FEATURE: Spotlight: Cassandra Jenkins

FEATURE:

Spotlight

Cassandra Jenkins

___________

ON this occasion…

I am spotlighting an artist I only turned onto relatively recently. The amazing Cassandra Jenkins is someone who has released one of the best albums of the year with An Overview on Phenomenal Nature. Her second studio album, it is a sublime Alternative Folk album that is dreamy and impressionistic. I am going to come to a couple of reviews for the album in a bit. Before that, it is worth sourcing a couple of interviews with the Brooklyn-born artist. In a detailed and brilliant interview with Pitchfork, we discover more about Jenkins’ path into music. She also talks about what it was like working with the late musician David Berman:

“As we lay in the snow, arms outstretched as if we got tired in the middle of making snow angels, Jenkins tells me about the author and filmmaker Miranda July’s idea of “everyday acting,” how you can make scenes out of ordinary moments if the people around you are willing to “go there” with you. For Jenkins, 36, this means adopting a persona when talking to a stranger in the grocery store, sporting binoculars around birders to signal that she’s one of them—or plopping in the snow in the middle of a crowded park. She gets a lot of joy from these performances because they allow her to step outside herself and dissolve into another space with a stranger.

The idea of decentering the self comes up again and again as a guiding principle behind Jenkins’ new psych-folk album, An Overview on Phenomenal Nature. On it, she acts as an ethnographer archiving quotidian sounds and conversations as much as a songwriter telling her own story. Album closer “The Ramble” transforms birdsong and footsteps recorded in the woodsy park sanctuary into a droning meditation. “Hailey” is a straightforward document of a friend’s Instagram post made tender by Jenkins’ cautious vocal delivery and the finger-plucked guitar and banjo notes. And centerpiece “Hard Drive” is a spoken word mantra that references people Jenkins interacted with in her day-to-day life: a security guard, bookkeeper, psychic, and driving instructor. Their idiosyncrasies, like the security guard’s feminism and the psychic’s reassurance, come together to form one consciousness—all the little pieces of herself that Jenkins finds in others.

Jenkins’ relationship with music has always been inextricably linked to her family. Her parents played cruise ships as part of a lounge act in the 1980s before raising Jenkins in an apartment on Manhattan’s Upper West Side. When Jenkins was a child, her dad bought a bus so their family band could drive around the country and perform at obscure folk festivals together. Up until the pandemic hit last year, her family regularly hosted touring musicians and held concerts in that same Manhattan home. It was at these shows that Jenkins played some of the songs on her new album for the first time.

After graduating from the Rhode Island School of Design in 2006, she bounced between day jobs and said yes to playing in every group she could including, but by no means limited to, a honky tonk bar band, a surf band, an emo band, and a synth-pop band. She went on her first tour in 2010 with an all-female bluegrass outfit called Uncle Earl and has since played with indie rock vets like Craig Finn and Eleanor Friedberger. “She has this calmness about her where you notice immediately that she’s really listening to you,” Friedberger says of Jenkins. “A lot of times in New York when you meet other musicians they’re always thinking of the next thing to say to impress you, but she’s just not like that at all.”

In the summer of 2019, Jenkins was preparing for a three-month tour as part of celebrated songwriter David Berman’s new band, Purple Mountains. But right before the trek was set to start, Berman took his own life. “We weren’t close friends, and I only knew him for four days, but I still had this incredibly unique experience of him,” Jenkins says, adding that she was profoundly impacted by his death. Though she was initially nervous to write about Berman, his spirit permeates Phenomenal Nature. On “Ambiguous Norway,” his memory surrounds her like fog, and on “New Bikini” she ruminates on the advice her friends gave her—“Baby, go jump in the ocean”—to cope with the loss.

Berman’s songs were full of darkness and vulnerability, lit up by wry observations about suburban kids, airport bars, and country clubs. He and Jenkins share a propensity to watch the world and insist on wonder as a guiding principle. Despite the loneliness and disappointment in their work, there’s a hopeful understanding that, as Berman sang on his 1998 song “People,” “Moments can be monuments to you/If your life is interesting and true.”

