Wendy Eisenberg: Oxblood Vinyl LP

Pre-Order Item. Release Date Subject to Change.
Label: Joyful Noise Recordings
Release Date: 3rd April

This album sounds like something rare, beautiful and lost on a Numero wayfaring strangers compilation but here Wendy is in 2026 and you are here today to create a future where Wendy's string-laden country folk could become many a keen listener's album of the year. Wendy's self-titled is the kind of album that transports you to a cabin and fills you with a lovely warmth the kind you strangely get when you're walking near a body of water on a cold day.

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. “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.”
On Wendy Eisenberg, the artist creates their own paradigm with a tight-knit circle of longtimefriendsandcollaborators—includingbassistTrevorDunn,drummerRyan Sawyer, and co-producer Mari Rubio (more eaze), 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-under- standing and self-regard. It’s about relief.”