Wendy Eisenberg and Nick Zanca Like Shooting the Shit

Nick Zanca is a record producer, songwriter, composer, and writer based in New York; Wendy Eisenberg is an improviser and songwriter, also based in New York, who performs solo and with their band Editrix. Both have new albums — Nick’s Hindsight was just released earlier this month, and Wendy’s Viewfinder will be out September 13 — so to celebrate, the two caught up about their creation and much more. 
— Annie Fell, Editor-in-chief, Talkhouse Music

Nick Zanca: So, we’ve known each other for a long time. We are putting records out on the same label — we both had a hand in each other’s [record]. You and I are both people that wear a lot of different hats, and I think both of these projects are us kind of finding a way to put all the eggs in one basket, with your regard to songcraft and improvisation, and for me kind of sculpting sound and then also trying to hone my chops as a songwriter. There’s also a lot of collaborators between the two of our things. They were recorded in the same studio. There’s a lot in common with these two releases. I spent a lot of time with this body of work having mixed it, but my first question is: what made you decide that you wanted to take on the subject of corrective eye surgery as a jumping off point for a double disc kind of affair? 

Wendy Eisenberg: Well, you know, it’s a double disc because you have two eyes. [Laughs.] I don’t know. I mean — sorry to answer your question with another question, but — when you were making this record, did you choose to make it about yourself, or about songwriting, or about things that you knew? Or, you just wrote, right? 

Nick: I mean, yeah. On some level, I don’t think that I was necessarily thinking too much about autobiography when I was going into it. It was sort of an unwritten rule for me that I wanted to write from subjects that I have very close quarters to, but that I don’t really see represented in the broader context of songwriting. Case in point, there are plenty of songs about infidelity in the context of monogamy, but you don’t really see a lot about what an open relationship viewed in a more positive lens might look like. That was something that I was thinking about. I think as the songs were starting to flesh out a bit, the autobiographical nature started to slip out, and that wasn’t necessarily something that happened intentionally. Like that song “Little Professor” that’s on the record, my idea with that at first was I was reading a lot about the history of autism — that Steve Silberman book NeuroTribes, and I was reading a lot into Hans Asperger’s practice and the relationship with the children that he studied. I wanted to write a Kate Bush, “Cloudbusting” kind of story song in a historical perspective. So when I was sitting down at the Wurlitzer to write it, I kept finding that a little more of myself kept slipping through the cracks of it. At that point, it just became inevitable, like, OK, I can’t force this anymore. 

A roundabout way of answering, but I wasn’t necessarily thinking too much about self-perception when I was working on this thing. I mean, your songs are very rooted in your own experience. That record, Auto, that we made — it’s all in the title, you know?

Wendy: Yeah. I mean, it’s funny because I have such an allergy to this industry narrative of, “I wrote these songs about myself in the hopes that they might find others,” because what else do people do? But I think that we’re kind of — and I haven’t ignored the fact that you asked about why I wrote about eyesight — but to your point, you don’t really choose the form of what you write until you’re in the decision-making process of actually writing it, I think.

Nick: That’s true.

Wendy: But for me, there’s a primacy to the eye that is so forgettable if you have sight. It’s this thing that’s totally unquestioned for people who can see, except for if you have some sort of interesting situation — maybe you’re getting cataracts, maybe you’re nearsighted. But the word “sight,” or “seeing” anything, is just used as a metaphor. So to me, that calls to the kind of, I think, falsely considered autobiographical impulse of the songwriter. You have no choice but to write from your perspective; you can try to get out of it with varying degrees of success, but ultimately, it’s your hand that’s drawing it. And it’s also a completely uncontrollable thing. You can’t control how other people see what you’ve done, so ultimately, you have this weird interplay between the fixity of the form that shows itself when you’re making decisions on whatever you were writing, and also the way that somebody can encounter the work in question — which is just kind of basic art theory in the 20th century. 

How about this as a question: did you view, retroactively or at the time, the writing you were doing for this record as a way to process something, or was it somehow external to that?