Soon after Berman died, Jenkins realized she had forgotten to cancel a flight to Norway that she had planned before agreeing to go on tour. When she noticed it was set to depart at the exact time her first Purple Mountains show was meant to start, she took it as a sign and went on the trip. While there, she met a Danish chef who told her that in Norway, clouds serve as proxies for mountains. The mountain reference, coupled with the fact that Berman’s middle name was Cloud, felt like an eerie coincidence, one that made her question the nature of existence itself. “I felt like all the borders of my experiences were just collapsing—it was this wink, and I was like, ‘Are you seeing this?’” she says, gesturing to a higher power above her head. “I was seeing connections like that everywhere in this really psychedelic way.”

Jenkins describes having “traveller eyes” after her trip to Norway. She obsessively recorded people and places for months, not knowing what she would do with the audio. She had written a whole set of songs, but found that they no longer felt resonant after a period of such meaningful change. She struggled the few times she tried to play them, recounting with a laugh one particularly jarring instance when she was opening for her friend Lola Kirke, the musician and actress known for role in Noah Baumbach’s Mistress America. “I ended up doing this workout routine and telling jokes about my dad,” Jenkins recalls. “At one point I remember getting off the stage and doing a conga line with the audience. Lola was in the line behind me and she asked, ‘What are you doing?’ I was like, ‘I’m having a crisis!’”

In October 2019, she booked time in the studio with producer, multi-instrumentalist, and songwriter Josh Kaufman, whose resume includes work with the Hold Steady and the National, as well as with Taylor Swift on her two recent folk-leaning albums. Jenkins showed up with voice memos, iPhone notes, and lyrics over the course of a week, and the pair pieced together six of the album’s seven tracks. “She ended up with something totally different than she had gone in looking for,” Kaufman says. “It takes a certain kind of person to not feel the obligation of their previous impulse.” Compared to the more structured and academic approach she took to making her debut album, 2017’s Play Till You Win, the process of putting Phenomenal Nature together was purposefully loose. She wanted to write songs with two or three chords that she could easily play with strangers or her family members.

Your album is named after an exhibition of Indian visual artist Mrinalini Mukherjee’s fantastical sculptures. How did her work influence the music?

In many ways the security guard that I talked to at the exhibition is my mascot of the record. I was struck by the fact that this woman had stopped me and said, “Let me give you an overview of this thing” when in fact it was a completely subjective monologue. I loved the gall of that lady to do that. I think a lot of times when someone is offering an overview of something, it is infused with their personality. Or when someone’s asking you a question, they’re revealing something about themselves.

You held day jobs digitally restoring gems at the Natural History Museum, working at a farmer’s market, and as a photographer. How have all these different gigs shaped how you approach being a musician?

I’ve never been a careerist, especially in music. It’s always been something I live and breathe with my family. Maybe it’s also a combination of a fear of failure, or not wanting to commit myself fully because I don’t want to ruin the thing that I enjoy most in life. It’s part of my mental health practice to make sure I’m always learning about other things and not getting absorbed in the narcissistic act of putting out my own music. This record is a great example. I really didn’t think anyone was gonna hear it. But I loved making it, and it really carried me through a difficult period in my life. Music hasn’t done that for me before in this way.

What was it like playing with David Berman?

My experience of him was really informed by the days in the wake of his passing, when I met so many people that played or corresponded with him. People have so many stories of him. I was so devastated that I didn’t get to know him better.

It’s intimidating to write about someone who is such a legend to so many people. When I joined [Purple Mountains] I was nervous because I was like, “Why am I here? There are so many people that can play this guitar part, why me?” But then, when I was standing next to him, I immediately was like, “Oh I get it, I know why I’m here.” He was so funny and open, and definitely struggling. I just was so excited to love this person. I knew that immediately. I could feel how deeply he felt the songs. He had a hard time getting through the [Silver Jews] song “The Wild Kindness,” but by the time we were done rehearsing, he had gotten through it without crying.

“The Ramble” is wordless and meditative, and a slightly different tone than the rest of the album. Why did you want to end the record with that song?

It was the last song to come into place. I wrote it in May 2020, a few months after the rest of the record, because I was spending a lot of time there. I actually wrote a guitar part and an audio guide to “The Ramble” but ended up taking out both because it felt too much like a directive. I wanted it to be a walk through the park with me but I wasn’t telling you where to go. You can just choose your own adventure.

