Album review
In March 2022, while Cassandra Jenkins was touring behind her 2021 breakthrough An Overview On Phenomenal Nature, the New York singer-songwriter caught COVID and was forced to hole up at a Homewood Suites in Aurora, Illinois, watching Wayne’s World on loop. (She quickly returned to the stage and played a number of summer festivals, including Barcelona’s Primavera Sound, where I caught her breathtakingly intimate set.) An Overview was a record Jenkins wrote while fully prepared to quit music, and though she was energized by the ways in which the album resonated with listeners, inspiration for its follow-up did not always come easy. “You know I’m gonna keep at this thing if it kills me/ And it kills me,” she sang in her hotel room. The line did not end up on ‘Aurora, IL’, a standout on her astonishing new album My Light, My Destroyer, but the song does begin in similarly diaristic fashion: “A thousand miles from home/ Looking for signs of life/ Circling the parking lot.” Then, like so many of Jenkins’ songs, it blooms into something altogether different.
Inspiration did strike, as it often does, slowly but surely. It was both cosmic and earthly: returning to her community in New York, strolling the city, stargazing, working at a flower shop, and simply existing in conversation with works of art that have followed her through her entire life, Wayne’s World being one of them. Jenkins’ curiosity becomes a vessel through which to deepen her own emotions and understanding of self, playing with words and perspectives as if the subtlest twist might heal or surprise us. She immerses us in the sound of her environment as much as she observes and pulls us out of it, seeing poetry in this kind of translation, and translation as poetry. There’s so much to run through her filter – and in collaborating with a group of artists including Hand Habits’ Meg Duffy, Strange Ranger’s Isaac Eiger, Palehound’s El Kempner, Darkside’s Dave Harrington, Katie Von Schleicher, Rob Moose, Spencer Zahn, and Molly Lewis – that My Light, My Destroyer becomes endlessly rich, comforting, and vivifying, even as many of Jenkins’ confessions seem achingly solitary. “How long will this pain in my chest last?” she asks a stick-figure drawing of Sisyphus himself. Her wonder does not need an answer to persist, gentle in the knowledge that, surely, it won’t be longer than all this stuff that keeps us reveling.
Following our 2021 Artist Spotlight interview, we caught up with Cassandra Jenkins to talk about some of the inspirations behind My Light, My Destroyer, including Anne Carson, Wayne’s World, the Hayden Planetarium, Groundhog Day, Petco, and more.
Anne Carson
One of the things we talked about last time was the myth of Cassandra; at the time, you recommended the book Cassandra Speaks by Elizabeth Lesser. But I know the title of the new album comes from a passage in Anne Carson’s Cassandra Float On. What resonated with you about it?
I think that myth is something that has followed me around my whole life, and I’m always in conversation with it, whether it’s someone talking to me about it or just my own impressions. I really appreciate Anne Carson’s analysis of this one passage where Cassandra changes the inflection of Apollo’s name very slightly. The idea that there’s a very thin line between two completely different meanings if you change an inflection very slightly was something I thought a lot about while making this record, these thin lines between two very different states. The title itself is very much inspired by that. I think she kind of kick-started my whole venture into thinking about language and translation and music, how they all relate. Just to be in conversation with her work is really inspiring for me. It very much inspired the song ‘Omakase’ and the passage there: “My lover, my light, my destroyer, my meteorite.” It’s like a chant that I extrapolated from Carson’s words.
How do you see that conversation with Carson’s work unfolding in ‘Omakase’? Is it more of a direct or indirect thread?
I think I’m often responding to things around me. To say I’m in conversation with it is just to say I’m taking myself outside of my own experience and incorporating someone else’s view. It’s definitely not just a prompt or a homework assignment. I wanted to write something ambiguously romantic, that had that push-pull feeling. I wanted it to feel like the feeling I get when I see this one scene in the ‘90s Romeo and Juliet movie. There’s one scene and one song that makes me feel a certain way, and I started to feel that way while writing this song, and I wanted to take it there. The thing that Anne Carson is talking about is not necessarily romance; in some ways, it does involve love, because Apollo is courting Cassandra at one point. But I took it and brought it into my own story.
