SLEEP? OVERRATED! Yeah, if only it were true – ask anyone trying to work on a little to none of it. But sleep, or more relevantly its absence, isn’t the end of the story for creativity – ask Cassandra Jenkins, an artist working on the line between folk and spoken word and electronics and indie pop. And a woman operating often enough on the line between conscious and unconscious states.
The day before we speak, while preparing for the New York-based Jenkins, I was almost crushed by fatigue, losing focus on the screen. I’d had two nights of broken, barely-counting-as-sleep sleep and as someone who has had insomnia for decades I thought I’d power through, this was nothing, but I just couldn’t function. And here I was listening to her sing of how “the clock hit me like a hammer”, facing the rising sun at what she calls “that seasick dawn”. You’re not helping Cassandra!
“The seasick dawn thing is actually a line from my friend Kristin [Andreassen]’s song called Seasick Dawn, and I heard it when I was probably 20 years old. And I’d experienced insomnia on and off for a while and hearing that, it just perfectly encapsulated how I felt when I would go through a sleepless night,” says Jenkins. “There’s a certain stomach ache I associate with it and sometimes if I’ve not slept or a slip maybe two hours, I get a little bit nauseous and greet the dawn with that sort of nausea that adds to the delirium of that state.”
At the beginning of the album, in the solid yet diaphanous, almost French pop Devotion, the clock hits her like a hammer; towards the end, in the woozy, ocean drift jazz of Only One, she punches the clock in the face, and they feel like the same moment from different levels of energy or confidence or delusion.
“It’s true,” she laughs. “It is sort of delusional, cartoonish and I definitely picture a cartoon clock. [The symmetry] I didn’t mean to do that; I think I have things that I go back to and images I’m obsessed with, and they are going to come up in different forms. It wasn’t until I stepped back and started to ask myself, okay what is this thing that I made?, that I start to see these things.”
I tell her that my experience of insomnia is that it is manageable until it isn’t, until it becomes the gateway to vulnerability that can end up as bouts of depression but also a kind of creative freedom at times. People like that become someone else for a while: raw, unformed momentarily, someone who might well say – as Jenkins sings – “Don’t mistake my breaking open for broken.” What do those circumstances mean, and what does it do, to her?
“It can be a drug of its own in a way,” concedes Jenkins. “I definitely don’t ever want to induce that state, but at a certain point is that idea of the second arrow. Like, if you are shot with an arrow you don’t want to shoot yourself with another, of being so upset about the first thing. Long story short, I think a lot of insomnia is driven by being so anxious that I’m not sleeping. And that’s just adding to the anguish that I’m in already. So these days, as much as I can, I just try to say okay, you’re not sleeping and that’s okay, just rest and do your best with it.”
Can that work?
“I do go in and out of struggling with it. And sleep paralysis is something that I experienced. I go in and out with these things,” she says. “It’s interesting, you’re mentioning the two songs where I was struggling with insomnia, and it is on either side of the album, and it frames the album. I didn’t realise this either, but they both are relating to the dawn and this liminal state, this Bardo, that exists every single day, twice a day, with twilight.
“Insomnia kinda leaves you in this Bardo as well, there we are conscious but maybe a little bit not at the same time and you are in between worlds. I realised early on I was interested in that period of day, that idea of floating and groundlessness.”
So there is something appealing about this vulnerable state, if you can manage it?
“That line that you mentioned, about being broken open, I was thinking a lot about that in the song Aurora, which is in the middle of the album, and aurora means dawn as well. So its placed throughout the album,” Jenkins says. “And I was thinking about William Shatner describing his experience of leaving the earth’s atmosphere and having a revelation that seems similar to what a lot of astronauts have experienced, that’s called the Overview Effect. It reveals this very fine line between Nirvana and a mental breakdown.
"I’m very interested in understanding that and looking at it and asking questions about. There are people who have similar accounts with psychedelics: difficult to describe experiences that really do dance on that very fine line between the two.”
Beyond the actual state of insomnia, in a place people get to with psychedelics as she says, or chanting or some other technique, that state is a place where artists can find themselves. Creatively you can be in that state and sometimes people strive to be in that state: not directly attached to reality or the moment, but not completely detached. Does she work in that state or is she more likely to work in a composed, controlled state afterwards?
“I think that ideally … People talk about the ‘flow state’ and that’s a real thing, really the ideal state to be in. I don’t try to access that, I don’t try to manipulate my mind state in order to get there, I don’t try to impose rules about how to get there. But I know what it feels like when I’m there.
“I think it’s a very natural state: it’s very chemical, all of the great chemical reactions that happen when we are in the flow state are like, dopamine, serotonin, oxytocin. All the good stuff. And I think my brain in particular tends to chase those things, and songwriting is like a very subtle version of a dopamine hit.”
In the perverse way of nature, the good stuff can be quite dangerous, too much of the good stuff especially. It can be, as Jenkins sings in Omakase, “my light, my destroyer”.
“This is something I think a lot about with addictions to social media and things like that: while we are scrolling to chase that dopamine and you can’t really get to the bottom of it. I think if we are expecting that kind of a dopamine hit from a songwriting session, we are going to discard everything we do. You’re not gonna get there,” she says. “If anything I try to – I don’t want to say a dopamine cleanse, because it sounds so Internet – I try to get some of the more stimulating things maybe out of my view for a little while. Instead of adding to it, I try to take things away so the more natural flow state can arrive, and I can actually feel it because I’m not totally desensitised at that point.”
That hit isn’t just dangerous to songwriters of course. Whole political movements, and some really awful social ones, are predicated on just that.
“One of the things that drives conspiracy theories is that connection you make between two things, and that connection is a huge dopamine hit. So, if you’re making connections, you are chasing that dopamine. I understand that very well,” Jenkins says. “I think I get that in very subtle ways from songwriting – ‘I’m building these connections!’ – and realising that one thing has to do with another that I’ve kinda grabbed from what feels like thin air, but it’s mysterious really, feels good.
“It feels really good. Along the way there’s a lot of anguish but when you make those connections that’s the reward.”
Cassandra Jenkins' My Light, My Destroyer is out July 12.
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