‘Werewolves of London’: MJ Lenderman’s best cover so far
MJ Lenderman is a refreshingly retro kind of rock star.
Of course, we all love it when we see the likes of St Vincent, Kaytranada and Dijon provide a vision of pop’s future with their uncompromising futurology. However, there’s something genuinely powerful about people who can still become stars off the back of a slightly out-of-tune Stratocaster and some stories told from the heart.
He’s not alone either. Lenderman joins a lineage of folks like Mac DeMarco and part-time bandmates Wednesday as superstars that would be just as welcome in the early 1990s as they are in the mid-2020s. That’s not nostalgia speaking either. In a way, there’s something just as thrillingly modern about each of those artists, as each of them reckons with the world as it is.
Thus, their music isn’t just the audio equivalent of slipping into your favourite ratty old jumper at the end of a hard day. There’s still something challenging and exciting baked into every note of it, especially when they do as MJ Lenderman does and throw a bunch of covers into every live show they play. Truly, the question of “What’s on MJ’s setlist tonight?” is a tough one to answer, and not only because the man produces songs the way rabbits produce other rabbits.
He also has a spectacular taste in covers. The kind that marks him out as a real crate-trawler, as most often, they’ll be from artists everyone knows like Neil Young and Bob Dylan, but songs of theirs that only real ones know. Case in point, one of Lenderman’s most played covers is ‘Lotta Love’, a Neil Young deep cut from his 1978 Comes a Time album. His most played Dylan track is ‘Something There Is About You’ from 1974’s lesser-spotted Planet Waves.
What is the best cover by MJ Lenderman?
As you can see, this is far from some fairweather journeyman strumming through ‘Old Man’ or ‘Like a Rolling Stone’ because no one wants to hear their own songs. This is the work of a genuine fan of both those artists, showing his appreciation for them. Those aren’t the only artists that appreciation extends to either, as we can see from the cover that MJ Lenderman most often plays. One that has become a pretty standard part of his setlist.
Y’know how there was that spate of white dudes thinking that they could make Robyn’s ‘Dancing on My Own’ sadder and more deep by removing all the energy and forward motion from it and replacing it with screwed-up-eyed oversinging? MJ Lenderman shows just how wrong those dudes were by doing exactly what they were trying to do with his powerful cover of This Is Lorelai’s ‘Dancing in the Club’. His haunted, deadpan take on the song shows more emotion than the wailing of a hundred X-Factor rejects.
However, that’s not the best cover he has in his back pocket. It is a great version, but its heartbroken lustre loses a little something when played live. For all the chiming guitars and shuffling drums that one hears on an MJ Lenderman record, he rocks out live. For proof of this, look no further than the version of Warren Zevon‘s ‘Werewolves of London’ that he’s been known to drop at the end of concert setlists.
Perhaps this is a little unfair, because this is a song he tends to do with his support act joining them. This gives the whole performance an energy that most other songs in his set don’t have, let alone his original songs. However, that doesn’t make the track any less breathlessly exciting, and a fine candidate for the best cover in MJ Lenderman’s back catalogue.
