Foto-© Pooneh Ghana

Cassandra Jenkins veröffentlichte am 12. Juli ihr Album My Light, My Destroyer via Dead Oceans. Wenn man sich klangliche Anleihen ans Universum vorstellt, landet man bei dieser Platte. Aber auch inhaltlich verbergen sich viele Schichten in ihrer poetischen Sprache.

Wir haben Anfang Juli mit Jenkins per Zoom über ihr Album gesprochen. Der Entstehungsprozess reicht von einer Geschichte aus der Griechischen Mythologie über die Aufarbeitung von Vergangenem, das noch vor der weltweiten Pandemie feststecke über die Erkenntnis, dass man Freiheit auch zulassen muss. Wir erfahren, warum sie am Ende eigentlich schon das nächste Album geschrieben hat, warum eine Band zu leiten wie Fantasy Football ist und wie sie all die kleinen Aufnahmen aus ihrem Alltag in ihre Kunst einbaut. Nicht nur auf der Platte, sondern auch im Interview nimmt sie uns so mit auf ihre Reise durch Gedanken, Inspirationen und Learnings.

We’re here to talk about your album, My Light, My Destroyer. That is such a brutally antithetic title. What is it about?
It was inspired by one of my favorite authors. Her name is Anne Carson, and she’s a classicist. She writes about Greek mythology and is a translator and a scholar of ancient Greek. She has written about the myth of Cassandra. This is a myth that has been with me all my life. So I’ve been compelled to write about it, and I think I just became really obsessed with some of Anne Carson’s work. She writes about the relationship between Cassandra and Apollo. There’s a passage where Cassandra is descending into madness and she calls out Apollo’s name seven times, and the seventh time she changes the inflection slightly. That little inflection completely changes the meaning of his name to mean to destroy, to utterly kill, to demolish. I just loved that intersection of that ancient story with a new translation that revealed Cassandra’s wisdom in that moment; whether she was a hysterical woman or not, the world around her was maddening. I think about that story a lot. It’s still relevant today. That’s where the title came from. I wrote a lot about light and qualities of light on the record. It’s an age-old visual thing that writers like to play with. I was ready to go for the jugular on this record in a lot of ways. This was one of them.

The duality of the title comes up in a lot of the songs and also in the structure of the album. Did you have that in mind as a leitmotif of the album while you were writing it or did it come later?
The way I write is rarely an orderly process. When I’m able to say, I think this is done, I’m able to step back and figure out what it is. I think in some ways there are two types of creators, the creator who has a plan and a method and the creator who has absolutely no plan and figures it out later. I definitely fall into the latter category. When themes emerge in my songs it’s because I’m really interested in something and it just keeps coming up. I’m just looking for different ways to understand and look at the same idea. One of those ideas is to see that sometimes there’s a very thin line between two very different worlds, and sometimes they’re in opposition to each other. Sometimes there’s a duality, but there’s also something that unites them. It was exciting when I started to see that emerge, especially when it was usually just a thin layer of glass. It comes up all the time, but probably most clearly in a song like Aurora. You have the Earth’s atmosphere separating this fragile planet from the void of cold, dark space. You also have this thin line between a man who could be considered to be having a mental breakdown or experiencing some kind of nirvana. That character became a bit of a mascot for me and such a strange American mythology of modern times that encapsulates a lot about where we are in our culture today. I’m really fascinated by looking at these kinds of things from an anthropological standpoint and trying to analyze them from a non-judgmental space, but really looking at them and observing them.

The observation also includes snippets and sound bites collected sfrom your world. We can even hear your mother. Where do they come in? Do you collect them with their place in mind being part of your life, being an observer and then fitting them into the whole?
I surround myself with a cloud of things that I’m pulling from. When I’m recording, I’m not necessarily thinking that I’m going to use this later. I think that mentality can hurt an experience in a lot of ways. But I’m responding to something that feels like it has a vitality to it, and I’m not asking myself what I’m going to do with it later. I don’t like to mine my present experience for future use. But I do like to use a recording device as a lens, to say that I’m shifting my lens. I’m not only moving through this experience. I’m also creating a little distance so that I can observe it. You can think of it as dissociation, which can be a helpful defense mechanism, but you can also think of it as a way to take an everyday experience and shed light on it. That’s what I try to do when I pull out my little headphones, because I try to really listen. Sometimes a byproduct of that is that I’ll listen to it later and think, oh, I want to live with that moment again. I want to keep coming back to it. There’s something here that I need to keep listening to. When I feel that way about something, I just respond to it by continuing to listen to it and breaking it down and responding to it. It becomes like a prompt to me. A lot of my writing is very prompt based, where my experience is a prompt. Sometimes a writer like Anne Carson is a prompt, a news story is a prompt. So I just respond to those recordings like I would to anything else.

