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Listening to My Light, My Destroyer, by New York singer-songwriter Cassandra Jenkins, it’s hard to believe it nearly didn’t exist. The work isn’t just catchy, funny and exploratory in equal measure, it also sounds self-assured.
But as it turns out, Jenkins had intended her last album, An Overview on Phenomenal Nature, to be her swan song. In fact she wrote it with that intention.
When it was successful enough to become what’s called in the industry a ‘breakthrough’, she landed a record deal, and had to deliver a follow up.
Jenkins is very good with words. Hearing she was once an editorial assistant at The New Yorker makes a lot of sense. As an example, that song ‘Petco’ features the lyrics “Outside my window I saw two doves/ Wrapped up in filthy and true love/ The walls are blushing landlord pink/ The dishes pile up, my heart sinks”.
There are lines about staring into “the sideways gaze of a lizard”, and a “heart-shaped duct tape wallet”. Like many of these songs, it’s almost as enjoyable to read as it is to listen to.
A few tracks prior, ‘Omakase’ puts the album title in context, as she sings “My lover/ My light/ My destroyer/ My meteorite”. Knowing the pressure hanging over her, delivering a follow up to what was supposed to be her final release, it’s easy to think this love/ hate relationship might be about music itself.
When asked about leaving music, Jenkins is typically well-spoken, saying she was “going to quit that narrow hope for a lot of mystery, a lot of unknowns.”
She’ll cheerfully quote Proust and Samuel Beckett, and is such a deep thinker that finding albums difficult makes sense. She’s not one to phone it in.
Her parents were musical too, performing cover songs in New England Hotels, and you have to think that may have seemed discouraging too.
But My Light, My Destroyer constantly feels effortless. Some songs have an alt-country tinge, some hew close to the indie-pop purveyed by the likes of Lucy Dacus and Phoebe Bridgers, but some, like ‘Delphinium Blue’, resist categorisation, mixing fretless bass with a vocal synth, and, like ‘Omakase’, a spoken word section that feels thrilling.
Interestingly, Jenkins put as much emphasis on field-recording as songwriting, and the album has a series of brief tracks that mix found sounds with jazz and ambient influences.
One night she was speaking outside with her mother, who had been teaching science. She recorded their conversation, looking up at the sky, and the result, interwoven with brass and piano, is profound.
The mention of an asteroid in that track obviously chimes with the meteorite alluded to in this album’s title. My Light, My Destroyer is nothing if not well thought out, and aside from Cassandra Jenkins’ pure voice and compelling songcraft, you can always feel a keen intellect undergirding each track.
Even ‘Only One’, with its simple love song sentiment, contains a reference to Sisiphus, and to the movie Groundhog Day, when she sings about punching a clock in the face. There are moments like that throughout, so surprising you’re just happy she kept going.
