Where Cassandra Jenkins Went Once the Laughter Stopped

There is a moment halfway into My Light, My Destroyer where a voice cuts in. It’s not Cassandra Jenkins’s voice, but her mother’s. “That’s Mars,” Sandy says. “Do you see where it’s really reddish?” “Yeah,” Cassandra replies, excitedly. “And that one is so bright—Venus, look at it! It’s crazy how bright that is,” Sandy continues. “What about that one?” Cassandra asks, pointing at a star. “That’s Betelgeuse,” her mother answers. “That’s part of Orion.” “Oh.” “It’s fun to look at the moon through binoculars.” We hear this fleeting, seemingly inconsequential conversation through Cassandra’s phone on a particularly clear New York night. There’s a medley of saxophone and trumpet running side-by-side with the two women, blinking along with the cosmos they’re both gazing up at. The intimacy resides in just how familiar it all sounds—Cassandra and Sandy’s voices illustrating what their eyes are doing and a very obvious, childlike sense of wonder shared between kin. You can tell they’ve shared this exact moment before. “I’m getting older, my parents are getting older,” Jenkins tells me, “and, as I get older, I get more weepy thinking about them not being here. I’m turning back into my childhood self, where I’m like, ‘Wait, what do you mean they’re not going to be here forever?’”

We met Sandy for the first time on “New Bikini” on An Overview on Phenomenal Nature three years ago, when her daughter sang about her. “She worried me and went out and bought me a new bikini,” Cassandra laments, “said, ‘Baby, go to the ocean. The water, it cures everything.’” It was good motherly advice then, to just let go, if only for a moment. Now on “Betelgeuse,” Sandy wants Cassandra to hold onto what bides before her. A stargazing session becomes a grounding cord holding together two hearts, a resting point between being sequestered in an Illinois hotel “looking for signs of life circling the parking lot” and waking up “in the heat of Phoenix” after dreaming of lovers licking seeds off each other’s teeth like coyotes.

“That was a night I was at home,” Jenkins says. “I could have been out at a show, but I decided to relax and be at home. There are a million moments like that, and I’m happy that I happened to be recording in that moment. I remember listening back to it and being like, ‘Oh, the ‘Betelgeuse’ comment sticks out to me. It’s kind of random.’ Then I was like, ‘Wait, but when things stick out, sometimes that’s actually what makes them so special.’ The more I listened to it, the more I realized I didn’t know anything about the star. I started doing research and I started learning more about the constellation, and then I realized, ‘Oh, because of this one moment, I now have a deep relationship with this little corner of the sky.’ If I were to do that every day, I might eventually know the constellations really well if I compile all these small, little moments. Associating stories with these places in the sky, I think it helps us have deeper connections. It gave me a deeper connection with my mom, and my mom gave me a deeper connection with the sky in that moment.”

I am rarely captivated these days. Sure, I hear dozens of perfect songs every month, hundreds every year. But there is such an absolute difference between acknowledging something as being “great” and listening to something that, with one swift kick or lullaby, changes how you consider, critique and consume music. Three years ago was the last time a song captivated me. It was Cassandra Jenkins’s 2021 opus “Hard Drive.” Just as “we’re gonna put your heart back together” healed some piece of me back then—mere months after I moved to a new city during a devastating pandemic with no job and a long-term relationship just hanging on by a thread—“Betelgeuse” glissaded into my life this spring when I needed it most, when I was about to leave that same city and return to my parents’ house. The song made me think of my own mother, an elementary teacher whose science classes were so life-affirming that she still has classmates asking her about the owl pellet dissections they performed more than a decade ago. “Betelgeuse” made me remember what it felt like to be small and to be curious with her, to be so consumed by the very same world we’ve yet to learn everything about.

“I live at home, I see my parents a lot,” Jenkins says. “It can be really easy to take a lot of those moments for granted. And, honestly, that moment didn’t feel any more significant than any other moment in my life at the time that I was recording it.” When making “Betelgeuse,” she was in a phase of recording while walking outside, picking up chatter with friends during Scrabble games or accidentally taping a brief conversation with a waiter at an Italian restaurant down the street from her home. Capturing what life exists around and within her is, as she calls it, “a lens that you put on.” “When I have that lens on,” she continues, “I’m experiencing my life differently. It could be like a distancing thing—a way to dissociate from your life by having something separating you—but I think it’s actually the opposite. It brings me closer and helps me connect in a way where I’m becoming an observer of my own life. I’m able to appreciate it in a unique way.”