Petco
I wonder what a chain like Petco is called in Greece. In the UK, I know it’s Pets at Home. Do you have a chain you can identify?
Yeah, there’s one called Pet City.
Pet City? [laughs] That’s so funny. I love names like that, like Pet Town or Pet Universe. But Pet City is really good – it’s just a city occupied by animals, I guess. I remember one time when I was pressing my own vinyl, releasing my own record, I went to find vinyl sleeves, and it was called Vinyl Town, but the URL was Vinyl City, and the company name was Vinyl USA. It was very confusing. Anyway, I love those kinds of names, and Petco is particularly catchy. I think that’s why I wanted to use it, but I knew I didn’t want it to be in the song.
Pet stores in general, each one has its own vibe. I think Petco is particularly dark and difficult for me to be around because it just doesn’t feel like the animals there are very happy. It feels very strange to merchandise nature to begin with. You remove it so much from its environment that you have to buy all this gear to take care of it, because taking something out of its environment makes it very high maintenance as a result. You’re trying to recreate a biosphere for them that does not exist inside a New York City apartment. Same thing with house plants; when I worked at the flower shop, people would come in with a tropical plant and ask, “Why is it dying?” I’d be like, “Because you put it in front of an air conditioner in New York City.” That is not a place where it wants to live, and you don’t want your apartment to feel like a rainforest, I’m guessing. It’s just going to require so much care to try to allow something to thrive. That bizarreness kind of sent me into an existential spiral, and I wanted to express that and figure out what it really meant to me.
Another thing that struck me is the habitual nature of it; it wasn’t that you wandered in one time and had these existential thoughts about our true nature. You felt compelled to keep going back.
Yeah, it was an opportunity for me to analyze the idea of nature versus second nature; what is true to us versus what we do out of habit. There’s a Proust quote that I really love: “Habit is a second nature which prevents us from knowing the first, of which it has neither the cruelties nor the enchantments.” That hit me so hard. I was reflecting on the idea of filthy and true love – true as this enchantment and filthy as this cruelty, all captured in this wild moment of love between animals that is so instinctual. I was also thinking about the term “lizard brain” in armchair neuroscience. The lizard brain is supposed to be our most animalistic brain; I’ve heard people talk about it as being our fight-or-flight response. I think I like to explore these circumstances where I’m looking for answers in the wrong places and never really find them. There’s something deeply existential about that, like Waiting for Godo vibes. To look for love inside a pet store, knowing you won’t find it, but you keep going back because it keeps telling you: this is where you find companionship. It kind of underlines how impossible that situation is, when you look for it again and again, and it just reveals more disconnect versus connection.
I like those ambiguous, not-happy endings that leave you thinking rather than feeling like you can tie a bow around something. But ultimately, it’s kind of hopeful. It’s saying, “I just want to experience love.” And I think that’s all anyone really wants. There’s that tenderness to it that I try to keep intact because I don’t want to just leave you on a depressing note. I don’t to leave you in, like, the rubble of Pet City. I want to bring you back home and say, “We really just want love – we’re going about it the wrong way, but that’s all we really want.”
Groundhog Day
Groundhog Day, I’ve read, is in many ways a very Buddhist film, which I really love. It’s very Sisyphean. He wakes up every day, and it’s the same day, and he’s confronted with all the ways in which he’s fallen asleep in his life and he’s not really living in the present moment. But when you take away the element of time being so linear, you’re suddenly freed from many of the hindrances we face every day and the comforts we seek from life. He’s forced to explore a lot of the ways in which he’s really not happy, and there’s a scene in the movie where he literally punches the clock because he’s so frustrated. He’s really at his wit’s end and hasn’t figured out how to get out of the loop; he hasn’t figured out what the loop is about yet. He’s just in the heart of his anguish. He punches the clock, destroys it, and it doesn’t fix anything. It just starts again the next day. His attempts at escaping through forced actions don’t work.
