DOPAMINE HITS AND CONNECTIONS, that’s where Cassandra Jenkins found herself in part one of this interview, looking for the routes through her songwriting on, now, three albums of elegant and evocative albums that serve as a search for herself as much as anything.
“Along the way there’s a lot of anguish but when you make those connections that’s the reward,” she said then and it’s hard to argue, for isn’t that really what we as consumers of art are doing too? Getting those rolling dopamine hits as we make connections with a painting or a book or a song or a line. That’s what we are searching for all the time, those little highs of recognition and binding to something beyond us.
Take Jenkins’ own work. On her previous album, the marvellously named An Overview On Phenomenal Nature, this listener fell hard for Hard Drive, almost a piece of conceptual art with its mix of spoken word and mid-evening light jazz around an enigmatic character engaging with the world. It was so coolly emotional, or intellectually exposed without seemingly knowing it, that it was like watching someone trying to convince themselves rather than an audience.
On her new album, My Light, My Destroyer, the song Omakese is different – a fuller arrangement; sung, in a duet, more than spoken; more clearly revealing – but has a similar effect: emotionally flipped open in a contradiction, “my light, my destroyer”, and everything seems to open from there both within the song and within the album. It’s not necessarily easy to explain why, but for me at least you could call these two songs the trigger points on their respective albums.
“I can’t really put my finger on it either but one thing I can tell you about [Omakese] is I wrote it with Josh Kaufman, he also was my cowriter for Hard Drive, and so I think there is something about what we make together that has that thing, that alchemy,” says Jenkins, at home in New York, sitting in front of a hearth that even in early summer feels homely and welcoming.
“[Omakese] was one of the hardest songs to finish because I felt that it had something that I couldn’t figure out. It took me a very long time: I struggled; I changed the key a bunch of times – it was hard for me to sing; I wrote the chorus at least six or seven times, completely different choruses; I couldn’t crack it. But I knew there was something. Whatever you are responding to, I was responding to as well and I wanted to try and get it there without getting in the way.”
And this certainty/uncertainty with a song that came to define and title the album.
“I know, it’s funny. It was the most difficult song and I did feel at times it was destroying me, toiling in a certain amount of creative despair. But it had that guiding light to it,” she says. “That struggle that I went through with that song brought everything else with it, brought the whole process with it. It was sort of a catalyst and the last one to find its way in a lot of ways. I had to realise that I was trying too hard to wrestle with something that needed something very simple and very delicate. And it’s something I haven’t yet figured out how to play live, and I’m very excited to.”
It is an ambiguous song, quite different to some of the new record’s more direct and plain-speaking songs of desire and need, part of the struggle coming from the fact she was “trying to wrap my head around some bigger ideas” that spread from the cosmos to mythology.
“There is an element of it that feels romantic, and I brought that out by bringing in another vocalist. It has almost a ‘90s duet feeling to it I really enjoyed bringing into the world of the album,” explains Jenkins. “I will say ‘my light, my destroyer’ is from a very, very specific text and is one of the oldest texts that was translated by Anne Carson, and she is one of my favourite poets and writers. She writes a lot about the classics and Greek mythology and has translated a lot of Greek texts, and there is one text that talks about the myth of Cassandra and her relationship with Apollo.
“It was a very fraught relationship: essentially he was responsible for her downfall, her spiral into madness. And as she was essentially spiralling she has this monologue where she yells out to him and says his name seven times, and the seventh time she changes the inflection just slightly so that it actually is rooted in the same word to destroy, to utterly kill, to demolish. She changes it ever so slightly in order to say my god, my destroyer, and he is of course the god of light.”
Jenkins took it from the fabled to the reality of her own experience, recognising that “I was thinking about this myth, this myth that has followed me around my whole life, and trying to say I think I’m ready to get in there and talk about that”, whatever route that might take.
“I was fascinated by that idea of translation, that if you just change something ever so slightly it has this very different meaning. I was looking at that a lot on the album, these subtle translations, these subtle shifts, this very thin line that divides two things,” she says. “And so it did become an emblem for the album.
"I like that ambiguity of when you say to someone, oh you destroy me: it can be very romantic, it can be a comedian that just tears something open in you because they have the gravitas to be able to do that, this beautiful thing. It’s very intimate and very tender. I was trying to bring it all into one song that made me feel a lot of things.”
The madness that plagued Cassandra was from human frailties – not necessarily hers – intersecting with the indifference of gods. The Greeks knew it, the ancients in all cultures knew it, there’s only so much the human mind can take when mixing with the divine (real or imagined).
“And there’s only so much we can take at any given time,” Jenkins says. “I think that’s where you get to that Overview Effect [which she discussed in part one of this interview: the impact of the vastness, splendour and indescribable nature of space] where it seems that someone who shoots out the earth’s atmosphere get such a strong dose of it that it’s overwhelming.
“It’s almost like too much for us to comprehend. It’s more than we are built to comprehend at one time.”
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My Light, My Destroyer is out today.
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