Wendy Eisenberg is chasing radical beauty

Coming from a virtuoso guitarist who notoriously switches between twee and terrorising, the Brooklyn-based artist’s latest album might be a bit of an eyebrow-raiser with its audaciously pretty songs and pristine sound. But, strangely enough, Wendy Eisenberg actually feels very much part of the same continuum of daredevil, sometimes cacophonous, experimentation that has defined their whole career thus far – the same brainy whimsy on display in bands like Editrix and Birthing Hips, as part of Bill Orcutt’s live ensemble, and even Eisenberg’s avant-gardist solo work earlier this decade when they were embedded in Western Massachusetts noise scene.

Speaking to Best Fit over video call last month, Eisenberg is enjoying a rare weekday off thanks to a snow day that has relieved them of their 9-to-5 duties as a college professor. But music keeps calling, and they’ve managed to write a new song already, despite the domestic distractions of their dog scurrying around the house and their partner and bandmate Mari Rubio, aka more eaze, conducting interviews for her own album rollout on the other side of the wall.

“Oh god, how long do you have?,” Eisenberg quips when asked about their current employer, The College of Performing Arts at The New School in Greenwich Village. “It hosted a lot of people fleeing World War II, a lot of great thinkers and all that,” they say with palpable pride. “Also, it’s a great place. A lot of the original Fluxus class that John Cage was teaching is part of that New School history. It’s been this kind of Village institution for a long time.” Eisenberg was hired to teach jazz guitar at the college in the fall of 2021, but their work has gradually shifted more towards teaching songwriting in the years since. “Luckily, I usually get one free jazz ensemble a semester, but most of the time I’m teaching composition for songwriters – advanced levels of theory, classes on lyrics, this and that.” 

Ever keen to make jokes at their own expense when a lane presents itself, Eisenberg describes themself as “a recovering jazz musician,” part way through a passionate answer to the question what, if anything, their professorship has been teaching them. “This is the best job,” they say, beaming. “Because I get to think all day about the things I think about on my own anyway. I’m like, what do lyrics do? Are lyrics a thing that does something in a performative sense, in the classic definition of performativity, or are lyrics poetry? It’s one of those questions where, if you ask it at a party, you’re just the most pompous ass who’s ever gone to a party. But if you ask it in a group of students who are also worried about that same thing, then you’re really working some shit out together. It’s amazing!”

Besides getting paid a salary for exploring and sharing their pet interests, Eisenberg says the work has revitalised and reaffirmed their own creative life too, improving their ears through a deeper feel for music theory and, in a more practical way, making them “an infinitely better musician” by playing through their students’ compositions.

What their students come up often blindsides Eisenberg in the best possible way. “Right now I’m teaching them about chromaticism, so I’ve showed them “Everything Means Nothing to Me” by Elliott Smith, and “Blood Count” by Billy Strayhorn, and the compositions they wrote were so fucking amazing,” they enthuse. “They were way better than the songs they wrote for my last class, which was on modal stuff. I was like, ‘Why is this better?’ And then I realised: every single thing that gets understood, through the lens of Western harmony, as expressive is something that sits a little bit outside of the diatonic scale.”

It’s a realisation that’s also helped them to rearticulate something about the genius of free jazz innovator Ornette Coleman, they say. “Ornette could make a diatonic melody sound fucking perfect and not boring, because he was shifting the context underneath it in a way that’s completely not about chromaticism. So it sounds nontraditional, but it’s actually the most advanced kind of melody writing, because it’s really coming from the ear and the heart.”

Eisenberg confesses that their students’ absorption of these theories inspires their own music as well. “Watching them really understand how to manipulate traditional, human, romantic, giant emotions, and seeing them master that, has helped me understand how to teach melody better,” they say. “They knew they could break a rule. They knew they could use these foreign chords in the key, and that made their melodies even bolder. They didn’t feel like they had to be subject to some notion of a classically good melody.”

