Cassandra Jenkins on “My Light, My Destroyer”
Between Us and Nothingness
– by Jasper Willems
Cassandra Jenkins has lost track of time. She was completely caught up making the video for “Delphinium Blue”, which required her filming a peony flower for five hours straight (!), separated by three-second intervals. Jenkins does this to create a stop-motion effect to illustrate the peony’s natural movements, heightening the awareness that we’re indeed watching an entity that’s very much alive. It’s an arduous task to compress five hours of footage into a three-minute video — of course, Jenkins is acutely aware of the irony of such assiduous time management being the very cause for arriving late for her Zoom call with me.
The peonies are in full bloom this May. And as Jenkins exuberantly points out, each one seems to have a mind of its own, which made the filming process trickier than she had foreseen. “I would wake up in the middle of the night and resume filming. Eventually I got a flower that worked. But you never know. Like I asked Max, my boss at the flower store I worked at, which one of these flowers will open. He squeezed one and was like ‘Ehh, I don’t know!’ Each one is so different: some flowers would open up immediately and stay that way. Other flowers would just completely collapse. Some would open just a little bit, and as soon as I stopped filming them, they would open.”
Fortunately Cassandra Jenkins’s work is superhumanly attuned to life’s strange, often volatile twists of fate. Seemingly fragmented and random experiences feel like extramundane signs of bigger machinations at play. Which may be true, because in the end, the individual penning these songs remains the one constant. As vulnerable and sensitive as Jenkins’ free-form musical whimsies strike, her work is also malleable and resilient. ‘Don’t mistake my breaking open for broken,’ she sings on “Devotion” with a measured softness. Much like the bright pink flower she so diligently enshrines in the music video for “Delphinium Blue”, her new album My Light, My Destroyer became a quest for realignment with her own habitat, New York City.
“It really takes me wrestling with things and going off into a dark corner by myself, toiling and then coming back again. Kind of what I’m doing with this music video right now. I’m very much torturing myself, but at the end of it, I’ll be like, ‘Hmm, okay, not bad. I did it!’” Jenkins quips that earlier in the making process, the video was going to feature a blue flower, but that would be too obvious. Her mind quickly runs adrift when I remark that the color blue does come however up alot lyrically on My Light, My Destroyer.
“I think the color blue takes on many different forms. It’s an interesting color because I read that blue does not actually exist. It’s like a reflection. I can’t remember how this works, but when you see something that’s blue, it’s actually like a void of color or something, like an optical illusion.” On the cover of My Light, My Destroyer, we see Jenkins standing in front of a fading blue sky holding up a pink-hued canvas. In the pocket universe of Cassandra Jenkins, indeed, every gesture seems to fall into place in the most poetic way imaginable.
Jasper Willems (Under The Radar):Your music always makes listeners feel like they are experiencing these moments with you. It seems like a faucet of water, and you take a glass to fill it. You just kind of have to open it for the creativity to flow out. I don’t know, does that make any sense? And if so, isn’t it a bit maddening at times? Because going by that logic, literally anything you experience could become a song.
Cassandra Jenkins: That’s true. But I wish that it were as simple as turning a faucet on and off. I think in an ideal creative scenario, it is a constant flow of water. But in reality, the pipes get clogged, the faucet is leaking in places it shouldn’t. I would say it’s a very human thing to encounter, like blockage and periods of drought — if we’re using the analogy of water. I think it’s all about the process of clearing the way for that water to flow. And that is really the process of writing songs. And in writing songs, you’re keeping that channel open. But you know, it’s difficult to force water to flow when it’s not able to.
So I think for me, it’s a really layered process. I usually write something, and then I try not to think about it. I try to just let it all hit the page, and when I go back to it, I can see this box where I feel like something’s not quite accurate, truthful, or aligned with me. I can always feel it when there’s a misalignment in a song. That’s when I start to re-approach it and sing it and play it. It’s a process of finding those sticky snags in the song, looking at them more closely. And wondering what’s not truthful about this, what’s not aligned about this. And in investigating in that way, I start to get at what I’m really trying to say.
But it’s a real process. I think it’s about acknowledging my own shortcomings as a human. I think the best example of this is in “Tape and Tissue”. There’s a line in that song that says ‘I wish I could wish you well’. When I first wrote that line, the lyric was simply ‘I wish you well’. And every time I sang it, I was like, ‘That is bullshit! I don’t wish you well!’. Maybe one day I will, but right now, I don’t. I’m not the altruistic person that I want to be yet, and that’s okay, And I have to be at peace with that. And being at peace with that is ultimately, how I find peace in myself. To say, ‘I haven’t forgiven that person yet’. I’m not going to lie and say that I have for the sake of a song sounding good. So I could feel myself lying.
