Wendy Eisenberg used to only write love songs to their craft. Their version of a sweet nothing? “Tell me I’ll write another perfect idea.” The commitment in their lyrics was to a life of creation, often an inherently lonely one: “When I am an artist, I can be beloved,” they sang on their 2021 album Bent Ring. When they turned their quizzical eye towards “love songs,” it was mostly to wince at their conventions. “Don’t look at me when I write little love songs/It is embarrassing enough for me,” they sang. “This is a very advanced form of torture/To write a song in a genre I hate.” I, um, love you too.
Whatever else has happened to the singer-songwriter and guitarist during their past half-decade of furious productivity, Eisenberg has very clearly fallen in love. The Wendy Eisenberg of Wendy Eisenberg is newly unafraid of love songs, or at least unembarrassed by their proclamations. They write about their newfound happiness with forensic curiosity and muted wonder, as if they were detailing a strange genus of plant.
Part of why Eisenberg may have hated the phrase “I love you” is that there is nothing to take apart in it, and taking things apart is their M.O. Eisenberg’s gaze breaks down big ideas into dozens of smaller ones, so that they wriggle free of your comprehension. You could call this process deconstruction or defamiliarization, but a friendlier term might just be looking closely. On their new album, Eisenberg looks very closely. Take this lyric, from the rapt ballad “It’s Here”: “Something’s losing its meaning/Someone’s holding my hand/Come on, look at me learning/There is comfort in demand.” Is this not the precise sound of learning to let go of nagging old fears of unworthiness?
No two Eisenberg records have sounded the same: They have made fractured jazz records, shredding rock epics, banjo improvisations. To mine this expansive new territory, Eisenberg has turned to what they call “weirdo country interpreters”—Richard Dawson, the Mekons, Joanna Newsom. On “Old Myth Dying,” they mimic one of Newsom’s signature moves on the harp, juxtaposing a syncopated line against a straight 4/4, generating a dreamy tension that never resolves.
Eisenberg’s compositional intelligence has a near-merciless quality, zeroing in on feelings of calm and unsettling them. The flickering meter of “Vanity Paradox” feels like a held breath, a tensed muscle, that doesn’t relax until the lyric “These old wounds/Undeserved/Tell me that it matters,” which trigger washes of major chords that seem like they are dissolving the wounds in real time.
The three best songs here—“Another Lifetime Floats Away,” “It’s Here,” and “Will You Dare”—are the most unguarded statements Eisenberg has ever made. Each one, at its core, is a paean, a devotional—a love song. “Another Lifetime Floats Away” lingers on the surreal intensity of childhood memory. In one verse, Eisenberg is hiding while her father works; in another, her mother makes her breakfast. In a third, she’s 20 years old and behind the wheel, presumably driving toward or away from another gig. Each verse ends with Eisenberg sighing the title, and the sense of loss is as inexplicable as it is sharp.
But “It’s Here” is the clear center of the album—its heart, if the phrase weren’t likely to make Eisenberg ill. They explore a tangled thought about the virtue of eating the forest versus mimicking its birds: a metaphor, maybe, about the difference between living life and endeavoring to recreate it. But by the end, Eisenberg has boiled the song down to a bird call, just two words, repeated: “It’s here.” The pedal steel guitar weeps, a Wurlitzer burbles, and the chords pedal between minor and major. What’s “here”? Maybe romantic love, maybe a love for the world at large, in all its precarity. But the atmosphere—quietly euphoric, watchful, alive with anticipation—conveys everything Eisenberg needs us to know.