Many of Eisenberg’s students have musical vocabularies quite different from theirs, but it’s a question of technique more than matching taste. Eisenberg may not care all that much for the Taylor Swift universe, but their students do, and somehow it works. “I’m like, ‘How are you going to make that part of your piece?,’ but they do, and yet they keep their own style. I’m such a fan of their work, because I’m like, ‘Man, this is actual songwriting.’ Yeah, they’re doing it for a class but they’re not losing themselves. So, theory can be useful. Who knew?”

It hasn’t been a smooth path for Eisenberg themself to get to this point. Their own musical evolution has been subject to both great mentorship and extremely toxic mentorship, so there were a lot of proverbial kinks in the wire to be worked out before they turned to teaching themself. “It’s been hard to have a switch in my mind between the me who is a teacher and the me who is doing things in a ‘career’ sort of way,” they explain. “I’m trying to give some of that perspective and help to my students, but it’s just this weird thing.”

Ideally, Eisenberg wants to maintain the separation between teaching and making their own music, largely to be able to protect the part of themself that feels things unnecessarily. “I think that’s the really critical difference,” they say. “I can’t give my students everything, because then it’s hard for me to have things left that are expressive and just for me.” 

While their first high school mentor was “very abusive” and gave Eisenberg “all this inappropriate stuff that totally ruined my life,” another teacher, Paul Wingo, set them on a more nourishing creative path. “He was a jazz guitar player, and I’ve always been ambivalent about that, but he had this kind of refreshing, open candour about jazz,” they explain. “I had never really been treated so sweetly, so it was kind of like, ‘Oh, this guy is sweet and he’s a jazz musician?’ I guess I am going to fall in love with jazz after all.”

According to Eisenberg, Wingo had a kind of “mystic faith in the universe.” “He was the kind of guy who, if he had to go to a gig, would somehow end up there really early, almost by accident. He’d leave on time, but still end up early. And he would always get a parking spot. He was just kind of a magical person. I try to click into that same kind of magic when I’m writing: what is the thing that’s going to make sense outside my own control? That sense of faith in the universe was probably the biggest impression he had on me.”

Eisenberg thinks the best jazz isn’t the kind where you “strangle your vocabulary into mastery and then put it in the right place forever.” “That feels like such a horrible academic way of thinking about it. It’s also kind of colonial, if you put it like that. Like, here’s this jazz that you can do correctly. How fucking lame!” Eisenberg also mentions Joanna Newsom’s ability to circumnavigate virtuosity “in service of a larger, deeper message” as a vital influence.

At this point I remind Eisenberg about something they once said during a radio interview – something along the lines of how “playing free jazz was like having an angel and devil on their shoulder, without it feeling oppressive.” “I think there’s a feeling I have now in free jazz, or in improvisation in general, that maybe I didn’t have before, where I’m actually concerned with the same things I am when I’m writing songs,” they say. “I actually just want it to be beautiful. I really like free jazz that has an extreme melody. For a long time, I was closer to the free improv world that’s more concerned with texture or tone or timing or duration or whatever. But these days I just like melody a lot.”

Eisenberg’s previous LP Viewfinder – partly inspired by getting laser surgery on their eyes, and percieving the world in hyperfocus for the first time – expresses the artist’s growth quite acutely. Not only was it a super original way to document a life-changing moment, but the music itself channels Eisenberg’s feeling of sheer perplexity in processing it all. “After Image”, the album’s 22-minute centrepiece, is a perfect example, with its playful push-and-pull between the melodies and free-improvisational passages. It’s truly psychedelic music. Elsewhere, on “Lasik”, Eisenberg candidly narrates the process of adjusting to perceiving their surroundings anew (“I am surprised healing takes forever / but changing isn’t healing”).