I think that’s a very clear example of me trying to uncover the meaning behind my own words. I’m always trying to call myself out and say, ‘What are you really trying to say? And you have to come at it from a very gentle and tender place. Because when you’re trying to uncover that stuff, you’re going to fight it, you’re going to resist it. And there’s a reason you’re trying to cover up the real stuff — you’re covering it up with defenses. And so I’m always trying to remove those defenses, and in order to do that, you have to approach it very gently.
I thought the “Devotion” is another example of that inherent sensitivity in your music. IT feels like you’re assessing yourself in that song: a summarization song about you, reflecting back to maybe before you released An Overview on Phenomenal Nature and how people perceive you afterwards. Obviously, you released your breakout record, so there was a lot of feedback coming in from your surroundings. Is “Devotion” a lightning rod for that a little bit?
That’s a really wonderful way of looking at it. I haven’t seen it that way, but stepping back now and being in this position of speaking with you and talking about my career as a whole, that makes a lot of sense. I think, especially the first, the opening line: it’s a way of saying, ‘I might look like I’m really dedicated to something, but really, I can’t exist without it.’ It comes from a place of survival. And that could be a lot of things you could be talking about. And it’s that same kind of humble self awareness of finding humility in all of my human shortcomings.
And yeah, I would say — if you could sum up that song in one word — it would just be transformation. There’s a transformation that occurs throughout that song. I think there’s a transformation that occurs throughout “Delphinium Blue” as well. And it’s rarely a very straightforward transformation with a happy ending and a bow tied around it. It’s usually a very complex, multifaceted sort of transformation that’s sort of bittersweet. Transformation is not necessarily a positive experience. It’s often a very painful one.
On your previous album, I felt that beautiful coalescence of obviously a dire time, during the pandemic. The way you write music and bring seemingly random things together in this beautiful, sort of cosmic way — I think a lot of people in isolation connected perhaps a bit too intensely to that. Obviously you started touring again right after the pandemic, when those infrastructures came racing back. I myself didn’t deal with that transition particularly well, and I’m not even a musician who tours all the time. Being this very sensitive, curious person, and all of a sudden, you’re in this touring infrastructure where you play cities but you don’t get to see them. Did that perhaps contribute to the melancholy of My Light, My Destroyer? You had to shift gears really quickly, and I wonder how you dealt with that.
Definitely. Some of my favorite songs were written by musicians on tour, and they’re usually pretty dark, bleak songs. So I’m just following that tradition. But yeah, I think you’re incredibly insightful to recognize that I am like a sensitive being, and the life of a touring musician does not really agree with my composition as a person. It actually very much disagrees with my composition. I get sick very easily, I’m basically sick on tour the whole time. Whether it’s mold poisoning or — I got COVID a couple times, and food poisoning, you name it.
You’re throwing yourself into all of these situations where you’re constantly exposed. The joke was, ‘you do it for the exposure’, but exposure at the time represented COVID exposure. Which I was exposed to as well. It’s like this very sad joke. But it was so true. So I’m trying to find balance in that life, and honestly, I’m nervous to be on tour again. Because it’s very draining for all my senses. I wish there were ways to make it less draining. I think if I had all the money in the world, I’d be comfortable. But I think that’s not really what I want either.
I haven’t figured out a way to do it in a way that allows me to have a life at home and a community at home. I look more and more to staying in the same place as the luxurious thing: that being the privilege. I think I grew up in a time when it seemed like jet setting and traveling is a privileged and exciting way of life. But the more I think about it, the more I want to be able to experience those beauties of everyday life. At home, with my community, with my family: those are the things that I really live for. So I’m trying to find balance and make sure that I can do both things well. I know that my life back home can suffer a little bit if I’m gone too long.
You draw such a beautiful parallel in the companion piece of the record: the instrumental “Shatner’s Theme” and then “Aurora, IL” . These melancholy feelings you have about touring echo William Shatner’s first reaction after going into space in Jeff Bezos’s rocketship. This man, who is so emblematic of wanderlust and ‘the beyond’, for a lack of a better word, literally described it as a “funeral” instead of a celebration. There’s a term for this specific kind of melancholy called The Overview Effect. Which is funny, since your previous album was called An Overview on Phenomenal Nature. So I’m wondering how these things resonated with you.
