indeed here. The revival of all the Americana elements of American dad-rock: pedal steel, banjos, fiddle (the country nickname for the violin), and distorted guitars straight out of the 1990s.

Indie Scene Darling

Yet MJ Lenderman cannot be reduced to a simple representative of the Dad Rock revival. Besides his solo career, the 27-year-old Asheville, North Carolina native plays in Wednesday, the band led by the remarkable Karly Hartzman, his ex-girlfriend. Between country ballads, shoegaze saturations and hardcore-tinged incursions sparked by the band’s frontwoman’s storytelling genius, Wednesday offers with Rat Saw God (2023) and Bleeds (2025) the most interesting Southern rock formula of the past twenty years.

MJ has released three very strong solo albums, gradually moving from the lo-fi rock of MJ Lenderman (2019) and Ghost of Your Guitar Solo (2021) toward a more syncretic blend of sounds that fuels today’s success with Boat Songs (2022) and the superb Manning Fireworks (2024). Brought up on music by the Canadian-American group The Band, later blown away by Drive-By Truckers and Dinosaur Jr.’s guitars, Jake has also absorbed the influences of Jason Molina (whose Just Be Simple he covered), Townes Van Zandt for guitar work, and of course Neil Young, whose vocal resemblance is striking.

Today, MJ Lenderman is one of the indie scene’s darlings for America’s Gen Z, able to fill the Brooklyn Steel’s 2,000 seats in New York in a matter of hours. Discovered by country superstar, the anti-ICE advocate Zach Bryan, MJ Lenderman will embark on stadium tours as a supporting act starting in July.

Shared Trajectory

In November 2025, the announcement of this Waxahatchee/MJ Lenderman double tour generated real excitement among fans, because the two musicians share more than just Anti Records as a label. Katie Crutchfield also shares with Jake Lenderman a passion for the sound of Townes Van Zandt and Jason Molina, which she has explored on multiple recordings with her husband Kevin Morby. Furthermore, her musical path is remarkably similar to MJ Lenderman’s. Katie Crutchfield began by playing punk-rock with her sister Allison in their band P.S. Eliot. With Waxahatchee, the Alabama native gradually shed the punk guitars of Cerulean Salt (2013) in favor of a triumphant return to roots on (2020), the record that prompted Anti Records to sign her.

Waxahatchee’s public breakthrough came with the dazzling Tigers Blood (2024), a country-rock album in which the indie scene’s next generation surrounds the songwriter. On the drums, you can hear the son of Jeff Tweedy (Spencer of Wilco), and MJ Lenderman makes a cameo on the album’s first single, Right Back To It. More recently, sisters Katie and Allison Crutchfield unveiled a Brad Cook–produced album, Snocaps (2025), of the same name as the supergroup they now form with… MJ Lenderman, who joined them on guitar. 

Dynamic but languid pricing

This double tour has all the makings of a dream for any devoted indie rock fan. Coincidentally, the New York City dates in April lined up with a long-planned trip to the city that never sleeps. So on the day the online ticket office opened, I did everything I could to lock in a ticket. The computer sat in the Brooklyn date’s waiting line. The phone was aimed at the Beacon Theatre in Manhattan the next day.

When Ticketmaster finally displayed a seating plan for the Brooklyn Paramount, only a handful of general admission tickets remained, the equivalent of standing room. Expect over $500 for a ticket. It’s utterly ridiculous. At the Beacon Theatre, prices were lower… around $400. The ravages of dynamic pricing. In a city of 20 million people at the mercy of supply-and-demand fluctuations. That’s not going to work. So what if I catch the Buffalo run instead? Not too far from the City. A decent pretext to see the country. Niagara Falls is supposed to be nearby, and supposedly not bad. A Red-eye round trip on a bus costs $100, and the ticket is $90. Great seats, too. Alright, Deal.

University Industrial Zone

Traveling by bus, Greyhound, in the United States is something you should do at least once. You meet all of middle America: a decidedly unrefined Amish family, a cash-strapped student heading home to her parents, a grandfather who seems to have forgotten where he is, and all kinds of lonesome cowboys who you’d rather leave to their own devices. If memory serves, it’s in a Greyhound bus, by the window, that Ratso from the film Midnight Cowboy (1969), played by Dustin Hoffman, meets his end. We’ll ride with his ghost as we head to Buffalo.

All day long I wander solo around the area until Niagara Falls with two enormous bags, each weighing more than twenty kilos. The Center for the Arts at the University of Buffalo sits in the middle of a kind of university-industrial zone that you reach by car or, in my case, by bus. At the ticket control, a grandmother tells me I can’t enter with my bags. She’s probably doing that job to top up her modest retirement. I tell her I’m from Paris, that I’m doing the Buffalo–New York Greyhound round trip. Anyway, I insist. No on-site storage and the reception closes in 30 minutes. Leave my things behind the bar? Are you out of your mind? I try the terrible joker card of “I’d like to speak to your manager.”

A woman in her forties—New York chic, almost forty—appears, sizing me up from head to toe. The exchange grows tense. The tone rises; two security guards move closer. “Thank you for your precious help, I’ll figure something out,” I say as I walk away. In the parking lot across the street, people stare at their shoes as I ask them to stash my bags in their trunks. They must think I’m crazy. I sling my bags into three lonely bushes by the lake behind the concert hall. Yes, it’s risky.