I very directly quoted that [in ‘Only One’] in describing that feeling, to “punch the clock in the face,” when you’re fed up with seeing the same sunrise every day and with your own mind state. He’s really caught in his own mind state, and he’s gonna be caught in it until he changes the way he operates in his life. It’s a call to action in many ways. It seems that this Groundhog’s Day effect feels like a punishment to him, but it’s actually showing him the way – the middle way. I’m using a lot of Dharma verbiage, but it’s really pointing him to the path, even though it feels like suffering. He’s the one making it suffering. I think when you look at Sisyphus, it’s the same thing.
Local massage parlor
The massage parlor was just in my neighborhood. I walked by, saw that sign, and it looked so funny to me because it was so sad. All I felt in that moment was sadness and despair. And to see it illustrated in this way by a complete stranger inside a business setting made me pause. It made me laugh because it felt so dramatic in such a simple stick-figure way. I’m used to seeing stick figures in front of a bathroom or on a train door, but to see them illustrating an ancient myth in this context threw me off my feet. I thought about it forever. For years, I saw it as someone expressing their despair; I’m not exactly sure what they were trying to express, but it seemed like it was expressing suffering, because we were all suffering a lot at that moment. But because I wrote about it and began analyzing it, I began to understand it as a message of hope. I didn’t see it – I was too in my own way. But it was a message of hope. It was saying, “Yeah, life is going to be endless suffering until you start to see the beauty in every day without concern for the ways in which you’re getting in your own way.” It took me years to understand that it was actually a very hopeful message. It was a little too deep for me at first to get that.
The massage parlor is still there, and they still put up massage deals sometimes. [laughs] I love signage in New York City. There’s a lot of humanity in it. The thing that’s saddest to me is seeing some of more franchised places taking over a place like New York, which has always felt so human to me. I feel the sum of many, many people in that city. One thing I’ve always loved about it is the small businesses, especially immigrant small businesses, and the connection and humanity there. It’s part of what makes New York City what it is. And I think it’s still there, even though it is getting more franchised and built up. The heart of the city is still beating.
I was struck by that line – “Stick figure Sisyphus/ Behind massage parlor window glass” – but I wasn’t sure how literal it was.
Yeah, it’s very literal. A lot of my songs are. A lot of my songs are just taking things that I see and writing them down. I express myself through my observations and let them speak for me in a lot of ways. It was April or May of 2020, and all of New York was shut down. I just saw this thing that I haven’t stopped thinking about. You can see the image of it in the Spotify single art, it’s just a photo that I took with my iPhone. It’s also in the album liner notes.
Wayne’s World
There’s a Cassandra in Wayne’s World, so it’s another thing that’s followed me around for much of my life, and something I’ve never really known how to talk about. I got stuck in Aurora, Illinois, and I wrote the beginning of that song there. I was really sick; I had Covid. I was very upset and frustrated. A friend called me just to say, “Hey, you’re in the home of Wayne’s World,” because there’s a scene in Wayne’s World where they’re like, “This is Wayne’s World from Aurora, Illinois.” You hear them talk about it, and it’s referenced throughout the movie. Aurora is supposed to be kind of like the Chicago suburbs, a very distinct version of America. It’s very much not a major city, and it’s funny to me that it’s called Aurora, which is another word for dawn. Dawn became a theme on this record.
There’s a scene in Wayne’s World where one of their pastimes is they go to the airport and lay on top of their car to watch planes fly right overhead. You see their skin being blown back, that thing that happens when you blow a fan in your face. There’s another scene where they’re looking up at the stars and asking each other questions, and Garth says, “Sometimes I think I’ll boldly go where no man has gone before, but I’ll probably stay in Aurora.” I love that line because not only is he referencing Star Trek, which I’m also referencing in Aurora, but it’s also just a funny, slacker comment. It’s very high-low comedy, and it’s a funny moment that really cheered me up when I needed it. I would go and just watch the sky because I felt so trapped in my hotel room that being outside, looking at the clouds, and walking around this empty complex was the only thing that got me through feeling trapped in my hotel room.