Jenkins is no stranger to the ephemeral. Part of why “Hard Drive” remains so omnipresent is because of the wisdom it grants the rest of us just by listening to it. A friend explains how when “we lose our connection to nature, we lose our spirit, our humanity, our sense of self.” A security guard reckons with phenomenal nature, contending that “men have lost touch with the feminine.” At the Inn of the Seventh Ray in Topanga, a bookkeeper delivers a sermon on chakras, karma and the birth of the cosmos. A man named Darryl is teaching Jenkins how to drive; an old friend named Perry is at Lowell’s place. “The mind is just a hard drive,” Jenkins sings, as she chronicles not a full life, but a recent one—though the lines separating the two often blur.

The story is well-known now, how Jenkins was supposed to play in David Berman’s band for the inaugural Purple Mountains tour in 2019. On August 7th, three days before the first scheduled gig at Huichica East in Pine Plains, New York, Berman died by suicide. Immediately after his passing, disarmed and confused, Jenkins decamped to the quiet of Norway to process. Five years later, she remains somewhat reticent to talk about the brief time she spent with Berman and what unraveled within her afterwards. “I always want to respect and acknowledge the fact that I really didn’t know him at all,” she says. “I got to know his work during that period really well, because everyone was showing it to me and reading letters that he had written.” While sitting on a dock in Scandinavia, Jenkins’s friend Katie texted her a cartoon of Berman’s—one that read “Ambiguous Norway” at the top of it. It would become the title of one of Jenkins’s very best songs, where the “you’re gone, you’re everywhere” post-chorus still lingers. “I can’t tell you how happy I was to be playing in that band and how connected I felt with everyone there. Everything just started to make sense in my life,” she continues. “I quit my job at the flower shop to go be in this band. I was like, ‘Yes, I’m doing the thing I’ve always wanted.’”

An Overview on Phenomenal Nature was a record written “in complete crisis.” Jenkins was prepared to quit music altogether, having sold all of her equipment and sworn off touring with bands for good. “When David passed away so suddenly in the way that he did, even though I didn’t know him very well, I was truly, truly devastated. And, all of a sudden, nothing made sense,” she says. Jenkins claims that she made Phenomenal Nature because she “had agreed to do it,” having studio sessions with Josh Kaufman already marked down on the calendar. When she was opening for the Hold Steady’s Craig Finn, Jenkins was so obviously a mess. “I couldn’t play my old songs; they didn’t make sense after this extreme event,” she furthers. “I felt like I was phoning it in—and if I’m ever phoning it in, I really revolt against it. I was basically doing a stand-up comedy routine instead of playing my old songs.” In turn, Jenkins wrote brand new songs “off the cuff and from the heart.” “That was the only thing I knew at the time,” she confesses. “I was really lost and I was crying every day in the studio.”

Kaufman held the space for Jenkins and pulled the seven songs from An Overview on Phenomenal Nature out of her. “I was quitting,” she contends. “I didn’t care what anyone thought about it.” But Jenkins had no clue that making a record while under the impression it would be her last would become a gift. “I was so willing to just be myself in a way that I think I had never been before,” she says. “When people heard that and understood it, I couldn’t really believe it. I’d never had the courage to do that. For it to make sense and for people to understand me, I was really just so grateful.” Jenkins is transparent about her own privacy, that she puts herself and her vulnerability into her work in ways that she rarely engages with in conversations with the people around her. She uses the word “exposed” to describe her songwriting on Phenomenal Nature, but she quickly extends a measure of grace when talking about how sincerely it was welcomed. “I always feel like a little bit of an outsider,” she says, “so I just felt so warmed by it.”

