In March 2022, Cassandra Jenkins was laid up with COVID at a Homewood Suites in Aurora, Illinois, drowning her sorrows in old episodes of Wayne’s World while her tour bus drove on without her. It was a terrible time to get sick. Not long before, the lifelong musician had been ready to give up music altogether—or at least jettison hopes of ever making a real career of it—when her second album, 2021’s An Overview on Phenomenal Nature, unexpectedly connected with fans and critics. Now, quarantined in her hotel room, her mind spinning with worst-case scenarios, she began writing a song to keep anxiety at bay. “You know I’m gonna keep at this thing if it kills me/And it kills me,” she sang, in an early version of what would eventually become “Aurora, IL,” one of the standouts from her new album, My Light, My Destroyer. Determination and its flip side, desperation, are nothing new in Jenkins’ work. (“Give yourself a few years… None of them like you, dear,” she sang wryly on her solo debut, Play Till You Win.) But here, they take on almost cosmic dimensions, providing the backdrop to some of her most revelatory—and carefully rendered—songwriting yet.
“Desperation,” in fact, is the sixth word we hear on the whole record, in an opening line in which Jenkins tells us, in no uncertain terms, just how desperate she is. She recounts an existential search, nonspecific yet unmistakably real. As she reaches a climax in her quest, she sings, “And I felt my arms rise light as feathers,” her alto warmly reassuring over a sweet approximation of Van Dyke Parks-esque ’60s pop. But everything gossamer suddenly turns hard and brittle: “And the clock hit me like a hammer/And my eyes rolled back like porcelain/And the breeze cooled me like aspirin/And I cried.” You can practically feel each one of the objects she invokes beneath your fingertips.
The album is peppered with similarly dazzling images and unexpected counterpoints. In the slippery heartland rock of “Aurora, IL,” her sickbed spell leads her gaze upward, to planes crisscrossing the sky, and then even higher, to a vision of William Shatner circling the planet, weightless in one of Elon Musk’s Space X rockets. Shatner weeps upon re-entry. Juxtaposed against this, she spins humdrum worry (“How long can I stare at the ceiling/Before it kills me?” goes the line in the final version) into a meditation on the precarity of the human condition.
She’s also just plain funny. Jenkins has always had a sneaky sense of humor—look no further than her fondness for unexplained Easter eggs. (After her debut album ended with “Halley,” a song about the comet, she slipped “Hailey,” a tribute to her friend Hailey Benton Gates, the actor/journalist/model, into the penultimate slot on An Overview on Phenomenal Nature; the new album closes with a lilting instrumental outro called “Hayley.”) On “Clams Casino,” a smoldering rave-up about loneliness inspired by her grandmother’s death, she contemplates leaving the hotel bar and driving out to the ocean, leading to an unexpected punchline. “I heard someone order the Clams Casino,” she sings. “I said, ‘Hey, what’s that?’ They said, ‘I dunno.’” It’s a joke so anticlimactic, you can almost imagine Stephen Wright intoning it in his trademark deadpan. Yet there’s tenderness here, too—the empathy of someone who knows what it feels like to be let down in a moment of need.
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