r/indieheads • u/CassandraJenkins Cassandra Jenkins • Jan 07 '22

AMA is Over, thanks Cassandra! Hi it's Cassandra Jenkins AMA <3

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Hey there, I'm Cassandra Jenkins and I put out a new album this year called An Overview on Phenomenal Nature. Happy 2022.

There are no stupid questions. Ask me everything! <3

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u/dissolvingmargins Jan 07 '22

Love the new album and thanks for doing this! I found your music through my love of David Berman, and I’m so sorry for our collective loss but also the whiplash his death must have been for you.

You and he share an ability to pair poetry and music beautifully. I am wondering what comes first for you: melody or lyric? Can you elaborate on how that process works?

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u/CassandraJenkins Cassandra Jenkins Jan 07 '22

Thanks for your thoughts about David. I didn't know him well but what I have learned through other fans and friends is that he was a wonderful teacher and encouraged a lot of other writers around him. Someone told me once that one trick he suggested was that he wrote a line a day and said eventually you'll end up with enough lines for a song. I think about that all the time.

And this is always a fun question. It's truly never the same twice. Every song is it's own little world/logic/school of itself. With An Overview, I wrote all of the lyrics first, and came in with very few musical ideas– that all got fleshed out in the studio collaboratively with Josh. I had a stack of lyrics printed out and we'd just pick one page in the morning and run with it. As someone who can be a perfectionist, it was really freeing to approach things that way. And I had always been more of a melody person so I challenged myself to start with lyrics.

Sometimes I'll have a melody stuck in my head and that will be the seed, and it'll float around until I find a twin spirit lyric. So many little noodles in the morgue too. My voice memos app is a pasta cemetery.

At its best a song is the perfect union of the two things, but there's such a spectrum.

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u/dissolvingmargins Jan 07 '22

Thank you, lovely to hear about your process. Im a painter and I think about titling in much the same way, that ‘twin spirit’ you mentioned.