When I wrote the song, I was feeling very mournful but also watching nature creep up everywhere. I wanted it to have that energy of the dandelion that pops up between the cracks of the sidewalk. That quality of moving forward. Through a lot of tragedy, nature has its way”.

I am eager to come to the way some critics assessed An Overview on Phenomenal Nature. I have listened to Jenkins’ debut album, Play Till You Win. Her follow-up is on another level. It is definitely one of the most beautiful records of 2021. Although it may not appear high in a lot of critics’ end-of-year polls, it is an album from a magnificent songwriter. In this interview with Under the Radar Mag, we find how An Overview on Phenomenal Nature deals quite openly and starkly with grief and loss:

“Cassandra Jenkins speaks about her latest album, An Overview on Phenomenal Nature, while packing up her car in Upstate New York. After our conversation, she will drive back to the city to get her first dose of the COVID-19 vaccine. On the album’s masterful track “Hard Drive,” listeners sit in the backseat of a car while Jenkins receives driving lessons from her instructor Darryl: “Speeding up the west side, changing lanes, he reminds me to leave room for grace,” Jenkins softly says in the track.

The making of An Overview on Phenomenal Nature, not unlike learning to drive, was an exercise in letting go and vulnerability. “If you ask Darryl, driving is basically relevant to everything. That’s our spoken metaphor,” Jenkins says. The album was recorded in six days with multi-instrumentalist and producer Josh Kaufman (of Bonny Light Horseman and Muzz) at his studio. She entered the studio with some words, ideas, and loose melodies with the goal of having rough demos by the end of her stay. Instead, Jenkins says that an album steadily started to shape like “molding things out of clay.”

“My last two releases [2017’s Play Till You Win and 2013’s EP] were songs that were finished and arranged and I had lots of goals for how they would sound,” Jenkins explains. “This record was the complete opposite. I had such a hectic schedule at the time and Josh is always busy, so the time limitation really forced me to get out of my head and not overthink things. A little bit would come along and then I’d look back at a song that night and I’d start to see it forming or we’d start to see it forming in the studio.”

For the majority of An Overview on Phenomenal Nature, its ambient and folk instrumentation drifts gently, which allows Jenkins’ lyrics to be the primary focus. Across the album, she sings about grief and falling apart. In 2019, Jenkins was preparing to go on tour with David Berman’s project Purple Mountains when Berman took his own life. “I have to tell you, I was really going through a crisis and capturing that on tape,” Jenkins admits. “That’s what I feel like this record is.”

But there are also moments of profound peace and songs that feel suffused by the light of her friendships. On “New Bikini,” Jenkins’ friends, and mother, encourage her to tap into water’s restorative powers. The sentiment echoes what Bonnie Tsui writes in her book Why We Swim: “We dare to jump so we can see something new. And sometimes we do it to recover a sense of what we once had.”

“I got cracked open by some of the hard stuff that I’ve experienced over the last few years,” Jenkins says. “It left no room for the gymnastics that we can do in our minds to not admit to certain behaviors that we aren’t proud of or to quiet the voices that really need to be heard because we don’t want to face them”.

The reviews for An Overview on Phenomenal Nature have been hugely positive. I feel that more people need to listen to Cassandra Jenkins’ latest album. This is what AllMusic noted about it in their review:

“Five years after her debut album, Cassandra Jenkins returns with Overview on Phenomenal Nature, a stunning work of impressionistic connections, contradictions, and observations all stitched together into a web of graceful dream folk. A native New Yorker with years of collaboration under her belt, Jenkins grew up within the East Coast folk community, singing and playing guitar in her family's string band before beginning a solo career in the mid-2010s. Along the way, she also cut her teeth as a session player, touring with Eleanor Friedberger, Lola Kirke, and Craig Finn. She also joined David Berman's Purple Mountains project and began rehearsing with them for a tour that was ultimately canceled after the singer's tragic death in 2019. Themes of loss and healing reverberate throughout the album, especially on the hushed "Ambiguous Norway" and the gorgeous standout "New Bikini," a pair of tracks in which Berman plays a significant role. The latter song's gentle sway and nods to the restorative power of water make it feel more palliative than mournful, a trait that could be applied to the album as a whole. From the outset, Jenkins conveys a soothing sense of intimacy that draws listeners into her small odysseys where museum guards wax philosophical on humanity's connection to nature ("Hard Drive") and the letting go can be found in the arms of a stranger ("Michelangelo"). Yet in spite of its intimacy, there's an expansive, wide-open quality to producer Josh Kaufman's arrangements which ripple with ambient synths, strings, and some stellar sax and flute work from ubiquitous local hero Stuart Bogie. With her tranquil voice and astute poetic sense, Jenkins flirts with melancholy, joy, sorrow, and wonder in a way that is both cerebral and touching. Her songwriting talent and willingness to experiment was already evident on 2017's Play 'til You Win, but the perfect balance of exploration and poignancy on Overview make it a significant step forward for her”.