Nick: I think looking at it now and thinking about how to speak about this in interviews or even just on social media, I see this thing as not only a vehicle, but an accompaniment for change. I’m someone who absorbs my collaborators’ or loved ones’ opinion sort of like a sponge, and this was the first project that I think I’ve ever worked on of my own where I said no to that, and just dug a little deeper and thought, OK, this is what happens when I actually follow my arrow to the very end of wherever it’s going. So, in hindsight, I think it was a bit of a mode of processing for me. I think these songs allowed me to arrive at a sort of equanimity. And usually that ends once you record and track the thing, but even after — you and I have had a lot of conversations about [how] we’ve made a record where the period in which the songs are being written and then when they’re released out into the world, you’re a completely different person over the course of that that time. But I’m looking back and it’s as if no time has passed at all. So much has happened over the course of this year, but I’m not looking at these songs and feeling like they’re a ghost from the past coming to haunt me, and like, Why do I have to keep singing this thing that I no longer believe in? 

The first Mister Lies record that I ever made — which was a rush job on the behalf of the label that I was working on, and not a product that I was super proud of even at the time — I remember someone that I was working with at the time telling me, “Records are like a permanent document of where you were at at a specific point,” and I think you kind of get lost in the sauce while it’s marinating of your relationship to where you were in the past as opposed to now. But this is the first project of mine where I’m really able to see this as kind of a photograph of where I was and interpreting it in that way, as opposed to creating some sort of emotional distance for it. It’s like I’m honoring where I was at that time, even if the circumstances have shifted quite rapidly, if that makes sense.

Wendy: Yeah, totally. I mean, it’s so funny, I didn’t realize it until afterward, but the album cover for Auto being a photograph that you could see as a photograph, and then Viewfinder obviously being a contact sheet — something I used to talk about with Richard [Lenz, an artist/photographer and one of Wendy’s collaborators] a lot was what photography was and wasn’t capable of communicating, or what role it had. Because in Richard’s life, photography was the central organizing focus until it really wasn’t. And so what you said about this being like a photograph of where you were in time — which implies some sort of fixity that you can refer to with some level of distance — the temporal distance physically ages a photograph, but also you’re physically aged, so you see this Dorian Gray-ish, weird parallel between whatever event it is that you had written about and however you see yourself to have grown since then. Which I think because of that, I’ve been conceiving of this and the next songs record that I make as part of a photography trilogy. Auto is kind of a weird selfie, Viewfinder is what it’s like to look beyond it. 

I think it’s reductive to say that songwriting or producing is a process of reflection exclusively. Like, you can’t just say, “I’m writing songs to process things that I don’t know how to feel clearly,” and have that be the only way that it could be meant. Because also there’s the real material fact of the writing — like, you didn’t say, “When I sit down to write the song,” you said, “When I sat down to write at the Wurlitzer.” There’s this engagement that we have with the material. I mean, you know I’m obsessed with it. You know that I, for years, just felt like I was not even a full person not holding a guitar.

Nick: You always used the term “machine operator,” or picking up the guitar as a “transducer.” 

Wendy: Which is so weird to think of now. Just the mere fact that I thought that for so long is almost its own language photograph of some element of a philosophy that I thought was helping me at the time. Whereas now, I see that probably there was some level of dehumanization that I’d either undergone or that I was forcing on myself — which I don’t think you’re doing with the Wurlitzer. But I do think that the way we engage with our tools maybe wasn’t something you thought about consciously all that much, but that was a part of your writing process. Because songwriting, I think, we think of as almost extra material — like, you write it to a tape or something, if you’re in 1960, and then you have this weird musical phenomenon that’s somehow divorced from it. Whereas when you’re producing, you’re putting things through preamps or you’re making decisions about sonic character. That, to both of us, has always been at the center point of what songwriting is. Like, I am a songwriter on guitar or banjo. I kind of can’t help it, you know?

Nick: Right. It’s just the vehicle that you’re using to get where you need to go. It’s funny that you mention that, using the tools. I was talking about this in another interview recently, but I have always viewed this whole process, up until this record actually, almost solely through a producer’s mindset. This was the first time, really, that I separated writing and recording and mixing. Back in my Ableton brat days, this used to be one gigantic soup, and there was really no end in sight that way. The process would just simmer and simmer until I somehow had to pull myself out from it and was like, “This is done.” But I think going through the process of writing on acoustic guitar and Wurlitzer and just thinking about, What is my relationship to the instrument that I am going to be playing on this? And then, and only then, going in and arranging it with a band and then recording — it seems like the most obvious thing in the world, but that’s just not how I used to work for a very long time. So I think that’s why I put that emphasis on, “Here is the instrument that I was sitting with…” It’s like, no writer that we love is talking about, “This is the Google Doc that I wrote the thing on…” 

Wendy: Maybe they’re thinking about it, even if they’re not talking about it.

