The guitarist made their name on dazzlingly knotty musicianship and collaboration with the likes of Bill Orcutt. So their new album is their most surprising: a startlingly beautiful reflection of love and self-acceptance
It’s 30 December 2023. Wendy Eisenberg is walking and cannot stop. At an all-night rave in Bushwick featuring Detroit house legend Theo Parrish the previous night, they became paralysed by anxiety, returned home, “threw up a lot” and then set off with no destination in mind. “I walked for that entire day,” Eisenberg says by video call from their Brooklyn home. “I couldn’t stop moving my legs. I felt like I needed to reauthor myself, and this was how I was going to do it.”
While out on their fevered walk, Eisenberg ran into an old friend. “She told me: ‘You seem like you’re having a kind of exorcism.’ Then she added: ‘Maybe just play some guitar?’” Thus diagnosed, Eisenberg went home immediately and began writing the music that became their sublime new self-titled album. “I remember reading how Cat Power wrote Moon Pix in 10 hours, in a dream state,” says Eisenberg. Many of these songs were written in a similar state, across three or four months after that “strange, mystical moment”.
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