Forewarned isn’t always forearmed. We knew that MJ Lenderman wasn’t going to be a chatterbox after we read an interview last year in Indy Week where he told the reporter that he didn’t think he was very good at talking. “The less people hear me talk, the more they can project on me or think I’m a smart guy,” he maintained.

We were not going to let him off the hook that easily. We read the Carson McCullers 1940 classic The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter about a deaf-mute to whom the lonely and isolated people of a Southern town turn for silent solace, all of them projecting their own meaning onto him, thinking he was almost a living Buddha. And we all know that Lenderman is a Catholic. (And if you don’t, he mentions it enough in his songs: To wit in “Joker Lips,” “Every Catholic knows he could have been Pope.”)