Nick: Sure. 

Wendy: Something that I talk with a lot of my collaborators about is, I write everything in a spiral bound notebook. It’s the most decrepit thing by the end, and I read out of it on a music stand. I think that’s a really different thing than writing a song in the Notes app, which a lot of people do, and it’s no less legitimate. But I think it does make my work feel older than maybe it actually should. 

Nick: Yeah. That’s interesting.

Wendy: I wonder about it, because — maybe you share this — there’s something that when you’re thinking really hard about what you do or when you’re just listening to somebody say any word, there’s that moment where you’re like, Do I actually know what that word is? And I think that when I think about what a producer is, that’s an especially tough one for me where I’m like, I don’t really know what that is. I teach songwriting at The New School, and Richard, when I first got that job, was making a lot of jokes about me spinning the chair around and being like, “So, what is a song?” But I genuinely feel that confused about it. And so a lot of this questioning comes from the fact that, yes, you’re separating these roles from each other — you separate the mixing person from the songwriter, from the producer, and I think they’re very clear to you. But I think maybe they’re clear to you because in your earliest public incarnation as a musician, you had blended them so you knew how they were separated. And it’s funny that you started off the line of questioning of this conversation with being like, “each of these records feels like a blending of the very different things that we do,” when, for me, the further away I get from the initial recording and composition of Viewfinder, the more I’m like, “I make jazz songs.”

Nick: Yeah. You’re not really thinking about conjoining…

Wendy: Yeah, because form chooses itself. I really think that. I think when you’re saying, “This is a joining of my songwriting to my production,” it’s definitely true in the sense that you’ve been producing other people’s work for so long recently, but it’s all coming from the fact that it was at some point totally congealed as a process for you. And then now it’s actually separate.

Nick: Yeah, I think so. Being able to separate those things, at least from my view, is how I was able to arrive at a little bit more intention, or could actually think about what I was doing. I hear the work now, and I can hear the separate stages more concretely, as opposed to something that I was working on before.

Wendy: And isn’t that so interesting, if we’re thinking about this as a chronicle of a particular stage in your life? Because it’s so tempting for people to have this fixed narrative around a record as if it’s a definitive statement. People think that the success that they desire for a record is that it’s a definitive statement, as if that isn’t the most easily distrusted thing. Right? Like, can you trust anything less than a statement? Doubt is so much more giving and beautiful.

Nick: Yeah, it’s true.

Wendy: But also, the way that right now we’re thinking with the records that we made — but really the record you made — is it was a way to break apart what was once a very familiar process, that you had already broken apart to become the producer that you are. It’s kind of felt like you did a thing that I have done a lot, which is splitting yourself into guitar person and person who sings — like, “Here’s the feeling person who writes the originary song that’s trying to do a ‘Cloudbusting’ thing, and then here’s the person on top of it who’s creating the aesthetic and the landscape for it and calling together the people for the sessions for it and world building on a physical level.” And then there’s the mixing person, which is the polisher, or whatever the fuck you want to think of mixing as. But all of those things being different, it’s almost like none of them are you. There is no central thing except for what is heard from an external point of view of the thing that you’ve eventually made.

Nick: Yeah. Someone else’s ears.

Wendy: Yeah. Which is so cool. That’s why doubt is sexier, because it’s only definitive to somebody on the outside. Behind every statement is this weird internal… Sorry, I’m, like, bebopping now. I’m riffing. But it’s fun to think of.

Nick: No, no, this is true. I mean, this whole bifurcation thing, or this whole question of trying to separate the songwriter from the arranger and the producer — I’m sitting a lot with it. I’ve been spending time with Jimmy Webb’s book on songwriting.

Wendy: Tunesmith. Classic. 

Nick: Yeah, yeah. And he talks about this shift in perception, of how it used to be that before the singer-songwriter, a musician did the music and the lyricist did the words, and now that everybody does both, there’s more mediocrity. But then, I kind of feel like I’m exercising different parts of my brain within these things. But it was only really the writing of it where I was completely by myself. I mean, I arranged all of the band parts kind of in a socialized format with Steven [Rogers] and Lexi [Bodick] and Sarah [Galdes], and then your parts and Ben [Chapoteau-Katz]’s parts and Mari [Maurice]’s all came out of this first thought, best thought Talk Talk-ish approach that I’ve been obsessed with for a very long time.

