It\u2019s 30 December 2023. Wendy Eisenberg is walking and cannot stop. At an all-night rave in Bushwick featuring Detroit house legend Theo Parrish the previous night, they became paralysed by anxiety, returned home, \u201cthrew up a lot\u201d and then set off with no destination in mind. \u201cI walked for that entire day,\u201d Eisenberg says by video call from their Brooklyn home. \u201cI couldn\u2019t stop moving my legs. I felt like I needed to reauthor myself, and this was how I was going to do it.\u201d<\/p>\n
While out on their fevered walk, Eisenberg ran into an old friend. \u201cShe told me: \u2018You seem like you\u2019re having a kind of exorcism.\u2019 Then she added: \u2018Maybe just play some guitar?\u2019\u201d Thus diagnosed, Eisenberg went home immediately and began writing the music that became their sublime new self-titled album. \u201cI remember reading how Cat Power wrote Moon Pix in 10 hours, in a dream state,\u201d says Eisenberg. Many of these songs were written in a similar state, across three or four months after that \u201cstrange, mystical moment\u201d.<\/p>\n
In the near-decade since their debut album, Time Machine, Eisenberg has plotted an instinctive, unpredictable path: a multi-instrumentalist, composer and singer zigzagging between confessional folksong and ecstatic improv, sometimes on the same disc. Their guitar-playing is unpredictable, lightning-in-a-bottle stuff, using traditional and avant garde techniques; regular collaborator Bill Orcutt tells me that Eisenberg is \u201can amazing player who improves everything they\u2019re added to, like musical MSG\u201d.<\/p>\n
Wendy Eisenberg: Meaning Business \u2013 video<\/p>\n
However, Eisenberg\u2019s forthcoming album \u2013 a bewitching, magical set of songs that signals a new maturity and is easily one of the best things you will hear this year \u2013 leans away from experimentalism, instead drawing nourishment from the playfulness and graceful melody of 70s folk-rock and singer-songwriter albums. And while these songs are every bit as ambitious as Eisenberg\u2019s more challenging earlier work, the orchestration, by their partner and co-producer Mari Rubio (AKA More Eaze), foregrounds beauty with a gracefulness that\u2019s almost startling, considering Eisenberg\u2019s knotty previous records. \u201cThe harmonic vocabulary of these songs reflects my newfound sense of comfort and happiness,\u201d says Eisenberg. \u201cBut my ultimate goal is for these songs to sound beautiful because of their complexity \u2013 a more nuanced, earned, adult sound of happiness. Self-acceptance is not a simple process, and that is reflected in the formal complexity of this record.\u201d<\/p>\n
A warm and playful interviewee, able to discuss their music with the insight of someone who teaches theory (which they do) but never blinding you with science, Eisenberg is an open book regarding their inner life. The exorcism their friend had intuited related to a breakup. At the time, Eisenberg felt \u201ctotally lost \u2026 I really loved the guy\u201d. It went deeper than romantic heartbreak, rattling their identity. \u201cI\u2019d dated women before; I\u2019d dated all genders. But some part of me always wanted to impress something normative \u2013 like, I can be this much of a freak, and also maintain some fealty to \u2018straightness\u2019.\u201d With this breakup, Eisenberg realised they \u201ccould not make it work with any man. It was a revelatory moment that involved me embracing my queerness, my nonbinariness, my lesbianity.\u201d In the following weeks, they felt adrift, \u201clike the old world that was me was dead and I don\u2019t know what I\u2019m going to be like\u201d.<\/p>\n
Music had always been Eisenberg\u2019s escape route, their happy place. \u201cI have a fast brain and I\u2019m kind of anxious, so my dad would sing songs to get me to sleep,\u201d they remember. \u201cMusic distracted me from whatever overblown emotions I felt as a teen: \u2018Let\u2019s go as deep into this as I can, because it\u2019s the thing that feels good; a way to visit another world.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n
\u2018Music was an instant creative friend\u2019 \u2026 Wendy Eisenberg. Photograph: Peter Gannushkin<\/p>\n
Eisenberg first picked up their mum\u2019s guitar as an 11-year-old growing up outside Washington DC. \u201cIt was an instant creative friend \u2013 straight away, I started writing songs.\u201d After learning \u201cstandard rocker-boy shit: Pink Floyd, Zeppelin\u201d, they joined a band playing \u201cSum 41-related stuff\u201d, then started writing for another band, Igos. \u201cThe bassist was into prog and had a Chapman Stick,\u201d Eisenberg chuckles, referencing the polyphonic stringed instrument<\/a> that was beloved of 70s musos such as King Crimson\u2019s Tony Levin<\/a> and fusioneer Alphonso Johnson. \u201cAn insane thing for an 11-year-old to play. But that band is why I take everything so seriously, musically.\u201d<\/p>\n Raised on Joni Mitchell , Gram Parsons and the Everly Brothers, Eisenberg grew obsessed with jazz in their early teens. \u201cJazz seemed interested in the same problem I\u2019d eventually want to solve in my own music: if songs are so beautiful and enduring, what other contexts can they bear? Thelonious Monk is my hero, writing melodies that are punishingly, amazingly, surprisingly catchy, and he\u2019d be really physical with the piano, banging it slightly out of tune \u2026 He\u2019d make a beautiful melody really fucked up, or make the most surprising melody feel like you\u2019d known it for ever.\u201d<\/p>\n The teenage Eisenberg practised guitar for eight hours a day. In their 20s, they relocated to Boston, pursuing a master\u2019s at the New England Conservatory of Music. They explored improvisational music and played with friend Carrie Furniss in Birthing Hips, for whose molten, punk-spirited noise Eisenberg developed a guitar style \u201csomewhere between [experimental saxophonist] Anthony Braxton and [Black Flag leader] Greg Ginn \u2013 this harsh linearity\u201d.<\/p>\n Wendy Eisenberg: Vanity Parado<\/p>\n After that group split, Eisenberg recorded solo albums and collaborative projects that were challenging and beautiful, often at once; their 2020 album Auto seesawed between prickly avant garde and the dulcet adventurousness of Hejira-era Joni Mitchell. \u201cWendy can be fearless, chasing an idea wherever it leads, usually into cacophony and feedback,\u201d says an admiring Orcutt, who, after hearing Auto, invited Eisenberg to be part of the quartet touring his acclaimed Music for Four Guitars.<\/p>\n Throughout Eisenberg\u2019s discography, there\u2019s a tension between formal beauty and their desire to unpick compositional architecture to test its resilience. Eisenberg describes 2024\u2019s acclaimed Viewfinder<\/a> as \u201ca record of songs taken as loosely as possible: this is what a song can hold if it\u2019s given to a cadre of improvisers that could do anything.\u201d An album inspired by Eisenberg\u2019s corrective eye surgery, Viewfinder\u2019s songs begin conventionally, before being pulled into new and unexpected shapes by their accompanists, its shadowy folksong detouring into turbulent jazz and electrifying avant odysseys. This restless pushing of the envelope is never bloody-mindedness for its own sake; Eisenberg is trying to explore new definitions of beauty. \u201cHonestly, to my core, I like really pretty things,\u201d they insist. \u201cAnd I like expanding my notion of what beauty is, to embrace the jagged, because I\u2019m human.\u201d<\/p>\n