Wendy Eisenberg – Wendy Eisenberg

Wendy Eisenberg returns to announce their new self-titled album, Wendy Eisenberg, arriving April 3 via Joyful Noise Recordings.

Out today alongside the announcement, lead single “Meaning Business” showcases the Brooklyn-based singer-songwriter, improviser, and virtuoso guitarist’s most focused vision yet—poetic, formally daring folk songs that mark a creative milestone after a decade of genre-spanning work.

“Meaning Business” opens with inquisitive chords before blooming into baroque-pop grandeur. Written in honor of David Lynch days after his passing, Eisenberg says: “I loved his work dearly, especially Twin Peaks/Fire Walk With Me/The Return, 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’).”

Wendy Eisenberg includes previously released single “Will You Dare” and follows standalone track “I Don’t Miss You,” which caught the attention of outlets such as BrooklynVegan, NPR Music, and Stereogum, and went on to earn spots on notable year-end lists from Paste and Aquarium Drunkard. Eisenberg has spent the past decade as a fixture of independent music and an artist of inspired multiplicity. As a singer-songwriter, improviser, and virtuoso guitarist, the coordinates of their artistry are ever-shifting, from art-rock to jazz to blistering free improv and eloquent folk. On catalog highlights including 2020’s Auto and the 2024 free-jazz sprawler Viewfinder—a double album that drew widespread praise from Pitchfork, Stereogum, The Guardian, The New York Times, The Quietus, The Wire, and many more—Eisenberg has made a signature of ambition.

The songs on Wendy Eisenberg began to take root in 2020, when Eisenberg moved from Western Massachusetts to Brooklyn. Longing for pastoral sounds, they gravitated toward classic songwriting practitioners like John Hartford, Gillian Welch, and John Prine; “weirdo country interpreters” like Richard Dawson and Joanna Newsom; and pop-folk orchestrations from Judee Sill, Jimmy Webb, and Van Dyke Parks. “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,” Eisenberg says.

A personal reckoning between 2023 and 2024, a period of self-confrontation they liken to a personal exorcism, imbued Eisenberg’s new music with sturdiness, clarity, conviction, and beauty. “I had this weird, semi-mystical experience,” Eisenberg says. “I remember walking around for hours alone, having given up on some kind of straight love, straight performance. Much of what I thought I wanted felt totally irrelevant. The part of me that felt like I had to be legible to appease imaginary people finally needed to die.”

On Wendy Eisenberg, the artist creates their own paradigm with a tight-knit circle of longtime collaborators—including bassist Trevor Dunn, drummer Ryan Sawyer, and co-producer Mari Rubio, who handled pedal steel, synth, and string arrangements—recording often at Eisenberg’s home and bringing a gorgeous ensemble texture to each note. “I was finally around people who accepted me,” Eisenberg says. “Many of the songs on this record were written in that new feeling. I wanted it to be incredibly comforting as it describes some massive changes in self-understanding and self-regard. It’s about relief.”

The conditions of Eisenberg’s life have steadied since the “exorcism” from which they wrote, and the recording reflected these shifts. Eisenberg became a full-time assistant professor of songwriting and they live now with Rubio, their girlfriend. “These things being true have changed my songwriting voice. It’s just as urgent as always, but slightly more spacious,” they say. “I’d spent my life trying to wrestle things into existence. These are songs that honestly just emerged, miraculously.”

Eisenberg will be touring steadily throughout the year, including support dates with Peaer, Bad History Month, Rich(ard) Dawson, and newly announced co-headlining album release shows with more eaze this April in Brooklyn and Philadelphia. The full list of dates is below, with additional shows to be announced.

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