Marty Isenberg's Wes Anderson Playlist

March 2nd at 7PM

“I’ve always resonated deeply with Wes Anderson’s movies,” muses
Isenberg. “There was something so familiar about the way he captured
the ache of adolescence.” He appreciated how Anderson’s cinematic
language always seemed to juxtapose our local vastness with our cosmic
tininess. Of course, Isenberg loved the off-kilter mixtape quality of the
soundtracks and how perfectly they mirrored the plot lines. So he set out
to put his own spin on songs by artists like David Bowie, and the Velvet
Underground but through the lexicon of jazz orchestration and
improvisation. The resulting album is a sonic storyboard, a soundtrack to
the wonder, loneliness, and nostalgia of life in the modern world.
Downbeat Magazine’s glowing review says “Movies for your ears are
somewhat cliched, but Isenberg has gone way beyond that. This is a
movie.”
The title track, “The Way I Feel Inside,” is an intimate portrait of
unrequited love, though Isenberg reads it more as a song about the
burning desire to be seen: “Should I try to hide / the way I feel inside.”
Before recording the album, he came out as queer and left his marriage
after ten years together. The album, like Anderson’s oeuvre as a whole,
portrays how acting on the fantasy of a different life leads you from loss
to liberation and eventually, acceptance. It’s an arc Isenberg knows
intimately. While Anderson’s films are not queer-coded, they were
nonetheless a secret decoder ring for his own experience as a newly-
divorced, queer jazz musician navigating life in Brooklyn.