You're listening to Song Exploder, where musicians take apart their songs, and piece by piece tell the story of how they were made.

I'm Rishi Kei Kesh Hirwe.

Jake Lenderman plays and records under the name M.J. Lenderman. He put out his first album in 2019.

In addition to his solo work, he's been a member of the band Wednesday,

and he's also featured on the Waxahatchee hit song right back to it.

In September 2024, the fourth M.J. Lenderman album came out.

It's called Manning Fireworks.

The New Yorker named it the best album of the year,

and Stereogum, Rolling Stone, and Pitchfork all put it

in their top ten. For this episode, I talked to Jake about one of the songs from that album, called

You Don't Know the Shape I'm in. The song itself took shape in a few different ways. Coming up,

you'll hear the way the song started as a demo, and then how that got fleshed out, and then how

it got rebuilt, and then how Jake got fleshed out, and then how it got rebuilt,

and then how Jake completely reimagined the whole thing. You don't know.

I turned 21 February 2020. And then I had a very, like, creative and prolific COVID time.

But once touring came back, we really started hitting it hard, and I hadn't really written

much for months.

And I was like, when am I going to have two months to not do anything again?

I was kind of expecting this to happen.

And then time kept going on and on.

And I realized

that's not how life really works.

...