Changing a life
Thank you for changing my life
Hello,
On April 3rd this year I released an album and within a week or so, my entire first run of LPs sold out, I received the Best New Music red circle rating on Pitchfork.com, smized on the cover of the cherished experimental music magazine, The Wire, and began fielding a lot more meetings with agents and interviewers than I’d ever expected. Coming after years of hard work in DIY, this felt as though my personal cosmic spinner of the Wheel of Fortune had reached a new milestone in the gym, her defined and gorgeous arm spinning the wheel so hard it generated sparks as it flew completely off its axis. These are things I’d wanted, and had not allowed myself to want. I knew their arbitrariness as much as how I knew important I found them, and because I had learned early on that other people are never in our control, I thought not to rely on the opinions and deeds of other people to bestow power and recognition on me, at least not until some unimaginably distant future.
I’d long conceived of myself as somebody who, at the tail end of an illustrious if, crucially, minor career, after sounding a river of commas and eddying parentheses upon the blank page of the sonic world, painting a pointillism of their works of love upon it, rapturous and Brownian as a field of fireflies, only might receive wider recognition. “Maybe when I’m 60+” I’d think in a mix of compersion and jealousy, as so many friends got sucked up into the fantastic sky of my own half-suppressed desires. I’d made peace with that life. The idea of it freed me to follow any musical interest I had. The fans I’ve made trust not just in the quality but of the breadth of projects I like to make; they are at home on that range. But now, although my life has not materially changed - same job, same apartment, same wonderful partner and dog, same friends - some quality of its air has changed, now that I share it with the thousands of strangers who are now listening to this record, who know my name, who hear in my songs how strange it was for me to learn to really love, how sublime it feels to sing to my younger self, and, oddly, perfectly, how to react to being seen.
I am still minor, although a slightly bigger kind. (This, too, is adulthood). Nobody is making me into a meme the way they do with those certain male songwriters with their wavy brown hair, those pop divas with their infinite opacity and steely resolve, those lyricists whose lyrics stun certain tweeters into that odd online repetition, the transcendent degradation, the meme. I face not the mob of the Chaotic Good; my only bot army is my sweet friend and manager Evan, who is really good at reposting things I’m supposed to have posted myself. Nobody is naming a genre after me, nobody is chasing me down the street. Yet still, something existential has shifted. The light afforded me by these ears, loving and not, has beamed me onto a strange new planet, which looks exactly like my current planet but on it, people are treating me like I have power, listening to me like I am important, and the desires that shaped the most unconscious of my actions and my choices mock and shock me with their realization.
It’s funny to me, how different this stage in my career actually feels. I am starting to believe that the forces behind the world avail themselves to you when you’re the fewest degrees away from understanding them. This record is undyingly personal, about how loving Mari, and loving my corner of the world, makes it possible to finally see my young self as someone whose hand I can hold, who I can walk alongside. I wrote this music with the hopes that other people might find that relationship in themselves if they heard it. By the admission of some friends, some emails, many audience members and a lot more dms, this record is that comfort. How miraculous, to feel this close and even helpful to these people, but at a paradoxical distance. The specifics really do allow the general to form, like a skeleton determines the shape of its flesh. Like words set to harmony.
That’s where I’ve been, by the way. It hasn’t been easy to make sense of this planet, considering how similar it was to the old one. My process as a writer is still the same - 8 hours of straight moping until I sweat it out in a 3-hour-max session after which I’ve diagnosed my world. The only things that have/are changing, beyond my perception of this new place, are that I have more booking help, more touring coming up, the ability to play in more amazing places with artists I looked up to for a long time, whose tier I never believed I’d reached. And maybe I haven’t, but I’ll climb up like a tourist on a skyscraper and peer at their world, knowing it’s all a shared, impermanent fantasy.
GIGS
SUONI PER IL POPOLO - MONTREAL
March 25 - Duo with Bill Orcutt, 8:30pm at La Sala Rossa with Drainolith and Setting.
March 26 - 11am Artist Talk with Bill on the Casa del Popolo terasse.
VANCOUVER JAZZ FESTIVAL
I’m the artist in residence, among pals Karen NG, Steve Gunn, Patrick Shiroishi, Caley Watts, and others :) All addresses in Vancouver BC. Send me some local recs - I’ll be busy, but I’ve never been, and am excited to see this beautiful city.
June 30: 1pm. Rhythm Changes Podcast Live Taping at Tom Lee Music Hall, 728 Granville St - 2nd floor
July 1, 11am Wendy Eisenberg - New Improvisers Studio at Western Front, 303 East 8th Ave,
July 2 Song Form //Less: Wendy Eisenberg / Lisa Cay Miller. 2pm. We both play solo sets then collaborate, then do an artist talk.
Jul 3 - Playing my album “Viewfinder” at 9pm at Revue Stage, 1601 Johnston Street, with this local angel virtuosi band: Sean Cronin - bass/Dan Gaucher - drums and fx/JP Carter - trumpet and fx/Nebyu Yohannes - trombone/Cat Toren - piano
Jul 4 - Improv Karaoke, 11:30pm at Revue Stage, 1601 Johnston Street.
HOMETOWN FUN
July 10 at Rippers in the Rockways, a rare trio show of mine with Trevor and Ryan in the band. Mari’s gonna be in Mother Europe. Steve Gunn and Evan Wright also on the bill. Night starts at 5:30 it’s gonna be a beach party!
July 11 Editrix plays the Broadway with Scarcity, Duchess, and Wellness.
July 14 at Union Pool, duo with Ryan. We’re working on our duo album now, it’s devastating. Opening for friends and legends Styrofoam Winos.