Like “The Ramble” on An Overview of Phenomenal Nature, Jenkins re-engages with binaural recordings on My Light, My Destroyer. Interludes and snippets like “Music??,” “Attente Téléphonique” and “Hayley” occupy the record’s B-side next to “Petco,” “Tape and Tissue” and lead single “Only One,” a transient and transformative emergence of soul-stirring pop. It was her discovery of Janet Cardiff’s work—particularly her installations at the Cloisters and MoMA’s PS1 Museum—that sent Jenkins’s obsession with found sounds. Being a part-time florist and a working musician, she didn’t have access to the latest and greatest equipment—but she did find a set of Sennheiser headphones that look like AirPod knockoffs on sale online. “I started wearing them everywhere,” she says. “One cool thing about these headphones is they have noise cancelling. But on the same token, you can go in the other direction and actually amplify the sound around you. It essentially, when you put that setting on, puts the sound around you in this high-definition.” On the morning we speak, Jenkins has two more pairs of the Sennheisers delivered—as low demand has rendered them nearly obsolete, and she has no interest in using any other pair.

The Sennheisers allow Jenkins to throw herself into the world with “an even finer-tuned ear,” as if they’re a “magnifying glass on sound.” She blends into the background when wearing them, becoming a “real observer” in a way that isn’t intrusive while capturing candid moments on the street. “I always have an intention to not be sneaky about it or try to capture audio in a devious way,” she says. “It’s always with this curious, open mind.” Once upon a time, Jenkins had to use a Walkman to record—back when she was a self-proclaimed “jazz dropout” who never yearned for virtuosity in the ways most musicians do. “I studied the bass guitar with Fred, a guy who played with my dad in a jazz trio and is a music therapist,” she says. “And I loved it, but, when it came time to take a bass solo, I just totally clammed up. It didn’t interest me.” She wrote the chords of “Betelgeuse” to the audio recording of her mother that she captured, basing the time and spacing of the music around the pulse within the conversation. Jenkins wanted the song to sound like a Miles Davis composition, and she wanted to add a trumpet into the soundscape. My Light, My Destroyer co-producer Andrew Lappin suggested she add a saxophone, as if to make the brass and woodwind instruments “reflect the dialogue” between Jenkins and Sandy.

Part of the intimacy of Jenkins’s recordings comes through her desire to help give other people the lens that she so often wears—her framing of passing moments that allows us listeners the chance to, next time we’re alone in a hotel room or sitting with our moms, step into that perspective. “It’s easy to let these moments go by, but if you can just pause and give people attention, that’s the greatest gift you can give anyone in your life: attention,” she says. “If that’s any kind of after-effect of listening to my recordings, to be able to pay attention to things, then I’ve done my job. I feel like I need to remind myself that I’m not always able to be on at all times and absorb the world in the way that I want to with that almost-psychedelic lens of appreciation. But when I do, I get overwhelmed by how crazy our existence on Earth really is and how incredible my mom is and how unlikely it is that I get to just be sitting here in this moment, listening to her. But, again, that’s an unsustainable state to be in. I don’t think we have enough dopamine and oxytocin in our bodies to be in that state all the time.”

To make a home in one of Cassandra Jenkins’s albums is to ignore musical and human binaries. Themes come and go, motifs take different shapes across different tracks. Where the songs exist on the tracklist are not permanent. It’s all puzzling and cosmic and mythical, like how she calls a lover “my meteorite” or beckons us into her view of beauty with a verse like “All around me the narcissus bloom / I picture the sun hitting you / The air is filled / With their perfume.” Though Jenkins attempts to make timelines linear, the songs oscillate between the past and the present—existing like beautiful, meditative vessels for other people to put their minds into. “I always think about reading tarot when I’m thinking about poetry and writing songs,” she says. “I like the idea that you create completely different meanings from the same three things if you put them in a different order, like you do letters of the alphabet—rearranging things will give you a completely different result, or if you put them upside down. It’s like that Ed Ruscha quote, ‘“Wow” is “Mom”’ upside down. I’ll always laugh at that, and it’s funny in light of ‘Betelgeuse,’ where I’m just sitting there like, ‘Wow, Mom.’”

