If Miller thought the local Music Technology program was good, Lenderman assumed it must be okay. He hated it almost immediately. “They were all 17-to-20-year-old boys who were into Ed Sheeran, which was surprising, or Avenged Sevenfold and Dream Theater,” Lenderman says with a smirk. “Nobody seemed like they wanted to do anything with music or could do anything. School was just a way to get a job that wasn’t music, because that’s a crazy thing to dream about, I guess.”
But late in high school, drummer Lenderman and bassist Stone had started Slugly with the guitarist Nathanael Jordan; the trio bent doom metal and post-rock into thoughtful, unexpected shapes. They became local house-show favorites, offering a first glimpse at what making music professionally might look like. “I had always thought of music as a hobby,” Stone says. “When Slugly happened, we had something beautiful—and novel and fun and wild.”
Lenderman, then, kept playing with his old Asheville friends, including Miller. In October 2017, during his first month at college, they played their first proper show at a local riverside club called the Gray Eagle, having begged to open for Sun Seeker and the Districts, two emergent touring acts with notable label deals. They felt a little like hometown heroes.
The day his first year ended, May 1, 2018, Lenderman packed his dorm room and moved a few miles east, into a verdant mountain holler just outside of the city called Haw Creek. Miller had moved there when he was 16 with his parents, who had recently relocated to another part of Asheville. They spent that summer recording before Lenderman begrudgingly returned to school. When his third semester ended that December, he and another Asheville band he loved and would soon join, Wednesday, tucked into two minivans, bound for a New York club date via a series of house shows.
“It was a crazy, miserable tour. December in the Northeast. And none of us had done it before, really,” Lenderman says. After they paid the sound engineer in New York, they’d made just enough money to afford the tolls heading back home. “Our last show was in Baltimore on December 23, so we got home at 8 a.m. on Christmas Eve. That was the last time my family ever went to church.”
He left three days later for his second run—this time, playing drums for Indigo De Souza.
In late September of last year, Lenderman took one bong rip and had the worst panic attack of his life.
Six months earlier, he and Hartzman had broken up during a conversation in a Tokyo bar, at yet another tour’s end and after six years together. But in April, they’d moved two hours east together to Hartzman’s hometown of Greensboro, anyway. He had been ready to leave Asheville, to try something new, but the arrangement proved untenable.
Backstage at the Ryman Auditorium in May, where he joined Waxahatchee on country music’s most vaunted stage, he confessed to Cook, the producer, that he and Hartzman had split. He said he wasn’t sure where to go. Cook invited him to crash with him and his wife, Stella, in Durham, in a long, blue midcentury home where the garage and a rear bedroom double as studios. Lenderman soon got comfortable there, playing on records Cook was producing if he needed a hand, including drums and guitar on a forthcoming star-studded record by soul treasure Mavis Staples. (On that album, he’ll be in the company of Derek Trucks, the guitar ace who first prompted Lenderman to play without a pick.) The Cooks and Lenderman briefly became a curious family of three with an aging dog, Remy.
