That is unexpected and wildly disappointing, considering that they are two of the most distinctive songwriters and bandleaders working today, colliding a range of left-of-center influences—Vic Chesnutt, Drive-By Truckers, John Prine—into songs that traffic in skewed imagery and complex ideas. Lenderman can be sly and evasive, favoring second-person pronouns that sound accusatory even after you realize he’s usually talking to himself. Hartzman is much more traditionally confessional, almost always writing in first person as she traces complicated scenarios across multiple storylines (similar to the Truckers’ Mike Cooley). Both are aces with a turn of phrase that leavens extreme pathos with humor. They open this Blue Room set with 2018’s “How Do You Let the Love Into the Heart That Isn’t Split Wide Open,” and the song is barely even a minute of them singing that long title. It’s pretty funny in its matter-of-factness, a meta-commentary on love songs—at least in its original incarnation. In this setting, however, it’s over before it even registers as a song, which makes it less of a stakes-defining introduction and more of an awkward throat-clearing.
Assembling a set short enough to fit on two sides of a record, they draw from the darker corners of their small catalog, mixing in Wednesday songs with Lenderman songs. There are two tracks from their 2021 EP Guttering, one non-album single based on a Harry Crews novel, and one from Lenderman’s 2021 solo album Ghost of Your Guitar Solo. And, of course, there are several from Manning Fireworks and Wednesday’s Rat Saw God. That vaults-clearing approach, however, lends Live at Third Man Records a finality that the duo perhaps didn’t intend and the music can’t uphold.
Even more than a year later, it’s impossible to ignore everything that was happening around this show. Just six months earlier, Hartzman and Lenderman ended their six-year romantic relationship, officially breaking up in a bar in Kyoto. Hartzman took that heartache into the studio as Wednesday recorded Bleeds, and her account of recording “That’s the Way Love Goes” is as harrowing as the song itself. But the news was publicly announced during the promotional cycle for Manning Fireworks (“I guess I should mention me and Karly broke up,” Lenderman told The New Yorker), so when they were standing together on the Blue Room stage, it was still fresh.
Was it a relief to share their secret? Did it add new complications to their professional lives? Were they still trying to figure it out? Live at Third Man Records arrives freighted with unbearable weight, but their set gives nothing away. It doesn’t need to feed gossip to be a good live album, but there’s a strange and unsatisfying self-consciousness to the proceedings, as if they’d both learned very quickly to be more guarded. When Hartzman tells the audience they’re going to play a few numbers even after they stop recording, she adds, “I’ma talk probably a lot more when I know it’s not going to be permanent.” No doubt that’s the better set, the unrecorded one—when they can shed all that weight and everybody can sing along.