Electro-acoustic versions

MJ Lenderman kicks off the night with Manning Fireworks. The UB Center for the Arts stage has been transformed into a cozy living room, with Persian rugs, candles, and lamps casting a subdued light through lace lampshades. All twenty-seven songs of the evening are performed in superb electro-acoustic renditions. Colin Croom (pedal and lap steel, resonator guitar) and Cole Berggren (keyboard, banjo, guitar, vocals), two musicians who tour with Waxahatchee, complete the ensemble.

The marvelous Joker Lips riff, played on the steel, provokes a chorus of ecstatic screams from the crowd. Magic in the setlist, Waxahatchee follows with Can’t Do Much, equally addictive on guitar. The shock comes when MJ Lenderman performs a stripped-down version of Rip Torn, his voice more tear-streaked than ever despite the naïve humor of the lyrics, which nonetheless sing of the dread of a still-new fame “If you tap on the glass / The sharks might look at you / Damned if they don’t / And you’re damned if they do.” Crutchfield continues with the most infectious Doom, from their joint project Snocaps. Lenderman adds harmonies to the vocal line, a perfect fit.

That Buffalo night, MJ Lenderman offers three new songs, beginning with Fishing, a downtempo, totally wild tune typical of the Asheville-based musician. He tells of a botched fishing trip and drifts into existential questions that lead into a beautifully instrumental section, crowned by Colin Croom’s electric resonator guitar’s saturated notes. The arpeggios of Brawson’s and the lyrics of the moving Love Streams hint at a superb album to come—hopefully this year.

Passing of the Baton

Waxahatchee enlists MJ Lenderman’s help on several tracks from her latest record. Beginning with Burns Out At Midnight, where his North Carolina compatriot lends discreet backing vocals. On stage, two guitars and vocal harmonies lend a unique depth to one of Waxahatchee’s finest tracks.

“This song was written by a friend, This is Lorelei. Nate Amos. It’s called Dancing in the Club,” MJ whispers to us. What a privilege to witness this. When he’s not writing for Water from Your Eyes, the experimental pop-rock duo with Rachel Brown, the musician Nate Amos releases his own material under the moniker This Is Lorelei. A songwriter of note, who hovers around the status of “the artist’s favorite artist’s artist,” Nate Amos recently signed with New York label Matador Records. Dancing in The Club comes from his first proper album under this name (he has released dozens of EPs and compilations) Box for Buddy, Box for Star, reissued in a super-deluxe edition in mid-April featuring covers by Hayley Williams, Waxahatchee, Snail Mail, Momma and MJ Lenderman, of course. MJ’s country/folk arrangements give a cruel humanity to Dancing in The Club, which was originally very electronic and relaxed “And I sang into my phone / I ate my dinner in the dark / And I fucked up my guitar / While I was fucking up my heart,” Jake Lenderman sings in a delightfully nasally voice.

Waxahatchee begins playing Crowbar. For the first time in the show, the words are sung aloud by everyone in the room. It’s fair to say the track is perfect for radio airplay. Then, as the first guitar notes of Wristwatch ring out, the applause swells. Maybe he’s the star of the night. MJ Lenderman opens the first verse, with a sly smile: “So you say I’ve got a funny face / It makes me money / So you say I’ve wasted my life away / Well, I got a beach home up in Buffalo”… A sea of shivers among the audience when they hear their city’s name. A small thrill. We would never have provoked that reaction in New York.

There’s nothing better than their duo Right Back To It to wind down for a brief intermission. In the crowd, many attendees look to be in their twenties or thirties. They came with groups of friends. There are also lots of families. In short, the older attendees came for Waxahatchee and the younger for MJ Lenderman. And everyone agrees on the luck of seeing them in the same place. What this tour has become is a transmission. Seeing Katie Crutchfield pregnant (she’s about to welcome her first child with Kevin Morby) sharing the stage with MJ Lenderman, ten years her junior, feels like a passing of the baton.

I’ve Seen the Past…

Indeed, MJ and Waxahatchee launch into four encores. With Abandoned, Katie Crutchfield pays homage to the legend Lucinda Williams, one of her primary inspirations for her Saint Cloud project. Brennan Wedl, Anti Records’ promising new signee (who had opened the evening), joins MJ and Waxahatchee to sing with them on the Jayhawks’ delicate All the Right Reasons. In a curious 2003 article titled “I’ve seen the past of rock and roll, it’s called the Jayhawks,” Inrocks spoke of the American group in terms of “[…] when you love music, you love the Jayhawks. Their songs are so pretty, they contain so much Byrds, Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young or Big Star, they feel so of the earth and the tears that it’s hard to resist without a strong aid of bad faith.” A clear sign of lineage. The final song is Six O’Clock News by Canadian Kathleen Edwards, which Katie Crutchfield also performs on her solo tours.

End of the concert, back to reality. My two enormous bags are still hidden in a hedge in the middle of Buffalo’s campus. I hope. I have to get out, fast. It’s nighttime outside, and the audience heads back to their cars in the parking lot. I circle the building. I must really look suspicious. A small adrenaline surge. The bags are still there, intact, just as heavy as when I left them.

At Buffalo’s bus station, some benches are occupied by homeless people, mostly asleep. Others chuckle, make a little noise, nothing too wild. Six Buffalo Police Department officers on patrol tip a sleeping man off a bench. He will wake up and crash to the floor. Am I the only one who’s shocked? The Greyhound to New York leaves in an hour, at 12:35 a.m. Tomorrow, on arrival, I plan to do a bit of thrifting. “Don’t move to New York City, babe / It’s gonna change the way you dress” sings MJ Lenderman in Bark at the Moon. And thinking back, my bags are heavy enough as they are.