Wednesday’s Karly Hartzman on MJ Lenderman Breakup, ‘Bleeds’

A little more than halfway through North Carolina indie rock band Wednesday’s new album, Bleeds, comes “The Way Love Goes.” It’s a brief, Merle Haggard-inspired love song written by Wednesday’s singer Karly Hartzman about the band’s guitar player, Jake “MJ” Lenderman. Backed by a twinkling, twanging guitar, Hartzman gently exhales a tune that describes, if not praises, the tougher parts of love. The song, she reveals in this personal essay, was written in the waning days of her six-year relationship with Lenderman, and then recorded not long after they broke up.

Bands with songs about their members’ tumultuous interpersonal dynamics are not unique — see the long history of Fleetwood Mac — but what makes Hartzman’s approach to the topic so compelling, in both prose and song, is her vulnerability, her plainspoken lyricism, and keen observation. Throughout this essay, she writes about exhaustion’s toll on romance. Lenderman is given understanding as he’s distant and Hartzman doesn’t strive to make herself look anything more than human as she describes being drunk, being sad, and being distant. While Hartzman and Lenderman remain split, the band is together and thriving; Wednesday are on tour (sans Lenderman) well into the New Year.

“So we choose the person who we want to go through life with, propping each other up like exhausted dancers in a marathon.”
 —Kristin Hersh (from Don’t Suck, Don’t Die: Giving Up Vic Chesnutt)

If you cry into a microphone, the sound is shoved back into you in high definition through the headphones. It’s harsher than any guitar feedback that can be tortured from an amplifier.

North Carolina is warming back up after the winter, in April 2024. I am sitting in a folding chair, facing a blank wall at the studio in Asheville. Like many other professional studios, it’s a highly curated space. Yellow hand towels in the bathroom that match the pillows on the couch in the control room. The lightbulbs can be individually controlled by an app. I set them to white, yellow, and orange. If I wanted, I could dial them to blues and purples and make it feel like I was a mermaid singing underwater to the lobsters. Instead I keep them dialed to what I’d see if I were clocking in to a nine-to-five office job. I might be able to find this funny eventually, but at this moment I can’t find anything romantic about singing a love song I wrote for our guitarist Jake many months earlier. We dated for six years; we were best friends; we watched each other grow up. We had broken up a month ago. I’m poking roadkill with a stick. Making it twitch.

“Knockin’ on that screen door
Even though I can see right through
Feels like I’m almost good enough
To know you”

Jake is downstairs with the boys playing Tetris, maybe. It’s just me and Alex Farrar, our producer, who was on the other side of the glass pressing record. My brain has felt fuzzy with mold for most of the week while recording these songs, but I feel like they’re the best I’ve ever written. I just need to put my head down, ignore the context, and get them tracked. I care about my songs more than I care about myself. Sometimes people call me “Wednesday” instead of my name. My music has become most of everything about me. I don’t particularly mind.

“Oversold myself
On the night we met
I’m not as entertaining 
as you might’ve thought I was then”

The song I’m siphoning out of myself is about frantically trying to glue together a sugar cube that’s on the verge of dissolving. It’s about salvaging love from exhaustion, and relearning how to make a relationship work with someone despite having seen the worst of them, and them having seen your worst parts too.

I clocked in today thinking I could get this vocal down methodically, but the tears snuck up on me. It’s weird to cry when you feel so numb. I creep myself out sometimes when I ignore my pain to get something done. I distract myself and go forward without processing a feeling until it bleeds through later in life. I’m 27 now, and with every year that passes I am able to zoom further out above myself to analyze my own life. I’m able to see my patterns more clearly.

I just need to get this album done by acting as if the band dynamic is the same as when I wrote the songs, but I keep crying through the vocal takes. Neither Alex nor the rest of the band know that Jake and I aren’t dating anymore. At this point, we still live together with our cat at our house in Haw Creek in Asheville. You have to walk through every room in the house to get to our bedroom. We still can’t get the mold out of the shower; there’s no fan in the bathroom. There’s no hood to suck up the smoke over the stove when I’m frying bacon. The house feels like it was made to hold stagnant air. It holds on to six years of our life. It’s my favorite place on earth.

Jake and I had spent the past two weeks trying to figure out if we could still work together in the band in spite of no longer being romantic partners. We had a lot of commitments as bandmates to get through before we could have time apart to do any emotional reconnaissance. There was a list in my notebook of the professional obligations we had yet to fulfill: Record the album; two week European tour; Hopscotch Festival in Raleigh; and one more show in Tokyo. Our last time playing together with Jake would be in the country where the two of us called it quits. My intentions for these final shows were clear to me: Don’t let a breakup fuck with the integrity of the music.

