Cassandra Jenkins

Cassandra Jenkins shapes her songwriting with an intimate, impressionistic touch, letting keen observations merge fluidly into her mix of folk and expansive ambient pop. Growing up in New York City, she first entered music through the East Coast folk circuit as a member of her family’s band, then stepped out on her own in the mid-2010s. During the same period she joined several touring ensembles, supporting Eleanor Friedberger, Craig Finn, and Purple Mountains. Her own recordings took an increasingly experimental turn on the 2017 album Play Till You Win and the 2021 release Overview on Phenomenal Nature, where dream-pop and dusky indie-rock textures surfaced alongside her core sound. The latter project marked a breakthrough that led her to Dead Oceans and the 2024 album My Light, My Destroyer.

Raised in a musically active Manhattan household, Jenkins began singing and playing guitar early. By age twelve she was performing on the folk-festival circuit with her parents and two siblings in a family group devoted to Western swing, folk, and jazz. Regular house concerts and a lively creative scene at the family’s Upper West Side residence formed a constant backdrop throughout her childhood. After completing visual-arts studies at the Rhode Island School of Design she worked as an editorial assistant at The New Yorker.

While continuing to perform, she kept her musical ties intact and refined her songwriting until issuing a solo EP in 2014. That atmospheric collection of torchy Americana explored internal terrain with notable poetic finesse. Her full-length debut, Play Till You Win, arrived a few years later and introduced a broader stylistic range, balancing rich pop layers and moody synths against acoustic guitar and strings as she examined personal reflections and sketched distinctive characters. An invitation to play bass with Eleanor Friedberger’s touring band opened several years of sideman work alongside Friedberger, Craig Finn, Lola Kirke, and David Berman’s Purple Mountains project before Berman’s death in 2019.

Jenkins made her Ba Da Bing Records debut in 2021 with Overview on Phenomenal Nature, a nearly spiritual collection recorded in Brooklyn with Josh Kaufman of Bonny Light Horseman. The following two years brought extensive touring, including opening dates for Courtney Barnett and Mitski, plus the standalone single “American Spirits” and a cover of Animal Collective and Vashti Bunyan’s “It’s You.” In 2024 she moved to Dead Oceans for her third album, My Light, My Destroyer. Produced and recorded by Andrew Lappin, the stylistically wide-ranging set wove indie rock, new age, jazzy sophisti-pop, and folk-rock with field recordings and experimental details, and featured contributions from Palehound’s El Kempner, Hand Habits’ Meg Duffy, Katie Von Schleicher, and additional musicians.