“I feel like Viewfinder was really about sight, because for a long time I was kind of obsessed with thinking about what it means to see something,” they explain. “From my earlier records, Time Machine being the most explicit, it’s all about the impossibility of memory. And I think I’m really lucky that that’s my interest, because I’m interested in how the guitar can sound both like nothing you’ve ever heard before and also like this kind of load-bearing sign of a certain kind of Western music.”

So if Viewfinder signifies the change, where does the healing part come into play? In both Eisenberg’s own past works and performing in Bill Orcutt’s ensemble, listeners are guided in this flux between structure and formlessness, with no intent to settle on either. With their old grad school band Birthing Hips, Eisenberg explored these extremes with palpable glee. The song “Strip Tease”, for example, features a mangled take on Beethoven’s “Ode To Joy” – a cheeky corruption of a timeless melody, much like Faust did with their subversive sampling of The Beatles and The Rolling Stones.

But, as Eisenberg sings on “Will You Dare”, time has a funny way of laying you bare. They remain proud of their early endeavours, resisting the impulse to look down on them in any way, but at the same time they realise that their whole outlook since then has changed. “With Birthing Hips, the problem I was trying to solve with music was really specific,” they explain.

“The way I played was basically, ‘How can I take the vocabulary of somebody like Greg Ginn and somebody like Anthony Braxton and make them coexist?’ And when I was writing songs, I was asking, ‘How can I take the harmonic thing of the Beach Boys or whatever and make it coexist with Derek Bailey-style playing? How can I take these two things and make them talk to each other?’ And I think the arc of my career has basically just been realising that, actually, they’re all talking to each other. And sometimes I just need to listen to prettier stuff.”

When it came to choosing the songs for the new album in a way that made sense, Eisenberg knew they had to do revisit their own past. “Lyrically, these songs are all kind of about talking to my younger self, and about talking very explicitly to earlier musical forms,” they explain. Instead of a cycle stuck on a constant loop, Wendy Eisenberg delineates the past like the outer rings of a tree: all their past experiences crystallising into songs with a surprisingly pastoral charm, interpreting the folk and alternative country lineage of American music in Eisenberg’s own idiosyncratic way.

Elaborating on a question about how much the anthropology of folk music – the way songs morph through interpretation across generations – informs their current writing, Eisenberg looks to some of their favourite lyrics by others: “They’re always distended in time in some way. There’s some kind of reaching across time that happens, even just on the level of using different tenses. Something as explicit as Willie Nelson saying ‘Time can take care of itself, so just leave time alone,’ as if it’s this personified thing, that’s amazing to me.”

Revisiting the past isn’t quite like looking at some faded photograph. It’s not a frozen image neatly framed, but something always reshaping and contorting with how one navigates the present. “Sometimes when you play, it’s like a prayer,” they say. “It’s like getting you toward some sort of future, some kind of past reconciliation. But often, when you play something that you wrote at a specifically emotionally intense time, you’re taken right back to what that time meant to you. For instance, when I play the song ‘Patterns’ from Dehiscence, I really am right back in that state of emotional, romantic turmoil. I’m physically there.”

Where the more boisterous ‘extreme’ music of Eisenberg’s past seemed radical at the time, Wendy Eisenberg seems to subconsciously meditate on the question, ‘Can unabashedly beautiful music feel radical as well as nostalgic?’ Like many of their creative ventures, it seemed like a more cerebral pursuit at first. “I was kind of fixated on writing really good pop songs, mostly because the contemporary sonic landscape was one of resignation and depression, for obvious reasons,” they explain, “and I was thinking about why other periods in political history produced really gorgeous music.”

During our conversation, Eisenberg mentions artists like Weyes Blood, The Beach Boys, Still House Plants, and Jim O’Rourke in terms of what they bring to the table within this particular inquiry. “I’m interested in the mutation arc of a pop person, too; somebody like Scott Walker, who starts out beautiful and ends up beautiful in a completely different, cosmic way,” they say. “So I wasn’t thinking what it meant if I, a weird guitar player, am doing these songs. It was more about writing the best song possible. What would happen if I wrote a song that feels true to me: more than a winking kind of look at convention? What are these conventions saying? Why does a Jimmy Webb song feel so revolutionary formally if it also feels so familiar immediately when you hear it? How do you kind of sneak in something like that?”

