Over the last decade, Wendy Eisenberg has steadily built one of the most ambitious and diverse oeuvres in independent music, the songwriter, improvisor and guitarist always pushing the boundaries of their sound and rarely staying in one place. Just consider the jump between 2020 album Auto, built around highly intricate, almost mechanical guitar patterns, and 2021’s Bent Ring, which challenged Eisenberg to write without a guitar at all. Or the contrast between the sprawling jazz of 2024’s Viewfinder with noisy, crunchy Editrix records which sandwiched it. Now, following this period stylistic adventure and coninciding with a process of self-confrontation they liken to “a personal exorcism,” Eisenberg is set to return with a self-titled release this spring with Joyful Noise Recordings, as though for the first time willing or able to put forward a halfway static vision of themselves within the maelstrom of change.
After first single ‘Will You Dare’, a song we described as “sun-dappled and deceptively simple, drawing inspiration from the greats of seventies folk and country in its disarming candour and ultimately proving audacious in its willingness to cut to the heart of the matter,” Wendy Eisenberg has now shared new track ‘Meaning Business’ to further introduce the bona fide folk aesthetic that runs through the album. “The songs are genuinely folk songs,” as Eisenberg explains in the album notes. “The production is less about seeing what the guitar might be capable of and more accepting the inherent strangeness of the languages it has spoken for the last century and a half.”
Written in the days after the death of David Lynch, ‘Meaning Business’ is an ode to the master and a celebration of the power of the images he brought into the world, all while grappling with personal experience in order to reconstruct the self towards some sort of whole. “I loved his work dearly, especially Twin Peaks/Fire Walk With Me/The Return,” Eisenberg explains of Lynch, “which is an especially important work to me and so many other people who have experienced sexual assault. Recovery from the trauma of that particular horror is a hallucinatory and psychedelic process because you’re reckoning with true horror—basically, the thesis of the Twin Peaks universe. This song sees me trying to find the little kid who I was, who endured that horror, and ultimately trying to free her from being trapped in that memory (‘Find Laura’)”