It resonated with me on a few levels. I think you’re reading that song really beautifully. I think that very much is a song about being on tour and struggling. I was struggling. I had COVID. I was in Aurora, Illinois, home of Wayne’s World. You know, Under The Radar knows how much I love Wayne’s World. I wrote that song while I was sick, back in 2022. I had my guitar, but it sat around. It wasn’t quite done. The second verse section that you’re talking about, I hadn’t figured out what it was about. That’s when I learned of this story about Jeff Bezos through a friend of mine. He told me about it, and I thought he was making it up. I thought he had written this. And I was like, ‘That’s a really good story, how did you think of that?’ And he was like, ‘Nope, it really happened!; and I started becoming obsessed with it. And obsessed with The Overview Effect. I was reading astronauts’ accounts of what it means to go to space and come back — the perspective it gives you on your life, and what it means to be in this place where nothing can survive. Nothing on this earth can survive out there.
So, yeah, I think when I was on tour — and just pretty burnt out — I was trying to get to every show and do everything. If you don’t play this show, everyone’s going to forget about you, and they’re never going to want you to play again. All those egoistic concerns, I succumb to them as well. And I wanted to identify that anxiety. ‘If they take my name off the marquee and I’m stuck here in Aurora, I’m gonna disappear.’ I felt like I was disappearing on top of already being so frustrated and being so sick. But finding comfort in zooming out and thinking ‘Oh, I’m just on this tiny speck in space’. That gives me so much comfort of just remembering that I’m nothing, and that’s the most freeing thing I could remember.
And thinking about William Shatner going to space really was a freeing mental space for me, just to remember how precious this life is. Not to worry about all those anxieties. One other note on Wayne’s World is, when you bring up Shatner as this frontier man. There’s this scene in Wayne’s World when Wayne and Garth are laying on top of the car and they’re looking up at the sky and they’re watching planes. That was what I was thinking about. There’s a line where a Garth says, ‘Sometimes I think I’ll go where no man has gone before, but I’ll probably stay in Aurora.’ And that was me. I was like, ‘I’m stuck here. I want to go to other places, but I’m just here.’ And that’s the best thing that I could be right now: to just be here.
That scene, it’s so good. He actually whistles the enterprise theme song! At the beginning of that scene, he’s whistling Star Trek. It blew my mind when I realized: ‘Oh my god, William Shatner, Garth, Aurora: it’s all connected, and my mind exploded. And that’s how we got Shatner’s theme and Molly Lewis whistling. It’s almost like that scene is at the beginning of the song. So I was imagining Molly Lewis kind of being the Garth in that situation, whistling my own theme song!
I feel that in your case, music is important, but not always the endgame. There’s maybe an overriding need to seek out certain places or people. There is this line in “Omakase” that struck a nerve: ‘I dreamt we were coyotes/ Licking the seeds off our teeth’. And I thought about your affinity with healing modalities. There’s this phenomenon I’m sure you know called zoo pharmacognosy, the scientific term for an animal’s self-medication with plantlife. It seems you also tap instinctually into the things that heal you, which is more than just you performing music.
Yeah, I mean, going back to “Delphinium Blue”, I worked at that flower shop because I was very blue. And being around flowers and talking to people every day, helping them with their problems — that helps me more than getting up on stage and singing my songs. I love to be of service to other people: helping other people brings me great joy. And that’s one of the many things that I think makes me feel whole: nourishing myself with good food. I work at the farmer’s market still and again, that’s a point of service. I’m helping people with their nutritious, organic microgreens every weekend. And you know, I’ll see someone familiar at the end of the line: ‘That’s the guy that wants his broccoli sprouts!’ And you know, I love that.
And I also love getting to feed myself like healthy, nutritious food. And the other part about that lyric: the coyotes are such an American icon to me, like a symbol of the American West. They’re these very scrappy animals, and I sort of identify with them to a certain extent. And there’s this strawberry here in the United States called an Omakase Berry, which is grown in a vertical lab, a vertical farm inside a greenhouse, essentially. They’re technically natural, but the environment is very artificial. And it’s like the wildest thing to me that we can create nature in that way. And so I liked the juxtaposition of this scrappy thing eating this like perfect strawberry that costs like $30 at Whole Foods.