Still, in the process of writing the new songs, Eisenberg’s keen ear gradually steered an intellectual exericse into an outpouring from the heart: an unburdening of the comfort of love, a job that affirms their fields of interest, a band that both challenges and channels their prolific musical output. “Everything got better but the world,” they sing on the album’s gleaming lead single “Meaning Business”, a song written in the wake of David Lynch’s death. The song evokes a similarly earnest romance as Lynch’s later career autobiographical road movie The Straight Story, a grounded, yet strangely surrealist panorama of the American Southwest. 

The film tells the story of a World War II veteran traveling slowly on a lawnmower to visit his estranged brother, in the hope of reconciling their relationship before he dies. One quote that stands out is when the veteran character says a bundle of sticks is harder to break than just a single one, “That bundle… that’s family.” “Finding my people has been really major,” Eisenberg says. “For the entirety of my twenties, and basically until Mari and Ryan [Sawyer, their bandmate] entered my life, I didn’t really have people who understood the core of me. People liked me, and I had friends, and I’m still friends with most of them, but I didn’t feel understood in my life. So I looked to these songs as the place where I could be understood.”

Eisenberg says they now feel liberated from the idea that a song has to be where everything weird about them lives. They can just be weird in their day-to-day life. “I don’t think there’s really a demarcation between the songs I write that are more produced or weirder or whatever,” they explain. “Maybe they have different forms. Maybe they’re more expansive conceptually to some people. But because I’m understood in my life, I don’t feel like I have to try as hard to put everything about myself that people might think is unsavoury into this one package.”

On “Curious Bird”, Eisenberg jokes “Sister believe: the future’s a setup / A joke with no end / A mockery of worship.” Going back to what they said earlier about being able to channel the past urgently through playing music in the present, perhaps being aware of that miraculous little mechanism gave Eisenberg the wherewithal to safeguard what’s waiting up ahead, and maybe that is its own version of eternity?

“Because it’s physical,” they answer, nodding. “It’s like you’re doing some sort of ritual process in order to receive, whereas when you look at an image, you’re looking outside of it. It’s external to you, right? If there’s anything music has over anything else, which has everything to do with why I think it’s the best, you can kind of look internally for reasons why. And the ultimate reason is that when you play it, you’re back in a certain physicality, or back in the muscle memory of a certain year of your playing. That makes you beholden to whatever it was that you were feeling. Then it becomes this really generous kind of experience. It can feel very religious.”

Before wrapping up, Eisenberg goes out on their umpteenth geeky tangent, suggesting that “Meaning Business” or “Another Lifetime” could eventually be reshaped on stage into an epic space-rock jam. “Recently Mari showed me the Dick Slessig Combo version of ‘Wichita Lineman’ that’s, like, 42 minutes long, and I really want to do that with one of my songs. I really want to expand, because I think they can bear a lot of weight. Structurally I know what they are but they move fast, so having some kind of longer-form version that is in some way pulling them apart feel really amazing.”

Bending and stretching time, and making their music more malleable, travels simpatico with truly seeing themself. If onViewfinder Eisenberg captured the confusion of a world suddenly invasively defined, Wendy Eisenberg is a true reframing of the self. “Now that I’m living a more legibly queer life, and really feeling it, I feel like I don’t have to hide as much, which means I can be freer with how the music takes form,” they say. 

“If I write something that’s more conventional, I don’t have this interior voice saying ‘Well, you’re forced to be conventional in your day-to-day life, so why aren’t you just doing it there, and then being weird over here?’ Now it’s all one thing. That’s just been huge for my process, because if I’m not expected to be a freak then I can actually just be a freak within the thing. And there are people who will be there for me forever.”