by David Wilikofsky
Late on their newest album, Bent Ring, Wendy Eisenberg sings “I can hardly bother with what doesn’t thrill me“. From the outside looking in, the line seems a near perfect encapsulation of their artistic practice. Eisenberg’s output over the past two years has been both prolific and varied; from the art pop of Auto and the “avant butt-rock” of Editrix’s debut album to the solo guitar explorations of Cellini’s Halo, Eisenberg rarely appears on record in the same form twice. Bent Ring is no exception. For this one, Eisenberg picked up the banjo and created a set of spare, deconstructed folk music that meditates on the realities of being an artist.
Perhaps the best place to start is with the instrumentation. Eisenberg is well known as a guitar virtuoso, so an album full of banjo songs is, in a word, unexpected. It’s also quite a sonic departure from their last song based excursion, Auto, whose heavy production contrasts with Bent Ring‘s more naturalistic approach. Most songs are simply Eisenberg’s vocals accompanied by banjo; a few include bass and percussion (or Eisenberg duetting with themself), but those elements are deployed with a light touch. The result is a pure distillation of Eisenberg’s musical language. Their trademark skittering rhythms and idiosyncratic melodies shine though with little distraction.
Artists create for many reasons, but most do it (at least in part) because they love it. Bent Ring seeks to answer more complex question: what does it mean to have a life in the arts, to be (as they put it) a lifer? Unsurprisingly, it’s complicated. “Analogies” begins with expressions of Eisenberg’s love for music: they’re a cipher, an artist. But it quickly devolves into self-doubt and marketing speak, as Eisenberg questions whether they can create art they believe in. Musical ideas appear in their head late at night, specters that prevent them from relaxing. They fight to keep their “alien perspective” even as other people judge their art. There are still joyful moments (getting on stage and performing, the strange appeal of life on the road) but they rub up against all the realities of existing inside an industry built to turn art into a commodity.
My favorite song on the entire album may be “Little Love Songs”, which is as much a meta-love song as it is a meditation on the creative process. It’s a song about writing a love song (which, sneakily, is being composed for an unnamed love); Eisenberg complains that working in this genre is a form of torture and beseeches the song’s subject to look away as they write. In the end, they say this song is “what came out, so of course I committed to see if goodness can come from restraint“. That’s a striking line. The truth is that no art is the product of immaculate conception, even though it’s often presented to us fully formed. It’s the product of work, of a lifetime of trial and error coalescing into a few short minutes of sound. Eisenberg is an artist who continues to do that work at a breakneck pace, unafraid to push themself and their art into new and exciting territory. As a brief look behind the scenes of that process, Bent Ring is yet another entry in their increasingly essential catalogue.