Name: Cassandra Jenkins
Start: 2025-03-27T20:00:00-04:00
Location: Cat's Cradle

Cassandra Jenkins
Thursday, March 27
Doors: 7pm : Show: 8pm // $20
Cat’s Cradle Back Room
TICKETS AND INFO: https://www.etix.com/ticket/p/68797824/cassandra-jenkins-carrboro-cats-cradle-back-room
Like the night sky itself, the world of My Light, My Destroyer is always expanding. Cassandra Jenkins’ third full-length cracks open the promise of reaching the edge of the new, with a wider sonic palette than ever before — encompassing guitar-driven indie rock, new age, sophistipop, and jazz. At the center of it all is Jenkins’ curiosity towards the quarks and quasars that make up her universe, as she blends field recordings with poetic lyricism that is at turns allusive, humorous, devastating and confessional — an alchemical gesture that further deepens the richness of My Light, My Destroyer’s 13 songs.
Jenkins suffuses My Light, My Destroyer with an easy confidence, which betrays the simple truth that the road here was not without difficulty. Referring to the 2021 breakout An Overview on Phenomenal Nature as her “intended swan song,” she explains that she was prepared to hang it up when it came to touring and releasing her own music. “I was channeling what I knew in that moment — feeling lost,” Jenkins recalls. “When that record came out, and people started to respond to what I had written, my plans to quit were foiled in the most unexpected, heartening, and generous way. Ready or not, it reinvigorated me.”
Immediately upon finishing two years of touring An Overview, Jenkins approached recording a follow-up, only to find that capturing the creative spark while “running on fumes” was tough. “I was coming from a place of burn out and depletion, and in the months following the session, I struggled to accept that I didn’t like the record I had just made. It felt uninspired,” she confesses, “so I started over.” With her closest musical co-conspirators reassembled, and producer, engineer, and mixer Andrew Lappin (L’Rain, Slauson Malone 1) behind the board, Jenkins set the prior sessions aside and began constructing My Light, My Destroyer from its ashes: “When we listened back in the control room that first day, I could see a space on my record shelf start to open up, because the songs were finding their home in real time. That spark informed the blueprint for the rest of the album, and its completion was propelled by a newfound momentum.”
Even as My Light, My Destroyer was developed over the course of a year, some of these 13 songs have been incubating in Jenkins’ notebooks for years; seeds of the cavernous New Age pop of “Delphinium Blue,” for instance, date back to 2018. There were sonic reference points in her mind during the album’s creation: Tom Petty’s deceptively breezy folk-rock classicism, the work of songwriters like Annie Lennox and Neil Young, her “high school CD wallet” (Radiohead’s the Bends, the Breeders, PJ Harvey, and Pavement), and David Bowie’s final gesture Blackstar; along with lyrical influences from writers like Anne Carson, Maggie Nelson, Rebecca Solnit, and the ever present work of the late David Berman.