To end up, there is another review that I want to mention. Pitchfork made some interesting observations when they sat down with An Overview on Phenomenal Nature:

“With the exception of “Michaelangelo,” a thematic overture that summons the understated wisdom of Aimee Mann, Jenkins composed the entire album in Kaufman’s studio over the span of a week. Plainspoken and intuitive, her writing zooms into a specific period in her life. In summer 2019, she was prepared to join David Berman on his comeback tour as Purple Mountains when, just before opening night, she received news that he had died by suicide. Throughout these songs, she guides us through the immediate aftermath—grief, helplessness, canceled flights—along with a more imagistic fog of loneliness and confusion.

While Jenkins’ early work offered a cozy spin on glammy Americana, here she and Kaufman carve a new atmosphere that feels particularly suited to this material. “Empty space is my escape,” she sings in “Crosshairs,” and her collaborators take these words as a kind of prescription, letting their melodies and rhythm materialize around her like constellations. Often, the cadence of her storytelling informs the sound of the band: Her search for enlightenment amid the depressive limbo of “New Bikini” casts them as a kind of ambient lounge act, while the solitary ghost story of “Ambiguous Norway” emits a heavenly campfire glow, like the ballads from Bon Iver rendered as sci-fi.

Jenkins’ goal as a writer is to remain present, receptive to the poetry of daily life. But anyone who has dabbled in meditation knows the other side of that pursuit: the anger of feeling stuck in your own head, the frustration at your own frustration, the fear that maybe you’ve veered too far off course to ever get centered again. Despite the lapping calm of “New Bikini,” with its luxurious saxophone accompaniment from Stuart Bogie, there is a storm brewing below the surface. In each chorus, Jenkins recalls a friend’s advice—“Baby, go get in the ocean/The water, it cures everything”—and reconsiders it with optimism, skepticism, or sarcasm. Over the course of the song, you can hear her outlook dissolve from peaceful, cosmic nothingness into the more void-like, everyday kind.

Despite the trauma in her subject matter, Jenkins’ writing summons a graceful, almost aspirational quality of lightness. She draws on the language of self-help—the mind-body connection, chakras, carving yourself from marble—but she also leaves room for pain to exist unresolved, unprocessed. She fills her music with community and friends, but she also understands that no one has it all figured out—least of all the people who claim to. This is why a song like “Crosshairs,” with its heartsick plea to “fall apart in the arms of someone entirely strange to me,” does not come across like rock bottom desperation: From Jenkins, this is a prayer, her belief that shared vulnerability can lead to its own kind of strength.

The album’s gravitational center, and her peak as a songwriter, is “Hard Drive.” Over a steady, slow-building arrangement, Jenkins recites each verse in her speaking voice, undistracted, letting us into four distinct scenes: an art exhibit, a bookshop, a driving lesson, and a friend’s birthday party. Here, Jenkins meets a psychic who offers a few words of hope and guides her through a breathing exercise. Somewhere along the way in Jenkins’ retelling, a transformation takes place. Singing in the second person, she becomes the psychic. The drums cycle uphill and the band crescendos toward a psychedelic sunrise of pedal steel and ringing, open, major chords: “We’re gonna put your heart back together,” she promises. “Are you ready?” Her voice glimmers with the confidence of someone who already knows the answer”.

Cassandra Jenkins is an artist that everyone should follow. Her songwriting digs deep and she has this voice and emotional pull that takes you directly into her music. I am going to follow her career and what comes next. It will be really interesting to see what arrives from Cassandras Jenkins…