But it’s not always happy moments. How does it work for the sadder or more serious moments in life?
It could be the same compulsion of “I don’t understand this.” I try not to use strong words like trauma because I feel like they’re overused and they’ve lost their meaning at this point. But I do think that a traumatized brain will want to relive that moment over and over again to try to get out of it. That’s a mental process that I may reflect in my songwriting. It’s still got a hold on me. How do I loosen my grip on that experience and how do I get out of this loop that I’m in? I talk about the loop in a few different songs. I think only one of them might sound like it’s a happy song or a love song, but it’s a pretty dark song in a lot of ways. It’s about being stuck in a loop of thoughts and not being able to get out of it. I often have to process a lot of my experiences and I do that through metaphor. Metaphor is very prepared for songwriting. So when I’m in that headspace, it ends up being funneled back into a song. They feel like byproducts in a lot of ways.

And now you’re stuck in a loop of playing them.
I know, oh my God.

You need to be careful which ones you publish, because if you want to leave the loop, that’s not the way to go.
Yeah, that’s so true. I really struggled with that on my last album. I am very conscious of never putting anything bitter in my music. I think there always has to be a sense of a twist or a lift. And I think releasing it is like shedding a skin that I haven’t been able to do. It’s an opportunity to let it all go.

I want to go back to the songwriting. You didn’t start with a blank canvas, you used songs or ideas that have been with you for a long time. How did you find the ones that felt right and put them together in a current state?
A good example of that is Larkspur Blue. I scribbled the first lyrics in my notebook six years ago, and it just floated around. It didn’t have a home. I tried many different outfits. They didn’t feel right. I think I recorded that song seven or eight times formally, not just demos, and it always felt wrong to me. There was this arrested development that happened to me, and probably a lot of other people, as I was processing things in 2018. And then 2020 comes along and all the stuff that you were thinking about processing has to be put aside because we have a global pandemic that you have to process now. So then you get to 2023, 2024, and I think I’m ready to revisit the things that were on hold. It took that long because there were ideas and emotions that I just couldn’t deal with. And with Delphinium Blue, I ended up recording a version of it in October. We mastered the record it in December. So a month before the record was going to be mastered, I went to Andrew Lappin and said, “Hey, I got this song. We weren’t going to put it on the record, but I think I finally found a home for it. Can we please just put it on? I don’t want to wait for a whole other record.” He said to me in the middle of the process, “I can see you. You’re already writing the next record. There’s things on this record where I can see you wanting to get past this one, but let’s just get this one done first.” So I was throwing things in at the last minute, but I had to get rid of that song. It’s been on me for so long. It needed to find a home.

You got caught up with the past already thinking about the future, and he was able to pick it to pick it up.
One of the most rewarding things about working with a producer is that kind of collaboration, where they can both encourage you and push you and challenge you and see things from an outsider’s perspective, but still be so in the weeds with you. It’s a very unique relationship and I feel very lucky to have been able to work with Andrew.

