Cassandra Jenkins Wants You To Take Care Of Yourself
Cassandra Jenkins is ten minutes early to her interview. She makes sure she’s hydrated and checks that her air pods are working. Once the interview starts she is just as likely to be asking questions as answering them.
“Everyone has a story that is like extraordinary, every time I meet up with someone we do a recap” Jenkins, 37, says explaining her inquisitiveness.
“Cassandra is as interested in collecting stories as she is telling them,” from a glowing review of her new album An Overview On Phenomenal Nature on Pitchfork. The album features a blend of stories from both Jenkins herself as well as the stories of numerous strangers she interacts with. “I made my record before the Pandemic so I was in a fortunate position where I just had this thing to share,” Jenkins remarks of her record.
She is glowing with excitement for every opportunity to talk about her social tendencies. “I think I’m a very social human being, but I’m also very shy,” she replies after formulating her thoughts. “I kind of design my life so that I never have to text someone and make plans, I could always just show up and there would be people there like Cheers. So when it came down to actually having to make plans that was pretty devastating.”
Despite the strange social landscape of the past year Jenkins never stopped collecting stories. “Something crazy happened to every single person when your life is frozen in time. You’re going through such an unprecedented and scary thing, it’s very transformative.” Jenkins is such a natural at making these kinds of poignant observations she often forgets to attach her own experience to them. “I didn’t really have the set up for living a completely remote life.”
The conversation about routine pandemic dullness quickly shifted into Jenkins’ wonderfully romanticized vision of her native New York as a hub of human connection. “Just traversing a city full of people who are just so radically different from me and have radically different perspectives. In Central Park people just talk to each other in this very nonchalant, I’ll never see you again kind of way.” She sounds like she could keep going all day.
“There’s a sort of rhythm in the way that people in New York talk to each other that is very natural to me.” Her diction is that of someone discussing intangible concepts like spirituality and karma, but she lends her fantastical wordplay to very practical observations.
With social media feeds packed full of people taking on new hobbies Jenkins wasn’t shy about how she has been staying creative. “Birdwatching is incredibly creative for me, it’s like a totally different way of learning” she quickly replies. This revelation came with a piece of advice as well. “Get in on bird watching now, then when you’re a grandma one day you are gonna rule so hard.” Birdwatching wasn’t the only creative pursuit Jenkins was excited to mention, with yet another non-musical pastime in her back pocket. “I found that knitting was really helpful, I know that sounds basic and boring but there’s something very functional about it.”
Jenkins’ music has a versatility to it’s sound, with a blend of instrumentation and a variety of vocal performance styles that generally defy the conventions of any one genre. “Cassandra Jenkins’ songs coalesce out of fog and tenderness, her voice no more than a murmur as she confides exacting bits of poetry right into your ear,” described in a Dusted Magazine review. This meditative style is core to her approach to music. “I was in a song a day club, though it was more like spoken word expressions. I’m not a very fast songwriter but I like to write poetry and I love the kind of extemporaneous speech,” Jenkins says of her musical ambitions during the quarantine months.
Another major facet of the pandemic affecting masses of people was a struggle with mental health and self-care. From SPIN magazine, “Jenkins’ songs are like haikus, where plain words sort of stumble into the profound.” She has the exact same impact when she speaks and the topic of self-care gets her observations flowing more than any other. “I didn’t really have the set up for living a completely remote life. I got into little pockets of comfort, like going to the same workout group in the morning with my friends.” And though her interview was never interrupted by a furry friend Jenkins made a point to stress the value of having one. “I found that even just having a cat around was really helpful. Just having another living being in my presence felt right.”
According to the Statista Research Department almost everyone, but young people in particular, were far more likely to consume more music than usual in 2020. The often criticized music industry was in headlines for many reasons both good and bad in the last year. As far as Jenkins’ advice, she spoke directly to other artists navigating the landscape and stressed that they put themselves first. “A lot of my friends have like extreme guilt that they didn’t make a record this year.”
Over 50 thousand albums were registered with music conglomerate site Best Ever Albums in 2020, a major increase over previous years that indicates the music industry was working even harder than usual. Jenkins’ purer notion of creativity and emphasis on mental well being doesn’t quite align with that philosophy. “People are hard on themselves like ‘I didn’t make a double album this year’ and I’m just like you’re alive, that is an accomplishment.”
Jenkins had her own first hand experience with the pressure to create that the music industry places on its artists. “The week that my record came out a booking agent reached out to me and said ‘love the record, can’t wait for the next one’ and I was just like what.” The 4 year gap between her debut album Play Till You Win and its eventual follow-up Overview is a foreign concept from the rapid rate of turnover that many commercial artists are subjected to in the era of music streaming.
On the other side of the music industry is the often brutal world of touring. Surprisingly Jenkins is slightly more optimistic as she considers her upcoming plans. “Options are being presented to me, I’m just going to see where the blood is flowing. I think that’s really important.” Jenkins is no stranger to touring, though she is much more experienced playing with other bands and artists than playing her own music. “If somebody is asking me to go on tour my first question is like, are these people I want to be around all day every day for 4 weeks,” she laughs before clarifying, “the answer is almost always yes.”
The prospect of playing her own songs live clearly excites Jenkins, but there are nerves that come with it. “Right now I’m planning a lot of touring and I’m scared, I’m very scared.” Even in this pursuit she is sure to prioritize her own well being. “I want to limit myself to two weeks at a time, I haven’t done a month or two month tour in a long time. You can just run yourself into the ground playing shows every single night.”
Before moving on from the topic of playing shows, Jenkins delivers her most impassioned suggestion of the entire interview. “If I could campaign for anything it would be to start shows an hour earlier.” The notion causes Jenkins to come alive in a whole new way, providing some strong emphasis by talking with her hands and interrupting her own streams of thought with new suggestions. “I was joking with my booking agent like, who says a headliner needs to go on at 11pm? Who decides that? And his answer was kind of like, well you decide that but it might mean you get turned away from some things.” The motivation behind her crusade on late start times is clear. “I go to bed at 10pm, let’s just end the shows earlier so we are all in bed by 10pm.”
Cassandra Jenkins doesn’t have to pretend to be unaffected by the trappings of the music industry, she genuinely is. “We’re looking at our lives through the lens of this industry that is expecting constant media and content to serve short attention spans.” Her philosophy is to avoid approaching music as “a careerist” in an attempt to not ruin the thing she loves the most. “We have to be really aware and conscious of the fact that creativity and creative output is often confused with productivity in artists.” Her relentless insistence on the importance of self above all else is refreshing in an industry where the writings of commercialization are often so plain for all to see.
She is gentle, charming and refreshingly herself. Much like her music she forgoes the often phony grandeur so many have come to expect from a contemporary female musician, finding beauty and comedy in the little things.
“Just like birdwatching. I love these quote unquote geriatric activities. If I get good at them now then I’m going to be so great when I’m actually that age. Maybe I’ll get into bridge before it’s too late.”