Wendy: My question is going to sound maybe a little woo, but when you write songs, do you really feel like you’re alone? I don’t. There’s at least two you’s, if not the ghost of anyone who’s ever written a song who you like. Which sounds like pressure, but it’s actually just a conversation.

Nick: I do feel like I’m on my own island a lot of the time, and it’s as if I’m trying to send smoke signals, in a way. Because I’m trying to turn my life into just life when I’m in the process of writing.

Wendy: It’s doing something that’s like the most possible and the least possible at the same time.

Nick: Exactly. It’s nailing jello to a tree or something.

Wendy: [Laughs.] You love that.

Nick: I do. Let’s just put it on record. But, I don’t know, it’s like a form of dialectical behavioral therapy in a way — this idea of self-parenting to come down from whatever hardship that you’re facing. I think when I was writing these songs, it was very much like an active state of reflection of what I was going through and trying to zoom out the lens a little bit so as to take a look at things from a broader perspective, and also find connection within that. I kept editing some of these songs until I found more of a sense of universality, and not necessarily like I was imparting every single piece of myself within the thing.

Wendy: So you edited?

Nick: Yeah, I edited quite a bit. I mean, there were definitely some songs that I’d take a look at the first drafts and — like, say, “You Two,” I recently stumbled across an old voice memo of the first draft I wrote from that song, and it was far too close to home. It was like a look within my own diary. I hear what it became now, and I feel like it could be from anybody’s perspective. Creating that distance so that when people later ask you about the song, you can point to it and be like, “Everything that I need to tell you is right there, and then the rest is for my therapist or my close friends.”

Wendy: The assumption of what’s universal and not is so hard to determine and so personally determined. Because I mean, to me, knowing what I did about the situations around the songs you wrote, they still are kind of diaristic. But they’re not diaristic in this crass way that I hear a lot in younger songwriters now, where they read off everything they did that day — which, by the way, is a pretty amazing and time worn poetic technique, and that has its own meanings. Like, if you just wrote out a grocery list, there’s a fucking poem in that for sure. But, you know what I mean? There’s what you choose to bring in and what you choose to leave out. It just seems like appealing to a kind of universality always traps that vision of universality into its own snapshot, like its own fixed photograph of where you were at a certain time. 

I just finished that crazy William Maxwell book, and it’s about a small town in the early part of the 1900s, and a tragedy that happened there. Which is unrelatable, but the idea of the presumption that the emotions within that are universal organizes things that otherwise would have been details that are really timely. So that’s something that I have a lot of — I want to say “guilt,” but maybe shame is better — within my own songwriting, where I’m like, Am I just some dumb person who has a job that’s talking about unrelatable hardships to somebody? But actually, my goal — and I think it’s your goal, it sounds like, in your editing process — is to make whatever’s universal come in through the sincerity of intent rather than the specific social trappings. Which I think that’s at least what draws me to literature; I’m always trying to get to the core of what can be understood about any situation. Which is, I think, why I think doubt is cooler than fact.

Nick: Doubt is definitely cooler than fact. We walk the same line, in terms of that.

Wendy: It’s just so funny to think about what’s universal. And I think that that’s why sight is so useful to me — the impossibility of ever really fully knowing. Like, the ultimate stoner thought being, “Is blue always blue?” Dumb thoughts like that are so central to our understanding of perspective. 

Nick: The “Changing isn’t healing” line on “Lasik” — is that something that emerged only after you went through the motions of this surgery? Because I would argue even past records, the way that you’ve written there is this sort of haphazard on-off relationship between this idea of changing and healing. I think of “Slow Down,” for example, as something that you often as your friend need to tell yourself. But at the same time, that came from within you to be like, “OK, Wendy, slow down.”

Wendy: Well, you know, your internal editor is like another artist that you’re collaborating with. And I think that they usually know better than me — and they probably are me, but they’re something closer to source or spirit or whatever. Again, sounding so woo. But that line — I think I’ve told you this before, that when I write lyrics, I absolutely just black out and I don’t really know what I mean until I’ve finished the song. It’s more about how the words vibrate together and I don’t really think about what they mean. And then at the end, I figure it out. Which is why, for me, I’m so sensitive about songs being processing, because they literally are. By the end of that I’m like, Oh, yeah. And then I hate the idea of them being reduced to that, because the processing also bears my totally fraught relationship to music theory. Or to poetics of any kind. 

