Cassandra Jenkins

One Liner: Lovely, gentle singer of gently comfortable indie folk/rock

Wikipedia Genre: Ambient pop, folk pop
Home: NYC

Poster Position: 23
Weekend One Only.  Friday.

Thoughts:  Well, this is beautiful.  Just absolutely lovely stuff.  Feels like it would be hard to translate it to a huge stage on a hot afternoon, but I guess other gently wonderful things have been played that way before and nobody lost their mind.

She's a native New Yorker, currently stationed in Brooklyn.  Her Wikipedia says that her parents played music on cruise ships in the 80's and that Cassandra toured with the family band when she was young, playing folk music at festivals.  Pretty odd upbringing, but it created something really nice!  Recently, she's been opening for Mitski and Courtney Barnett, which matches really well.

The music is either quiet rock or soft-focus ambient folk that feels like a comfortingly warm embrace.  Her first EP, winningly entitled "EP" came out in 2014.  Not many streams on there.  Her first real album was 2017's Play Till You Win (which, I always figured that it should be "'til," since it is a shortened version of "until," but maybe she meant something different here?).  The main song from that one is the first track, "Candy Crane," with 223k streams.

Live version, but you'll get the idea.  Just freaking beautiful sounding - every piece sounds right and good.  2021 brought the more ambient-oriented An Overview on Phenomenal Nature, and some tunes with over a million streams.  This one is "Hard Drive," with 2.9 million.

That video matches up with the tune so well.  I want to go for a walk in those yellow woods.  I have no clue why, but watching her speaking those words about learning to drive at the age of 35 just made me start to tear up.  WTF man.  The next verse is even more touching.  Like I said, its wonderful and pretty.  She also has a brand new single called "Pygmalion" that is nice too, but with a touch more edge to it.  She's great!