Wendy Eisenberg has evidently always been a fan of the rhetorical question, but perhaps never more so than on Wendy Eisenberg. “You are the oldest you’ve ever been,” they intone, sweet and clear, on the opening track: “Did you feel yourself change?” Whos, whats, wheres, whys, and hows abound: see “Who was I becoming?” (“Meaning Business”), “What gave me that idea?” and “Where was I when that happened?” (“The Ultraworld”), “Why did I try? Did I try?” (“Will You Dare”), “Is that how I wound up here?” (“Another Lifetime Floats Away”). But, as with all rhetorical questions, there are no answers expected. The asking—or, more specifically, the spacious, open silence that follows in the question’s wake—is the point. After all, absence is itself a kind of presence. Those gaps between certainties, between language, are where life is actually lived.
And that’s what Eisenberg is learning to do on their self-titled LP: build a life within the terrifying, sweet hollow of the unwritable unknown. There are feelings that can’t be defined, experiences that can’t be explained, futures that can’t be predicted; it’s all inherently unnerving. There’s a sort of solace, then, in claustrophobia, the same sense of safety you get from lying beneath a heavy weighted blanket. Eisenberg has felt that, too: as they sing of their younger self towards the top of the closing track, “The fact that the walls were caving in somehow seemed a kind of comfort / I wanted to feel comfort.” But the album ends, instead, on the current moment, on the Wendy Eisenberg of Wendy Eisenberg: “I cannot find the walls,” they sing. “I trust that that’s a good thing / Sometimes I’ll need convincing.”
There’s a feeling of warm relief to the record that has eluded Eisenberg’s previous works, brought about by a series of changes—external and internal—in their life that they view as a “personal exorcism.” The album began to take shape after they moved to New York City and found themselves awash in the hubbub of the city that never sleeps, yearning for the quiet coziness of their previous homes in Western Massachusetts and Maryland. While their earlier records ranged from improvisational free jazz (2024’s Viewfinder), madly experimental, mind-melting avant-rock (2020’s Auto), and the sweet lo-fi hiss of the pandemic-era (2020’s Dehiscence)—not to mention their work with noise-rock group Editrix, wild punk outfit Birthing Hips, and trio Darlin’—Wendy Eisenberg takes a folkier turn, but it feels natural, as if they’ve been doing it all along. Steeped in strings, pedal steel, and Eisenberg’s signature finger-picking, the record oozes sheer warmth. The short and sweet “Take A Number” is as clear-eyed as it is open-hearted, Eisenberg singing with an almost Kimya Dawson-like plaintiveness; love song “Will You Dare” is all country twang and Mari Rubio’s (of more eaze) keening pedal steel; strings bloom beneath double-tracked vocals on “Meaning Business.”
Of course, regardless of what project they’re working on, you can always count on Eisenberg for knotted arrangements, unexpected melodies, and irresistibly complex guitar lines (there’s a reason we put them on our list of the greatest guitar players of the 21st century), and this record is certainly no exception. Their experimental instincts never falter, even beneath the weight of a new sound, only ever augmenting it—Gillian Welch, Joanna Newsom, Willie Nelson, and Richard Dawson all leave their thumbprint on Wendy Eisenberg, but so too does experimentalist David Grubbs (an album like The Spectrum Between, especially). Those impulses are littered throughout the album: the wild, distorted strings on “Vanity Paradox”; the subtle polyrhythms undergirding the folk simplicity of “Old Myth Dying”; the complex, rapid melodies and heavy bassline (courtesy of Trevor Dunn) of “Curious Bird”; the jazzier instincts of “The Ultraworld”; Ryan Sawyer’s swishing drums in “The Walls.”
The quieter, folkier approach here additionally allows Eisenberg’s writing to truly take center stage—and while that’s always a boon for a lyricist as talented as they are, the maturity at the heart of Wendy Eisenberg elevates their language to new heights. Themes of time, selfhood, and writing itself ebb and flow throughout the record, not unlike the ocean/water motif that keeps cropping up. Closer “The Walls” begins with Eisenberg singing, close and intimately, “I wondered, when I was younger / If I would feel this way forever / Or if this world would finally settle into something solid.” “Another Lifetime Floats Away” tracks Eisenberg through their life, each verse a new anecdote for a new decade, always returning to the same refrain: “All that we knew won’t get us through, wants me to try another way / All that I want prefers to taunt me with a half-lost memory.” Growing up and getting better is always hard, but doing so in a uniquely hopeless age is all the more so. “Everything got better but the world,” as they put it on “Meaning Business,” an ode to healing and to David Lynch’s Twin Peaks that manages to work towards recovery while still allowing time to grieve the younger self that’s been lost. “I don’t think it’s possible to disappear / We just go missing.” Meanwhile, “Vanity Paradox” unpacks the, well, vanity paradox inherent in the creation of art: you spend so much time writing about yourself that your actual self-perception becomes immensely clouded. “Words have limitations,” after all. But turning to external metrics isn’t the answer, either; “Old Myth Dying” faces down the realization that the worldviews we inherit are so often flawed: “Everything I thought I knew, everything truest to me—was everybody lying?”
Yet for all the bittersweetness and melancholy, Wendy Eisenberg as a whole is profoundly hopeful, guiding a path toward a self finally uninhibited by societal expectation and internal self-doubt. “It’s Here” announces that the time for change has come—“It’s here, little Wendy / It’s here.” While “Vanity Paradox” reckons with the pitfalls of artistry in its first half, it soon becomes an awed ministration on the things we’ve overcome without realizing. “Will You Dare” ruminates on love, and how important it is to submit to the terror of being known and of opening your heart; it will only transform you. “The Ultraworld” picks up where “Old Myth Dying” left off, declaring that “only a month ago all of the habits of my old life died” and that all those old myths have since been revised. Eisenberg asks “The Ultraworld how it revealed itself to willing ears” and, for once, finally receives an answer to a question. “The world answered: ‘I know you better, ‘cause it’s not about knowledge.”
There’s real truth in that. Knowledge isn’t everything, although it often feels like it is, especially when you’re young and lost and desperate for answers. Perhaps I’m merely speaking from experience here, but writers in particular tend to seek relief from swaddling themselves in words, hoping that surrounding themselves with the right language will finally make sense of an indifferent, arbitrary, and cruel world. It’s hard to unlearn that knee-jerk instinct to spend your days making art from them in the hopes that a life will emerge on the page, but that’s the work laid out for us—laid out for Wendy Eisenberg themselves. As they sing on “It’s Here,” “my curiosity dares me to eat the forest leaf by leaf by stem, / Instead of mimicking its birds, using their words.” We won’t find answers if all we do is write down our questions. Sometimes you just need to step outside and take a bite out of the leaf. [Joyful Noise]
Casey Epstein-Gross is Associate Editor at Paste and is based in New York City. Follow her on X (@epsteingross) or email her at [email protected].
