Rudolph

A reindeer shows up in a story about a hot-rod cartoon car, and somehow the result is one of the more quietly sad songs of recent indie rock. That is the sleight of hand at the center of "Rudolph," the track MJ Lenderman released in the summer of 2023 and later placed on his album Manning Fireworks. The premise sounds like a joke, and it is one, but the joke is built to carry something heavier than it admits.

A Christmas title in the middle of July

Music writers noticed the mismatch right away. The title promises snow and sleigh bells, yet the arrangement of warped pedal steel and fuzzy, distorted guitar has the feel of a relaxed summer hangout.^[2] Paste described the sound as a blend of Southern rock and power pop, with heavy riffs and full percussion.^[1] The single landed in July 2023, in the thick of a US tour, and it was the first music Lenderman shared after signing with ANTI- Records.^[1][2]

That gap between season and subject matters. A song about the most famous outcast in Christmas lore, delivered at the height of summer, tells you the narrator is not interested in nostalgia for the holiday itself. Rudolph here is a borrowed figure, a character whose entire identity is built around being singled out for a flaw and then, eventually, being valued for it. Lenderman takes that familiar redemption arc and drops it into a setting where redemption is far less guaranteed.

How the song came together

Lenderman has said the track was the first song he wrote after finishing Boat Songs, his 2022 breakthrough.^[1] He spent a long time working out the guitar part between tours, then finished the words with a friend late one night after a Wednesday show in Atlanta.^[1][2] That origin story is worth sitting with. The song grew out of touring life, assembled in stray hours between shows while his profile was rising.

It also explains the texture. Lenderman has been in Wednesday since 2018, and his solo records sit in the overlap between that band's noisy Southern indie rock and a more traditional alt-country songbook.^[4] He was just 24 when "Rudolph" appeared, born in Asheville, North Carolina, in 1999, and already carrying the reputation of a guitarist who could make a ragged solo feel like a punchline and a confession at once.^[4]

The cartoon crossover

The narrative, as press coverage describes it, is an ill-fated meeting between the reindeer and Lightning McQueen, the animated race car from Pixar's Cars films.^[2] It is the kind of premise that invites a shrug. Two pieces of children's pop culture collide, and the humor lies in how seriously the song treats the encounter.

But treating a silly situation with a straight face is exactly the technique that defines Lenderman's writing. A reviewer for A Readable Feast noted how the album mixes casual, offbeat humor with heartbreak and Catholic guilt, and how it keeps returning to a tension between wanting to grow up and feeling the world is leaving him behind.^[5] Seen that way, two beloved childhood characters meeting a bad end is not random. It is a way of talking about what happens to the things we were told would always be wholesome and bright.

I will not pretend there is a single settled reading. The lyrics are oblique, and Lenderman has not published a line-by-line explanation. What can be said is that the song uses mascots of innocence, one a symbol of seasonal kindness and the other a symbol of speed and swagger, and lets them stumble into trouble in a way that feels very adult.

Humor as a defense

Lenderman's catalog is full of characters who deflect. They tell a funny story so they do not have to say the sad thing directly. The Beats Per Minute review of the album described his lyrics as a mix of dry humor and poetic phrasing.^[6] The Far Out Magazine review praised the same quality, calling out his imaginative wordplay alongside what it saw as sincere lyricism.^[3]

"Rudolph" is a clean example. The surface is absurd. Underneath, there is a feeling of someone observing a catastrophe from a safe distance and narrating it with a half smile. Reading the song as an act of deflection helps explain why the guitar work is so satisfying and so loose. The playing never tries to resolve the tension. It just keeps rolling, the way a person keeps talking when they would rather not stop and feel something.

A sound that refuses to settle

The Far Out review singled out the song as an upbeat, country-touched highlight, with slide guitar, dynamic playing and gritty solos, and it found the overdriven tone immensely satisfying.^[3] That description matches what the track does best. The riff is built to be hummed. The solos are untidy on purpose. A bright pop shape holds a fuzzy, slightly sour center.

This matters for interpretation. If the music were mournful, the song would read as a straightforward elegy. Because it is so buoyant, the listener is left to decide how much of the cheer is real. That is a very Lenderman trick, and it is part of why the song works on first listen as a good time and on the tenth as something more complicated.

Where it sits on Manning Fireworks

Manning Fireworks arrived on September 6, 2024, on ANTI-, and it was received with wide acclaim, including an 8.7 from Pitchfork.^[4] Far Out gave it 4.5 out of 5 and called out the guitar playing and wordplay.^[3] Among the album's tracks, "Rudolph" is the one with the longest history, since it was released as a single a full year before the record and issued on a 7-inch paired with a reworked version of his song "Knockin'."^[7]

Against the album's other material, it is the loudest and quickest piece, a kind of burst of color in a record that is otherwise quieter. One listener review observed that the album's instrumentals are generally subdued, with the Christmas-adjacent single as the notable exception.^[8] Many listeners also connect the album to the end of Lenderman's relationship with his Wednesday bandmate Karly Hartzman, which gives its songs extra emotional weight.^[5] I would be wary of reading "Rudolph" itself as a breakup song, since it first appeared a year earlier and nothing in the coverage ties it to that story. Still, on the album it sits among songs about loss and self-doubt, and it picks up some of their color.

Other ways to hear it

One reading treats the song as pure comic nonsense, a tall tale told for the pleasure of the telling. That interpretation is legitimate, and the song's performance supports it. The playing is joyful and the premise is ridiculous.

A second reading hears a parable about fame. Rudolph is the original overnight sensation, picked from obscurity because of a quirk. Lenderman, newly signed to a larger label and about to tour much bigger rooms, may have felt a kinship with a character who is celebrated for the very thing that once set him apart. That is speculation on my part, not a claim the artist has made, but the timing of the song, his first piece of writing after his breakthrough, makes it a fair thing to consider.^[1]

A third reading is about disillusionment. When the symbols of childhood magic meet each other in an unhappy situation, the song becomes a small, funny funeral for the idea that innocence protects anyone. That version fits the album's recurring sense of a narrator trying to stay grounded while the world moves on.^[5]

Why it lingers

There is also a generational angle. Lenderman writes for listeners who grew up on the same cartoons, holiday specials and franchise films, and who now find those shared references useful as a kind of common language. Using them in a rock song is both an in-joke and a way of saying that the culture we absorbed as kids never fully leaves us. It follows us into adulthood, where it gets a little battered.

Part of the appeal is simple craft. The guitar is memorable, the production has a lived-in warmth, and the whole thing moves with an easy momentum. But the lasting pull comes from the way it handles tone. It never tells you whether to laugh or wince, and it trusts you to do both.

That trust is what separates Lenderman from many of the slacker-rock peers he is lumped in with. His jokes are not an escape from feeling. They are the only available route to it. A song about a reindeer and a race car, played with this much conviction, ends up saying something honest about how people talk around what hurts.

In the end, "Rudolph" is a good argument for taking silly things seriously. It borrows the most familiar figures in popular culture, scuffs them up, and sends them off into a hazy Southern-rock summer. What you hear in the rubble depends on your mood, and that flexibility is precisely why the song has stayed in rotation long after its summer release.