July 17 at Cold Spring Hollow with Editrix. We’re recording a secret EP that weekend.
SLEEPYTIME GORILLA MUSEUM TOUR (all tickets are at this link! the trio of ryan and mari are opening. we’re bringing keith on their bus, come give him a pet)
July 23 The Bluebird, Denver, CO
July 24 The Record Bar, Kansas City, KS
July 25 Cedar Cultural, Minneapolis, MN
July 26 Chop Shop, Chicago, IL
July 27 The Mill, Nashville, TN
July 28 Grey Eagle, Asheville, NC
July 29 The Earl, Atlanta, GA
July 30, Alabama Music Box, Mobile, AL
July 31 White Oak Music Hall, Houston, TX
August 1 Mohawk, Austin, TX
SOME OF AUGUST
August 21, Editrix plays Baignade Sauvage Festival in Ambialet, FRANCE
August 28, UC Theatre, Berkeley CA, opening for Bill Callahan
and then, an extra special “whait” tour starts, but I’ll tell you about that later, when I catch up.
Books:
Changing Gender - Susan Stryker
The Second Body - Daisy Hildyard
Nova Scotia House - Charlie Porter
Message in a Bottle - Walker Percy
The Oblivion Ha-Ha - James Tate
Records
Aldous Harding - Train on the Island
Abigail Snail - Rad Berms
George Braith - Two Souls in One
Sizzla - Black Woman & Child
Skeeter Davis & NRBQ - She Sings, They Play
Thoughts
Some time ago, probably after I outgrew millennial autofiction, I began to consciously avoid books with space between each paragraph. I longed for the classic comfort of a dense brick of text. Now, with the rise of AI style, it’s been amusing to see those paragraph breaks, still huge in sad literature the world over, unlatched from their origins in prose poems, postcolonial genre benders, and that Carole Maso or David Markson vibe, into corporate long-post slop. I feel grossed out and vindicated, which, if you read my big ass, substack-divided paragraphs above, is the order of the day!
I have a pretty strong aversion to “emo harmony” for some reason, even though many of my friends are practitioners of it and I like what they do. I just can’t seek out their source materials. It feels bad to me, to listen to that. I was theorizing with Mari last night that I don’t like it because I feel emo all the time, so I don’t need to hear it. She responded that she feels emo all the time, so it makes her feel good to hear it. I feel like how Strayhorn sounds to me, heartbroken and technical, all the time, and I always want to hear that. What is the line we draw, if we’re drawing a line here? When I’m sad, I like to listen to the saddest music in the world or the most aggressively stupid. What does that say about the nature of my feelings?
I’ve been writing a lot of songs for the next “songs” “record” and what’s been fascinating is how much more interesting and rich it feels to write songs dedicated to my friends and heroes rather than about strictly myself. It overwhelms me in a good way to dedicate my practice to them. I think of myself as a sort of boring, consistent person with a big, crazy brain, whose distillation of ideas and deep feeling for and through them is more interesting that whatever trials I’m going through literally. Writing these little dedications feels really different for me, like I’m finally verbalizing one verse a little prayer I’ve held in my heart since these subjects entered my life.
I had an outsized emotional reaction revisiting Modest Mouse’s The Lonesome Crowded West the other day, because it does this thing certain brilliant songwriters do so well, which is capture something about the material misery of the day, not exactly triumphing in the abject but calling from it the feelings it asks you to suppress, the god force trampled by it. Shane from Chanel Beads is a master of that craft, Richard Dawson too. It hurts. Do I feel that all the time, too? Do you?
The one material thing in my life that’s changing right now beyond my aforementioned ether is that I’m getting a new car and selling my little Honda to Ryan, keeping it in the family. That car has been through so much. I’ve owned it for nearly 10 years, and it’s seen me through 3 long term partners, countless miles on Mass Route 2 and I-91 and most points east of the Mississippi and in Ontario and Quebec. Editrix has toured in it, improbably. It has three amazing bumper stickers, “My Other Car Is The Void,” the Molasses Industries classic, “Keep Honking I’m Listening to Honking,” and the all-timer, “Pirate of the Car-I-Be-In.” It got molto scratched up on the highway before I moved to the city and even more scratched when I was trying to figure out how to fit it in our tiny, blessed parking spot. Someone up in Harlem tagged it with a cunty, ineffectual red line on one side. When I have to park it in a garage, the workers make fun of our endless scratches, but they’re my scratches, and they’re embarrassing but mine, so I laugh, resigned and more than a little proud. I’m replacing it with a cousin’s old car, the exact same car as mine but 2 years newer and 180,000 fewer miles on it. It’s honestly a little heartbreaking letting go of that guy. I never named it, but I wrote Auto more or less about my experiences in it. When Mari and I moved in together and started sharing it more, she said that she began to feel the same parental way about it that I do about little Keith, like it’s her zippy, sleek, idiosyncratic, black white and tan familiar. A year ago my car started to even favor Mari the way Keith sometimes favors me, choosing to hook up to her bluetooth every time instead of mine. I’ll miss that waterstained bearer of the places I’ve been. Every one of your 216,000 miles has been a blessing, whether in the shock rainstorm of the midwest with Caroline Davis on our duo tour in 2024, on my endless drives into Boston and New York from my time in Western Mass. Thank you little car. Sending you out with this song in your honor.
See you out there, guys. Thanks for your patience, your time, your ears, and your eyes.
Love,
Wendy
"Nobody is naming a genre after me" -- Eisen-core might work.
long live the honda god speed you! black emperor