Hayden Planetarium
It’s interesting how you reference the Overview Effect in the song ‘Aurora, IL’, the profound shift astronauts experience when they see Earth from space, and I was wondering whether something similar happens when you go to the planetarium for the first time.
Yeah, I think what they’ve found is it’s actually impossible to perfectly reproduce the conditions in which someone can experience this psychological state. They’ve tried using VR and all kinds of things, but I think it can really only happen if you go to space. But I like to think that going to the planetarium is like a microdose of that trip, a little taste of the Overview Effect. We just get a glimpse of it that’s very digestible. I think to send someone up into space is more than the human mind is really built to comprehend in that very short period of time. Going to the planetarium is a much more friendly, digestible thing for our minds to process, like, “Oh, we’re very small. This is a very vast universe, and my life is very inconsequential. But I’m also part of everything else.” It’s all of that mind-blowing stuff that I think people experience when they talk about the Overview Effect or when they’ve gone on psychedelic drugs or LSD, and you hear them just saying like, “I don’t know that words can explain.” I think you do experience a little bit of that at the planetarium.
I live very close to the Hayden Planetarium. I go there a lot. I haven’t been in therapy for almost a year now, and I feel like at one point I started group therapy by going to the planetarium. I found it very therapeutic. Very much like, I walk in stressed out and leave remembering that my problems, at the end of the day, are not the end of the world. Doing some stargazing in New York City sort of set me on a path to that.
Tell me about the listening event you did at the Lower East Side Girls Club Planetarium.
The planetarium show was amazing. I think my biggest sense of accomplishment comes from the fact that I got almost a hundred people inside a planetarium that probably wouldn’t have done that otherwise. I think they’re underutilized spaces. I’m much more curious about the sciences these days, and I want to share that with people. For me, it’s very, again, therapeutic. It’s very grounding to explore the link between art and science. That planetarium show was my first way of letting the world know that I’m interested in this and saying, like, “I’m open for business.” If you need me to compose some music for your planetarium show, I am your guy. And if you want an indie musician party at your planetarium, call 1-800-Cassandra-Jenkins. [laughs] I just really want to do more of this. There are planetariums all over the world, and I want to share the exultation that I’ve experienced from going to these shows. I’m so enthusiastic about it. I just think it’s a wonderful perspective we can use. I sort of wish that our presidential candidates could have an experience of the Overview Effect and then go into the election. I wonder how that would affect things. I also wonder if certain people are not susceptible to the Overview Effect.
Maggie Nelson
I talk a lot about the colour blue, and I think you can’t talk about the colour blue without talking about Maggie Nelson. Her book Bluets has had such an influence on a lot of artists. She wrote a piece of art that is so beautifully constructed and so beautifully explores the colour blue in all its depth, and she does it through so many means. She’s such a curious, exploratory artist in that way. There’s one line: “I’ve become a servant to my sadness.” She is, of course, drawing connections between blue and sadness, and the complexities of that emotion. At some point, someone was like, “You should call your song ‘Delphinium Blues’.” And I was like, “Absolutely not, that is not the point. I’m making a very conscious choice not to do that.”
I waited for a long time to read her book because I do experience depression and have chronically for a long time. I think the book really speaks to depression in a really beautiful way that’s very hard to do. I waited until I felt like I was in a good state to read it, but I would recommend it to anyone. “I’ve become a servant to my sadness” became a line that I responded to in ‘Delphinium Blue’, saying I’m a servant to these flowers, this place. It’s an act of service that I’m here doing this. I like flipping that idea on its head a little bit, twisting it to a deeper dimension; taking that idea, bringing it into this place, and the meaning changes with it. I just like playing with language with that way. Also, to pull her into that song is to pull her world into it as well; to make a reference like that is to say, “Yes, I am talking about this. [laughs] In case you’re wondering, I’m very aware of that book.” I talk about this in ‘Aurora’, as well, you hear, “I’m looking for blue skies.” That thin line, the thin blue line that Shatner talks about; the tiny blue dot effect. The colour blue is very omnipresent in the record.
This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity and length.
Cassandra Jenkins’ My Light, My Destroyer is out now via Dead Oceans.
