Marty Isenberg's Wes Anderson Playlist

Doors at 7:00 | Show at 8:00

All ages welcome.

Free parking is available in the lot across the street until full.

“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.

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Host or Publisher Alberta Abbey