Of course, Joni Mitchell opened up Hejira with “Coyote”, and that record also interrogates life on the road very affectingly. She wanted to quit the industry at several junctions as well. And you thought you were going to quit after An Overview came out. There are a lot of parallels here I feel.
That’s my favorite record.
It is? Well, I guess that makes sense.
I hadn’t thought of it though, but I keep seeing this clip across the algorithms of Instragra, this clip of Joni Mitchell singing that song to Bob Dylan, which is incredible. But yeah, of course Joni. Always Joni.
On “Only One”, you mention a ‘stick figure’ Sisyphus. And Sisyphus, obviously, was really to call it quits too. Until Zeus became super petty: ‘Fuck you, you’re gonna roll this big ass barrel up the mountain for all eternity’. Going back to what you said about the anxieties of touring, of not playing certain shows — I think “Only One” describes it with such a sense of humor: you captured this image of the stick figure Sisyphus at a massage parlor, which should be a place of healing. I think it nails how a lot of artists feel in the touring economy right on the head.
Yeah, it’s like its own hamster wheel, right? A hamster wheel is kind of similarly circular. I mean, I’ll say one thing: that whole image was given to me. I just observed it. I literally walked by. Okay, so I recreated this sign from a photograph. The photograph that you see on the single art is a picture that I took of the massage parlor down the street. It’s right next to the flower shop where I worked. It’s very local. And well, it’s very literal. But exactly what you’re noting, this sign is at this place of healing. I mean, hang on for one second. I recreated it. Let me get it for you. [Cassandra walks to the back of her living room, showing a faithful replica of the stick figure Sisyphus sign she made].
I literally traced it through projection, like a lot of my painter friends do a painting. But, yeah, it was both a sad and hilarious sign to me. I think some of the things that make me laugh the most are the things about suffering and melodrama. Those are the things that make me belly laugh– the things that hit me hardest, are the things that acknowledge a darkness, a suffering in the world. I think a lot of my music people associate it with healing modalities, and I did like, adding that little dash of massage in there. It was, again, the second verse that I couldn’t figure out. And then I remembered ‘Oh, I took that picture in 2020, during the darkest time in New York City ever’. That sign just was a gift from New York City, from the massage parlor. I actually go there regularly, they do a good massage. And a massage is really, it’s my favorite thing. If I could get a massage every day, oh, my god, I would.
A person I met recently gave me some tough love about that the other day. She told me over the phone, ‘Jasper you have no rituals, no wonder you get so worked up about stuff’. And she was right too. Even if it’s just something as simple as sitting in stillness for five minutes, repeating the same word over and over. Stuff like that can be spiritually cleansing.
I’m a big fan of that idea, and I’m a big fan of meditation. And I also like to joke, that if you are starting to meditate — which I hope that you will try and find your way with — you’re welcomed to a world of pain. It’s like you have to be in there. It’s the worst place on earth, until you figure out, like, ‘Oh no, it’s just like every other place on earth’. It’s all the same thing, but it can be a painful process, especially if you have a very active mind. Which I know that you do. I think creative minds, especially like just, it’s hard to be up there for extended periods of time. Whether you’re in the Watchtower or in the river floating by.
Do you believe that being somewhat of a late bloomer, having had this whole life before becoming a ‘household name’, has helped you gain valuable perspective, and embrace the march of your own beat, so to speak?
Yeah, I think so. I mean, I’m happy that I was older when I started to have a significant — I don’t know what to call it. A significant moment with my music, where it felt like people were hearing my voice for the first time. My literal voice, but more so my metaphorical voice, my writing voice. It hit me at a meaningful time when I had already sort of become disillusioned. And I think that disillusionment is a really good thing. It means that you’re not gripping the things in your life so tightly. You’re not gripping the good or the bad. I think I hit a point in my life where the waves weren’t going to rock me too hard in either direction. So if something good happens, I can just take it. If something bad happens, I know that the good is right on the other side of that.
So I just try not to be taken by the waves so much. And I think being older helps with that. Being more experienced really helps with that. I think I could have very easily gotten knocked down by good and bad waves when I was younger, when I still wanted it so badly. You know, the more tightly you grip onto something, the more intensely you’re really rocked around by it. Also, I realized how narrow our vision of what ‘indie rock success’ entails truly is. If all you judge yourself on is that one path, you’re gonna set yourself up for failure. There’s so much you can do in this life. Like, it’s way more interesting to me to find where my life is flowing and try to roll with it. To find where I feel the most free.