Just as “Betelgeuse” remains the ubiquitous lifeblood of My Light, My Destroyer, the thread between this album and An Overview on Phenomenal Nature thickens immediately. “I walk around alone, laughing in the street,” Jenkins sang three years ago on “Ambiguous Norway.” Cut to “Clams Casino,” and she is reflecting on that chapter of her life, when she was touring Phenomenal Nature and “looking for a silver lining.” “There’s no such thing as a silver lining when you’re talking about a tragic death,” Jenkins says. “You can’t find a silver lining there, no matter how hard you look. It’s always gonna be tragic.” It’s in her nature to create a linear narrative out of something—the known and the unknown. “I don’t wanna laugh alone anymore,” Jenkins sings now, before finding stability in the often-missed parts of ourselves we leave behind—if anything, it’s a very subtle way of saying “you’re not gonna find a silver lining here, you’re not gonna find it anytime soon” to herself like a prayer. “It doesn’t make sense,” she admits, “but a girl’s hair on a hotel bed is my way of saying ‘not today’ and, ultimately, finding peace with that.

Jenkins says she felt “emboldened” to use the word “poetry” on An Overview on Phenomenal Nature because, in many ways, she was singing about a poet she admired. “The poetry is not lost on me,” she lamented on “Ambiguous Norway,” a representation of her “existence on Earth.” “I’m out here and seeing new connections and it’s making me laugh,” Jenkins says. “And I’m like, ‘Does anyone else see this?’ No, it’s just me. That’s just what it is, and it’s that simple.” But on “Clams Casino,” a song about having gone through enough touring by herself and then reuniting with a band and remembering how happy she was to just be with other people, she questions whether or not the laughter—the kind that, when you’re alone, might make you cry—is fully for her or for everyone else.

“I think laughing alone in the street, at certain points, is beautiful and fun,” Jenkins says. “But, if you’re feeling isolated, it can get old. You need other people to be able to laugh at things, especially when they get tough. These moments are little strings that you can follow. They are what gets me through life; they are the thing that helps you laugh when you’re facing a difficult situation. It’s the punchline that allows you to laugh when things are going wrong, and when enough things go wrong and you’re alone for long enough, it’s hard to laugh with them anymore. And of course, you try.”

The phrase “poetry of life” has long followed Jenkins’s work. It helps that her binaural recordings sound like vignettes of a world growing, dying and being reborn all at once around her. She’s a practitioner of sitting somewhere long enough and experiencing life as it’s meant to unfold, and she eagerly tells me a recent story about how, while sitting in her car and eating Thai food alone, she watched a family move a fridge out of their house. “That was its own version of hilarious, and that’s its own poetry,” Jenkins says. “Then I noticed the car in front of me that was parked, it had a license plate that said ‘PEACE888’ and I was like, ‘That’s awesome.’ If you pause long enough and are willing to look, it’s literally right in front of you at all times.” What does Jenkins mean when she says “it”? Well, passersby.

“The poetry of everyday life is so multi-dimensional that it’s very difficult to put into words,” she says. “I think the thing that drives me crazy—and probably drives a lot of artists crazy—is trying to encapsulate the things that we feel from what we’re experiencing. I’m someone who can’t help but observe patterns in my life and make connections between things—and sometimes I’m making these connections in ways that no one else on Earth would appreciate. It’s the way that we converse with people. I find so much joy in conversing with people, and observing how I’m doing that. It’s all the time, everywhere.”

In a difficult and chaotic existence, finding connections with things and documenting patterns is Jenkins’s “way through.” “I think nature gives that to us, in the most obvious, science book kind of way—where we see the spiral recurring in everything around us,” she says. “And that’s inherent to this place and I think, on a chemical level, when you make those kinds of connections, it’s gonna result in a dopamine hit. It’s, quite literally, getting me through my day.” Too, Jenkins’s favorite poets (Mary Oliver, Anne Carson, Berman and comedian Tig Notaro) are writers and thinkers who help her “remember to stop and observe and pay attention,” small human moments too easily forgettable. As we riff with each other, she pauses to tell me that she’s watching two butterflies “dancing around a lilac tree” across the street from her home. “Oh, you’re being cartoonishly poetic,” she says. “Cut it out. But, it’s also just so beautiful. It’s one of my favorite fragrant flowers, and it’s spring and I get to sit here and talk to you and observe this at the same time.”

“Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?” Mary Oliver once wrote. It’s a great question without an answer, a dynamic you can find on all of Cassandra Jenkins’s records, especially now on songs like “Delphinium Blue” and “Omakase.” “I wander through the pet store asking, ‘What is my true nature?,’” she sings on “Petco.” “‘Can I take care of anything or anyone I’m eyeing?’” In art, Jenkins searches for things that stoke her curiosity—like the origins of her name, how Cassandra was a Trojan princess imbued with prophecies by the Greek god Apollo. She cites Carson’s work specifically, and her idea that “all language is trying to translate something.” “There is no pure translation of our experience,” Jenkins says. “To a certain extent, everything is some form of poetry. Everything’s an interpretation.” On “Attente Téléphonique,” she laments fading into the distance “to see the wind pass.” “I’m just a visitor by a gentle sun, trying to translate,” Jenkins sings in French. “And I will always try.”

On My Light, My Destroyer, Jenkins attempts to make her own translation of the “overview effect”—the idea that, when you see Earth from space and you’re on the other side of the planet’s atmosphere, you suddenly have an appreciation for just how fragile life really is. Astronauts have spoken often about when they return to Earth after expeditions. “There’s this overwhelming sense of appreciation for our life on Earth that is hard to do when you’re on it,” Jenkins says. “That’s what we’re struggling to do every day, how to appreciate our time here when it’s very easy to just have your blinders on and be in your own reality. To me, it’s a very wonderful example of what it is to zoom out and gain perspective on your life—and it’s something that we can’t all experience, unfortunately, because we can’t all go to space tomorrow. Maybe one day.” Scientists have tried to replicate the overview effect by using VR, but they’ve yet to succeed.

When she made An Overview of Phenomenal Nature, Jenkins didn’t know what the overview effect was. It wasn’t until her dear friend and collaborator, Gideon Jacobs, introduced her to the idea when he told her about the story of William Shatner being “the oldest man sent to space” by Jeff Bezos. “He told me the story,” she explains. “He said, ‘I’m thinking about writing a piece about when Jeff Bezos sent Shatner to space.’ I was like, ‘Wow, what an insane idea. How did you think of that?’ He’s like, ‘What do you mean?’ I said, ‘That’s a wild idea for a story.’ He’s like, ‘No, no, that really happened in 2021.’ I thought he was making it up. I hadn’t heard the story. It was just one of those stranger than fiction moments, and it set me off on a whole path of obsession.” Jenkins was stunned by Shatner’s account of grief in space, which he recalls in his book Boldly Go.

“He talks about how thin the Earth’s atmosphere is and just how habitable this place is when it exists in an incredibly uninhabitable universe—he becomes aware of the vastness of space and just what a vacuum of nothingness it is out there,” she says. “He had somewhat of a mental crisis when he came back down, and that crisis just makes a lot of sense to me. What do you do with that information? It seems like his mind was opened to an extent that it was hard to recalibrate when he got back. If I could micro-dose the overview effect every day that would help me to live a better life. I think, ultimately, Shatner kind of suggests that, too. There’s an amazing clip of him coming down and Jeff Bezos welcoming him and spraying champagne everywhere and Shatner is literally in tears, just unable to process what had just happened. There’s this incongruence between the two messages being communicated there: Bezos was proud of his accomplishment and Shatner was just having a mental breakdown.”

Jacobs, according to Jenkins, knew that Shatner’s story would blow her mind (“He knew what to feed me,” she laughs), and their conversation turned into them writing a space opera about it together. Part of the score is on My Light, My Destroyer, on “Shatner’s Theme,” and there’s a script finished and a band (aptly named the Overview Orchestra) enlisted and ready to go. The connection to Star Trek continues on “Aurora, IL,” a song that is secretly about Wayne’s World. “I’ve been haunted by that movie ever since I was a kid,” Jenkins says, “because of that time that I grew up in. I’m just a little bit older than the movie, and people would always say “and her name was Cassandra.” While touring An Overview on Phenomenal Nature, Jenkins found herself left alone in a hotel room in Aurora. “I was stuck there and I was really annoyed about it,” she furthers. “And then someone was like, ‘Well, you’re in the home of Wayne’s World.’ And then, suddenly, it helps me embrace my weird, five-day chapter there.”