You worked with many people on this record, more people than ever before. How did that come along?
It didn’t start that way. The first iteration of the record was really just me and one other person. I really missed my friends. My isolation from the pandemic continued through my years of touring, because when I wasn’t on tour, I was in a protective state, trying not to get Covid so I wouldn’t miss my tour. It was a cycle like that for two years. I really missed everybody and I needed to play with my friends. Some of the people on the record I’ve known for over a decade. They played on my first EP in 2013. I just needed to come home to people I knew really well. Throughout my career, everyone has always done it out of friendship, out of a desire to make art. And finally I was able to say, “Hey, I can pay you your day rate now.” That felt so good. I’ve been waiting ten years to be able to actually pay my friends what they deserve. That was part of it. When people ask me what I do, I can say I’m a singer and songwriter. But before that I used to say I’m a bandleader. I put bands together. It’s a skill that I’ve worked on over the years just because I had to. I’d be playing in a band and then somebody else with a big career would come along and they’d be like, “Thank you very much. I’m gonna take the bass player now.” And I would just say, “Bye, see you when you get back.” Then they come back and they’ve got all these cool new skills and we keep playing together. It’s been like that for most of my adult life: watching my bandmates come and go, putting new bands together, traveling, putting a band together in a foreign country. So for this record, I exercised that in a very short period of time. A lot of the live tracking we did very quickly. It was like, “Who’s around? Can we get this studio?” It’s like fantasy football. I have all my players in my head and I know what they’re really good at. And I want to bring them in. Sometimes you get somebody who’s really good at something and I put them over here to play a different position and something magical happens. My brain finds a lot of satisfaction in putting bands together and figuring out how people play off each other and how to make a song come alive through the years and years of experience that these players have.

When I first listened to the album, I was struck by this sonic landscape that felt supernatural. How is that even possible? It also felt very timeless. The sounds give you so many things to think about at the same time. The songs are very different. How did you find the right sounds for each song and how did you put it all together on an album that feels so complete but so different? I imagine it is like the puzzle you just described with the band members, but with the songs.
Very much so. Sequencing is something I really love to do, but it’s a big challenge. When I took it to a label and they tried to pick singles, nothing really represented the whole. It’s very hard to say that one of these things is going to be emblematic of a sound. I totally embraced that. My previous record was such a limited sonic palette because I also had a very limited amount of time, a very limited budget, a very limited crew of people. And so by nature it was going to sound very contained. Whereas this one, I just spent two years traveling and listening to all this new music. And then I was at home and I went to shows and I’m such a sponge. I’ve been exposed to so much new stuff. I had to reflect that in what I was creating and all my interests. I let myself follow the things that I was interested in and what I wanted to learn. Each record is like your own little university that you create for yourself. If you spend a year making it, you’re in the school of that record for that year. There are certain techniques throughout the record and as soon as I tell you, you’re just going to hear it: I really got into that drop. So if you have a measure four, you have the whole band drop out on the first beat of that measure. It’s all over the record because I really wanted to figure out how to use that and where it felt good and where it didn’t feel good. Even now, when I listen to the record, I go, “Oh, I should have put the drop here. That would have been really cool.” On Play Till You Win, which I made in 2015, I really got into diminished chords. Diminished chords are all over the record. I get into certain ideas and allow myself to follow them and see where it takes me.

What else did you learn in the school of My Light, My Destroyer? What is your takeaway from the album?
It’s something I can only reflect on now because I’ve had a few months since it was finished. What I’m realizing now is how much I needed to shift and pivot away from my previous record. I lived inside that record for a long time, longer than the average album cycle. Because there was a pandemic, we had to wait another year before we could tour, and so it just went on for years. That record was such a blessing to me. It gave me so much. But it also dealt with very, very heavy material. I was singing about it day in and day out. I didn’t realize how much it weighed on me. And that contributed to why touring was so grueling and why I really needed a break from it for a while. I learned about my own needs and what I really want to put out into the world and what I want to create and how to follow that. And just recognizing when my life is pointing me in directions that are helping me feel free versus the things that are starting to make me feel closed in or trapped because it’s all up to me how I want to run my life. I found myself feeling very trapped in certain things. It’s an act of listening. When do I feel free? How do I keep following this? Even when the things around me are telling me that I have to continue to live a certain way? How do I listen to what my life is trying to show me? That’s an abstract answer to that question, but I think that’s what I learned. And I learned a lot about writing lyrics. I embraced being a songwriter in a way that I never had before. I took a lot of pleasure in writing lyrics in a way that I never had before. I got better. I feel lucky to be doing this at my age when I feel like I have a little bit of control over it that I didn’t have when I was younger. It’s ongoing. It’s a lifelong pursuit and I look at it that way.

Thank you for the interview!

Cassandra Jenkins Tour:
10.11.24 Aalhaus, Hamburg
13.11.24 Silent Green, Berlin