Wendy 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, they’ve made a signature of ambition. After spending the past five years experimenting in different bands, genres, and creative challenges, and following a period of self-confrontation that they liken to a personal exorcism, Eisenberg has arrived at a milestone. The poetic and formally daring folk songs of Wendy Eisenberg comprise their most certain vision yet.

The songs began to take root in 2020 when Eisenberg moved from Western Massachusetts—where they’d lived for a few years after attending Boston’s New England Conservatory—and relocated to Brooklyn. Longing for the pastoral feel of their former home, Eisenberg gravitated towards the warm sounds of country and folk. For an already renowned guitarist, these classic songwriting practitioners (John Hartford, Michael Hurley, Gillian Welch, John Prine, Willie Nelson) and what Eisenberg called “weirdo country interpreters” (Richard Dawson, the Mekons, Joanna Newsom) offered other kinds of timelessness and virtuosity, as did Eisenberg’s immersion into pop-folk orchestrations (Judee Sill, Jimmy Webb, Van Dyke Parks). “The songs are genuinely folk songs,” Eisenberg says of their record. “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.”

A personal reckoning between 2023 and 2024 imbued Eisenberg’s new music with evermore 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 friends and 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.”

Eisenberg explores this epiphany explicitly on “Old Myth Dying,” singing in a fevered register, over polyrhythmic guitar playing, about knowing what you can and can’t control. That renewed feeling is in the pedal-steeled lucidity of “Will You Dare,” a bracing tune about love and the passage of time, which “has a funny way of laying you bare,” they sing. “It pulls you and scares you and tangles your hair/Asking: will you dare?” Opening with inquisitive chords before blooming into visceral, baroque-pop grandeur, “Meaning Business” was written following David Lynch’s death—favoring the late filmmaker’s “alien sense of Americanness” over a codified “Lynchian” sound. “Vanity Paradox” evokes how self-examination in artmaking can paradoxically blur one’s self-image. A tension between unresolvability and a longing for steady ground abounds; as Eisenberg sings on “The Walls,” “I wondered, when I was younger/If I would feel this way forever/Or if this world would finally settle into something solid.” The boon of such solidity rings out between each player. “Working in a very homegrown way was essential—these songs came out very delicately and were allergic to false steps,” Eisenberg says. “This is the first record I’ve made with an extensive backlog of songs, and I chose these because they felt spiritually the truest to how I have been moving through this new world right now.”

The dreamlike centerpiece “Another Lifetime Floats Away” traces the sweep of a life, how the past inhabits us and tends to flood back at will. Its bittersweet ease remarkably describes the nature of time, which can never turn back, in a succession of vivid images—their mother making breakfast; their dad working; their adventurous 20s, touring Northeast highways—while also describing the present moment from which the song was crafted. “It situates me as my own parent now,” Eisenberg says. “It’s emotionally overwhelming to grapple with the feeling that you are now the person who witnesses and occasions your own life, like your childhood home or your parents.” It is possible to imagine people singing it forever.

The song that follows, “It’s Here,” is about “the consciousness afforded by true love,” of people and songs and learning to trust in both. 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.” Calling back to that lifetime of devotion to song, and the negotiation towards a realized self that is likely to last as long, Eisenberg ends with “The Walls,” originally penned for their free-jazz trio Darlin’:

A memory: when I was twelve, or thirteen,

I’d write songs close to midnight

And some of those would sound a bit like this one, even back then

I seem to be consistent

If rootless in this half-guarded impulse

I cannot find the walls

I trust that that’s a good thing

Sometimes I’ll need convincing