“And I’m scared to death
there’s women less
spoiled by your knowing
newer and much sweeter
many much more patient
with much more than I can give”

“This is such a sad song,” I say to Alex in the control room through the microphone. “Yeah … let me know if you need a second,” I hear his voice say through the headphones.

My third take of the song is uninterrupted by tears. I don’t like to do many vocal takes, because the feeling dissipates the more I repeat the words, as my brain puts up a membrane to protect itself. I want the rawest version of the words I can capture, without my crying interrupting what I have to say. The third attempt was the final vocal take.

Over a year before recording, I’d heard Merle Haggard’s “That’s the Way Love Goes” on the outlaw country station that we kept Jake’s minivan’s radio dialed to. I was deeply affected by the melody and the immediacy of his voice. The lyrics and instrumentation were cheesy but in a perfect way that evoked the feeling I got when walking through the aisles of a grocery store late at night. Only Merle Haggard could serve three years in San Quentin and also get away with singing: “Yet you ran with me / Chasing my rainbows / Honey, I love you too / That’s the way love goes.”

I listened to it constantly: while I made our bed, while I grilled salmon on the stove, while I washed the dishes, while I took the trash cans a quarter mile down our driveway in the early hours of the morning.

Soon after I heard the song, it was New Year’s Eve going into 2023. I got real dressed up for a party our neighbors were throwing. I put on elbow-length pink gloves, a sparkly white dress with ribbon lacing on the front with a clingy pink Speedo long-sleeved shirt underneath, black-and-white striped stockings, and a “belt” that was actually just a heavy-duty chain that I locked around my waist with a padlock.

New Year’s Eve is always a sensitive time for me. It is the anniversary of the last night I spent in person with my best friend in high school before he died. I usually dress up outlandishly to thwart the difficult memories that come up and get pretty drunk if I have the means. But being wasted always made it impossible to get through the night without getting emotional.

I filled my Marvin the Martian cup with tequila on our neighbors’ porch next door. While swaying on the wooden porch swing, I ate collard greens with pork-jowl bits that my bandmate Xandy brought to the party. I nursed several pieces of homemade cornbread. I floated giddy and drunk with our friends around the charcoal grill and on lawn chairs around the fire. I was thankful that we were always having groups of our sweet friends over at the house. In my drunkenness I could let my own life feel like the center of the universe, as it did when I was a kid. For a brief moment, the boundaries of the earth ended at the furthest reach of my vision: at the houses where my friends and I lived; the creek that turned the field into a big puddle when it rained; the neighbor who was always screaming at her boyfriend and seemed to have been pregnant for years; the acres of land around us where we often stumbled upon black bears digging through the trash, turkey vultures picking at racoon corpses, coyotes screaming in the night.

Moments before midnight, I hit the edge of my drunken giddiness and fell off. I was officially too uninhibited to reinforce the walls that usually kept my sadnesses and memories of my best friend’s face, voice, or his funeral from leaking through. I told Jake I needed to leave immediately and ran back next door to our house and into our bedroom. I felt like I was being impaled by all of the things I had been able to experience because I lived past 17. I thought about what my friend would be doing if he survived: curing cancer; becoming president; playing piano at the airport; eating an egg bagel with scallion cream cheese; throwing a rock at a metal trash can; looking at Fourth of July fireworks at the baseball stadium from a parking lot; watching me grow up, telling me I turned out okay.

I felt like an idiot still feeling so intensely about some shit from high school that I’d never put in the work to make peace with. I was angry at my inability to be a fun drunk. I was spiteful that New Year’s Eve always puts me in this position. Jake came inside and helped me get out of my padlock belt and my scratchy dress. I stood limp, embarrassed, and naked in our bedroom. He unzipped his canvas jacket, and I wrapped my arms around him underneath it. He put his arms around me and swayed me back and forth. I started singing Merle’s “That’s the Way Love Goes” softly into his shirt, which was becoming stained with my tears and snot. The song was always in my head and became a sweetness I could always go to for comfort.
He put me in my pajamas and tucked me into our bed. Our cat, Girl Girl, jumped up onto my lap, always quietly showing up when we needed her. He arranged my oily bangs on my forehead into a neat line and kissed me good night. Then he got up and left the room to go back to the party. I turned on the lamp on the bedside table so he wouldn’t hurt himself bumping around our bedroom when he came back in later.