Jenkins’s favorite scene from Wayne’s World is my favorite scene from Wayne’s World: When Garth and Wayne are laying on the hood of Wayne’s AMC Pacer and waiting for an airplane to fly low over them (“I watch planes fly over the city, caught in space-time, nowhere to be”). Garth whistles a tune, and it’s the Star Trek theme song. “Aurora, IL” already contained a lyric about Shatner in it (“A billionaire in Texas built a rocket ship to send the oldest man in space up, up on a pleasure trip,” she sings. “And when he came down crying on the local news, he couldn’t stop talking about the color blue”), the convergence of Captain Kirk and Garth Algar in the City of Lights felt especially cosmic. “That was one of those moments where I was like, ‘This is writing itself. I have nothing to do with this.’ It’s actually kind of creeply. It’s a little too much,” Jenkins laughs.

Ever the hyper-fixated songwriter and researcher, she wanted someone to whistle the Star Trek theme song on “Shatner’s Theme.” Who better to call than one of the greatest whistlers in the world, Molly Lewis? “I chased Molly down and wrote an email,” Jenkins says. “I was like, ‘Can you please whistle this theme song that I wrote for the space opera I’m working on about William Shatner going to space?’ And, sure enough, she sent me a voice memo from her hotel room in Paris whistling the theme song that I’d written for the Overview Orchestra. When I got that, I was like, ‘I received the thing I was chasing.’”

My Light, My Destroyer is an album full of portals—to the glow of a single candle through blinds, to the clouds, to an air filled with daffodil perfume, to waking up in the heat of Phoenix, to pet stores, to massage parlow window glass, to the other side. It’s an album full of trying—to be less alone, to stand in place and observe, to make things last. The record begins and ends at dawn, and there’s a symmetry indicative of time and the group who collaborated together within those seconds: Rob Moose, Spencer Zahn, Meg Duffy, Adam Brisbin, Kosta Galanopolos, Isaac Eiger, Molly Lewis, Jesse McGinty, Michael Coleman, El Kempner, Katie Von Schleicher. There are many more names, all of which draw from different, personable sources of styles—and My Light, My Destroyer is the language where the creative spirit finds peace. “That Brian Eno quote about ‘something’s never finished, you just abandon it’—it’s a really comforting thing,” Jenkins says. “A record is never done, you just go on tour—which is basically just saying, ‘Yeah, you gotta keep moving.’”

And for five years now, Jenkins has remained nomadic—caught in a bardo between the still-omnipresent phrasings of David Berman and the euphoria of a musical life still poking out through the seams of her own journey. The gratitude and confusion persists, too. “There’s no landing pad, no conclusion to draw from it,” she says. “I’m just continuing through space and doing the best I can with all the information and data given. A lot of what I’m learning is that I’m never going to necessarily find the answers that I’m looking for, but I’ll land somewhere else. Shoot for the moon, land amongst the stars; shoot for clarity and land in ambiguity.” I return to “Betelgeuse” time and time again, listening closely to not the words, but to the pauses and the streets humming in the background beyond Cassandra and Sandy’s voices. There are lifetimes growing and unfurling just outside of theirs. It’s busy and comforting all at once. “I just read that there was an asteroid the size of a skyscraper that, on Saturday night, went between the moon and the Earth,” Sandy says. “Did we see it?” Cassandra asks. “Somebody did,” her mother replies.

After our conversation, Jenkins texts me about the “observer effect.” It’s a double-slit experiment used to explain how the ways in which we see the world cause us to assume that a physical particle will only pass through one of the slits—that “every object we’ve ever observed at our human scale follows only one trajectory through space and time.” An album like My Light, My Destroyer corroborates such a theory, that “a conscious mind can directly affect reality.” Through Jenkins’s lens of the world, we hear laughter and put names to the faces of constellations. The stories are of one continuous, singular existence then translated by the rest of us to become congruous with those of our own. Somebody saw that asteroid and chose to tell someone else about it. There is harmony and grace, too, in knowing that somebody will hear My Light, My Destroyer and elect to do the same.

Watch Cassandra Jenkins’s Paste Session from 2017 below.

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Matt Mitchell is Paste’s music editor, reporting from their home in Northeast Ohio.