In March 2022, Cassandra Jenkins was laid up with COVID at a Homewood Suites in Aurora, Illinois, drowning her sorrows in previous episodes of Wayne’s World whereas her tour bus drove on with out her. It was a horrible time to get sick. Not lengthy earlier than, the lifelong musician had been prepared to surrender music altogether—or at the least jettison hopes of ever making an actual profession of it—when her second album, 2021’s An Overview on Phenomenal Nature, unexpectedly related with followers and critics. Now, quarantined in her resort room, her thoughts spinning with worst-case eventualities, she started writing a track to maintain nervousness at bay. “You already know I’m gonna preserve at this factor if it kills me/And it kills me,” she sang, in an early model of what would ultimately change into “Aurora, IL,” one of many standouts from her new album, My Mild, My Destroyer. Dedication and its flip facet, desperation, are nothing new in Jenkins’ work. (“Give your self just a few years… None of them such as you, expensive,” she sang wryly on her solo debut, Play Until You Win.) However right here, they tackle nearly cosmic dimensions, offering the backdrop to a few of her most revelatory—and punctiliously rendered—songwriting but.
“Desperation,” in actual fact, is the sixth phrase we hear on the entire report, in a gap line by which Jenkins tells us, in no unsure phrases, simply how determined she is. She recounts an existential search, nonspecific but unmistakably actual. As she reaches a climax in her quest, she sings, “And I felt my arms rise mild as feathers,” her alto warmly reassuring over a candy approximation of Van Dyke Parks-esque ’60s pop. However every part gossamer immediately turns laborious and brittle: “And the clock hit me like a hammer/And my eyes rolled again like porcelain/And the breeze cooled me like aspirin/And I cried.” You possibly can virtually really feel every one of many objects she invokes beneath your fingertips.
The album is peppered with equally dazzling photographs and surprising counterpoints. Within the slippery heartland rock of “Aurora, IL,” her sickbed spell leads her gaze upward, to planes crisscrossing the sky, after which even increased, to a imaginative and prescient of William Shatner circling the planet, weightless in one among Elon Musk’s House X rockets. Shatner weeps upon re-entry. Juxtaposed towards this, she spins humdrum fear (“How lengthy can I stare on the ceiling/Earlier than it kills me?” goes the road within the last model) right into a meditation on the precarity of the human situation.
She’s additionally simply plain humorous. Jenkins has at all times had a sneaky humorousness—look no additional than her fondness for unexplained Easter eggs. (After her debut album ended with “Halley,” a track concerning the comet, she slipped “Hailey,” a tribute to her good friend Hailey Benton Gates, the actor/journalist/mannequin, into the penultimate slot on An Overview on Phenomenal Nature; the brand new album closes with a lilting instrumental outro known as “Hayley.”) On “Clams On line casino,” a smoldering rave-up about loneliness impressed by her grandmother’s dying, she contemplates leaving the resort bar and driving out to the ocean, resulting in an surprising punchline. “I heard somebody order the Clams On line casino,” she sings. “I mentioned, ‘Hey, what’s that?’ They mentioned, ‘I dunno.’” It’s a joke so anticlimactic, you possibly can nearly think about Stephen Wright intoning it in his trademark deadpan. But there’s tenderness right here, too—the empathy of somebody who is aware of what it feels prefer to be let down in a second of want.
