Emma Ayzenberg – Another Spring
Emma Ayzenberg’s first new song in two and a half years is called “Another Spring”, and that title is doing real work. She’s described writing it during a stretch of starting over again and again, sometimes by choice and sometimes not. The song doesn’t resolve that tension so much as sit inside it.
The arrangement backs her up well. Carly Bond’s electric guitar and Robert Shelton’s Farfisa give the track a warm, slightly worn texture, while Gregory Uhlmann and Eliza Petrosyan’s guitar work and Emily Elhaj’s bass keep things from ever getting too sparse. Griffin Goldsmith’s drums stay restrained throughout, which suits a song that’s more about waiting than arriving anywhere.
What got me is the flower image near the end. She sings about flowers that grew on their own one spring, and how she released them the same way she released someone she loved. It’s a strange thing to put side by side, tending something you didn’t plant against letting go of someone you did love, but it lands because the song’s already spent its first half admitting she knows someone “with my body alone, and not my head.” By the time she gets to “I’ll try again next year, with another spring”, it doesn’t read as resignation. It reads like someone who’s done this enough times to know the cycle will hold.