Nick: Totally. 

Wendy: But yeah, unfortunately I never think about lyrics. I mean, I think about them now, or I think about them separate from me. But when I’m writing about them, I have to be in void space. So when you said that you were editing stuff, I’m kind of fixating on it, because I’m like, How do you do that? Like, without losing the originary grain of the song?

Nick: I think it just comes from rehearsing them a bunch. I mean, I was sitting in this room knocking back the songs repeatedly. I think that only came out of repetition and trying to escape — which is kind of impossible — self-perception through repeated and repeated performance. And telling myself, through a form of exposure therapy I suppose, Do I actually believe in what I’m singing? And just being at pains to make sure.

Wendy: Yeah. It’s so funny, there’s so many things that I can still sing that I don’t believe in, and other things that I didn’t even think about when I wrote them that now just seem intolerably false to me. [Laughs.] 

Nick: Does it feel like there’s a disjunct now when you are singing them? I mean, I suppose you’re not really going too deep in your back catalog — the last few songs gigs that I’ve seen, it seems to be [newer material].

Wendy: Yeah, because I have these new songs and I want to learn how they feel to people. But yeah, it’s kind of like your repetition thing in the studio — I’m so hyper social when I’m in the mood that I’ll just be like, “Wanna hear this thing I wrote yesterday?” And people have to endure it because I’m the one on stage.

Nick: But I love receiving voice memos from you, especially when I’m on tour. Every time I get a voice memo from you, even if we are living our very separate lives, it does feel like a bit of a transmission. Going back to this whole question of the sonic photograph — it almost speaks more volumes than if we were just texting. It’s almost more pithy, to receive a song from you in that way. And then I’m able to reflect it back on whatever I’m working on or sitting with at the time.

Wendy: Well, I mean, it’s kind of back to something you said earlier in this conversation, that we recorded these records at the same studio and that we have really similar collaborators or time spans of when we were writing stuff — these things exist in a community. It’s something that I think is often narrativized; at best, somebody says, “Oh, yeah, this is the contemporary community of this or that or whatever,” but it absolutely is a little world. And I think it’s easier to have access to a world if it’s not simply through text. Even though I love reading. And I think when you write a song, it’s the most ultimate reflection of tone. Like, you know how when people are bitching about how texting is less emotional or less clear of a transmission than a phone call? It’s because in a phone call, you can alter the shape of the words. I mean, it’s amazing to talk about this within a Talkhouse interview—

Nick: Yeah, it’s funny.

Wendy: All of these things are so inflected because we both talk the way we talk, almost like the words are a score that has to be imagined through the crafting that we do unwittingly, like the form of our sentences as we improvise them.

Nick: Exactly. It makes me think of dating apps. There’s an option on Tinder of, “better in person.”

Wendy: I have only been on the apps for, like, a week of my life. Is that a button?

Nick: I forget if it’s Tinder or Hinge, but there’s a dropdown for communication style, and you can be like, “I’m a big texter,” or “I’m better in person.” 

Wendy: How do people know that? 

Nick: I’ve always bypassed that. I’m more of a hookup app guy. [Laughs.] But I’m glad that we are coming at this in terms of a conversation that will be transcribed as opposed to us just writing walls of text back and forth. I mean, god knows we’ve had many unhinged email threads when we’ve been making records together, of just references upon references. I think we’ve talked about, what, two or three books in this entire conversation? And that’s just a testament to, I think, real life conversation. Almost all of the cultural recall kind of disappears when you’re actually talking about the metaphysics of songwriting or whatever.

Wendy: Yeah. I mean, I feel like you get into that to understand what it feels like when someone else does it. But it’s like the central pain of my life, not being able to look outside myself in a true way to see what’s actually happening here. Maybe it’s not the central pain of my life — I’ve got other pains. But, you know. The reference is really cool in the sense that I like putting people on to stuff. But the older you get and the more connected with what it is you might actually want to say, and the surprise that’s inherent in trying to actually say something that’s true to you — you’re always going to be surprised by it if you’re genuinely receptive to any sort of perspective on your own life, you know? 

Nick: Yeah, yeah. At a certain point, it’s just like: tell me how your day was, and then tell me about the book.

Wendy: Yeah. I like shooting the shit.