In 2023, we constantly toured our album, Rat Saw God, released that April. The songs I sang onstage about our home became about a place I couldn’t afford to visit for more than two weeks at a time. There were multiple full U.S. tours, multiple trips to Europe, constant one-off trips to different cities to play festivals. We toured with Jake’s band, MJ Lenderman, in between Wednesday tours.

He was away even more than I was. I often took time off during his tours to be at the house, get some rest, and spend time with our cat who was at his parents’ place more than ours at that point. When he wasn’t touring, Jake would often go off and record on other people’s albums or record his own music.

We worked all the time. Even when I was home, I had gotten so used to the constant grind that it felt weird to relax. When I wasn’t on the road, I still felt the constant call in my heart to make things, and it drove me crazy when I didn’t follow the urge. I spent hours most days sewing handmade Wednesday merch. I loved sewing, and I loved that it could be emotionless if I needed it to be, unlike songwriting. I could express myself without having to bleed.

In the rare times when we were both home, often all Jake had the energy to do was noodle on his guitar and watch TV or YouTube videos. He tried to get me to come to our bedroom and lay around with him, veg out, and unwind, but I couldn’t relax. I was afraid if I stopped the momentum of my constant busywork it would be impossible to start it back up again. I was so exhausted that I was working endlessly to avoid some theoretical exhaustion. There’s a Bukowski poem that goes: “Take a writer away from his typewriter / and all you have left / is / the sickness / which started him / typing / in the / Beginning.”

I was also so desperate for time alone after being stuck around five or more people constantly for years. I could tell that the amount of solitude I required was driving Jake crazy. When I would finally come to bed he would often get up and sit at his desk and watch movies or record songs on his computer. We operated on opposite schedules. We lived together in a three-room house but hardly saw each other. When we were able to get a rare moment of stillness together, one of us would say “face time,” which meant that we were to do ten seconds or so of looking directly at each other in silence. It felt odd but necessary, having to prompt ourselves to remember each other’s existence in our own home.

I wanted to write a love song for Jake with the same melody as Merle Haggard’s “That’s the Way Love Goes” to admit and apologize for how much I had been isolating myself. I was avoiding a lot of sadness and exhaustion and was avoiding him because I didn’t have the energy to alleviate his sadness and exhaustion. I wanted to write a song that would prove to him that I was aware of this and promise that, eventually, I could be better.

“You have seen me angry
I know it’s not been easy
And I know it can’t always be
And that’s the way love goes”

As the touring continued, we experienced more months of misunderstanding each other. We were reaching incredible highs in our careers but also had let each other down so many times at crucial moments when we really needed the other to be there. When I would panic trying to parallel park the van when we were on tour together, the only thing that would calm me down was opening the car door and walking any direction until the stupid thing was out of sight. When he needed an ear after a rough travel day, desperately needed someone to understand him, I was unable to provide anywhere for him to put the words. I told him I had noticed some of the glow behind his eyes disappear since the touring made it normal to drink or consume whatever substance was around every night. He didn’t see what I was talking about. I was a workaholic and unavailable. He stretched himself thin, unable to turn down creative opportunities that took more and more of his leisure time away from him. It had become impossible to retain the vision we initially had of the future of our lives together.

My body whittled itself into intimacy repellent, only able to function when distracting itself: working on my creative projects, touring, and taking long midday naps. I rarely was able to be around our friends, because I knew I would be too wrung out to perform some version of myself or of Jake and I as our friends understood us to be.

I loved him so much, but I knew I couldn’t give him what he needed from me. He also couldn’t provide assurance about crucial things I was planning my life around. I saw myself getting married and having kids, and he was not visibly excited by the prospect. He wouldn’t have been able to figure out what he could do to get me out of the coffin I buried myself alive in. We didn’t really argue at the end. It mostly just felt like we were clawing at the wood under six feet of dirt, slowly running out of oxygen.

Jake and I agreed to break up in March of 2024. We were sitting in a suffocating, smoke-filled listening bar in Kyoto. We were at the midpoint of a ten-day vacation in Japan that followed a three-week tour with Wednesday in New Zealand and Australia.

We were sitting together in a place that couldn’t be more different from our home in Haw Creek. I was just drunk enough to admit to him that I had been thinking we weren’t meant to be together. He agreed with me. We left the bar completely unsure of what we were to each other, and it was snowing. A month later, we recorded the love song I wrote for him.