Cassandra Jenkins Looks to a Higher Consciousness in "An Overview on Phenomenal Nature"
By Anna Wojnarowski
In her long-awaited sophomore album, Jenkins plays the long game. She takes her time digesting the interactions and fleeting experiences that make her life hers. The result is a reflection on the rarity of each other’s individual existence. An album just over thirty minutes with seven tracks, Jenkins creates a world of observant wonder with every note she’s given. Balancing her own perspective with the outlooks and words of people she comes across in her life, Jenkins has a holistic approach to dealing with life. In “New Bikini”, Warren the fisherman, friends in Norway, the sick Grey, and her own mother tell her “baby, go to the ocean” because “water, it cures everything.” Said in different ways by each character, the many meanings and tones of each chorus create a fully realized short story. Jenkins’s angelic voice is closely followed by quiet saxophone, piano, and light cymbals.
The theme of connection to nature is followed in the next track, “Hard Drive.” The magnum opus of this record, Jenkins opens with a sample of a quote spoken by a security guard from Queens: “So these are real things that happened / Where you can apply these, these, um, important concepts / And understand that / When we lose our connection to nature / We lose our spirit, our humanity, our sense of self.” The concept of nature is not a far-off entity to us, we are nature, but only if we allow ourselves to be vulnerable in it. Slowing down and taking that fact in is what ultimately ends the song. Her friend Perry asks Jenkins to “Take a deep breath / Count with me” after she finds out how hard of a year Jenkins has had. Two and a half minutes of counting takes up the rest of the song as a medley of electric guitar and saxophone cascades over it. The security guard’s voice comes back, muffled, overlaying the counting that Jenkins is trying so hard to concentrate on. Opening yourself up to the collectiveness of life follows into “Crosshairs”, where Jenkins and her high register is looking for a breath of fresh air in the eyes of someone else: “All I want is / To fall apart / In the arms of someone entirely strange to me / In your eyes / I see the panoply / Of the people inside me.” To her, the mystery of something new is the same as the familiarity of something old. The only thing that holds her back from this experience is the inevitability of time passing: “Empty space / Is my escape / It runs through me like a river / While time / Spits in my face / Turns us like stones into drifters.” Time hurts, and you can’t run away from it. However, dwelling in its wide expanse allows you to let go.
“Ambiguous Norway”, was penned after the untimely death of David Berman of Purple Mountains. Jenkins, who was supposed to open for him for his comeback tour in 2019, was left with nothing but grief when she heard the news that he had taken his own life. Named after a cartoon Berman drew, Jenkins explains that when she decided to go to Oslo to get away from the budding pain, she realized that she could never really get away from it: “There’s still something in the air / No matter where I go / You’re gone, you’re everywhere.” The collective nature of life is unavoidable; whether we seek to look for it or seek to steer clear of it. To be a part of the collective consciousness is to both experience a bounty of love and an abundance of loss. In “Michelangelo” Jenkins tries to move along as best she can with that thought in her back pocket: “I'm a three legged dog / Workin with what I got / & Part of me will always be / Looking for what I lost.” To live is to lose. But to exist is also to be a part of something far bigger than many can articulate. Jenkins has the rare ability to be one of the few.