Cassandra Jenkins, MOJO Rising,
CASSANDRA JENKINS
“Water by no means cures everything.” CASSANDRA JENKINS
FOUR DAYS after David Berman’s death in August 2019, Cassandra Jenkins flew to Norway to stay with friends who lived on an island. She had recently been recruited to play acoustic guitar with Berman’s new band Purple Mountains on a tour that, cruelly, would never happen. “I remember being on a fjord and thinking, I was supposed to be in Pittsburgh today,” she says, from her family’s New York home. “It was hard not to have this parallel schedule winding through my head.”
Jenkins did not know the Silver Jews frontman long but his loss resonates through her beautiful second album, An Overview On
Phenomenal Nature. “Farewell, Purple Mountains,” she sings on Ambiguous Norway, “you’re gone, you’re everywhere.” New Bikini, meanwhile, records her Norwegian hosts’ advice for the grieving: “Baby, jump in the ocean… the water it cures everything.” As she discovered after a trip to Mexico, however, it doesn’t: “Ironically, I have been very sick for the past year and a half from drinking contaminated water,” she says, “so water by no means cures everything. Maybe that’s TMI.”
It’s this balance of gentle wonder and raw clarity that makes Jenkins’ songs so affecting, outlining her quest for wholeness in a fragmented world. Songs such as the luminous spoken-word Hard Drive, where a psychic at a party promises to put her heart back together, are a reaction against her debut, 2017’s Play Till You Win, a record that came “with strings and horns and pedal steel and all the layers”. Here, she wants to be able to “walk on stage with a band that’s never heard it before… follow me, it’s two chords.”
Jenkins grew up surrounded by visiting musicians and potluck suppers. From the age of 12, she played in a band with her siblings and parents, their Upper West Side home doubling up as a folk venue. Encouraged by her parents not to make music her job, she studied art, combining writing and performance with teaching, wedding photography and a stint at The New Yorker. After 2019, she was on the brink of giving up, only writing these songs so she had new material for one last tour, with The Hold Steady’s Craig Finn. Yet An Overview On Phenomenal Nature
has landed with such soft power, that Jenkins’ future now looks different.
“I’m not sure I’ve ever connected with people in such a way that I’ve connected with people with this record, but it’s all been virtual,” she says. “To be able to do that in person would be such a great privilege. I have no idea what that’s going to feel like. I’m in completely new waters.”
An Overview On Phenomenal Nature is out now on Ba Da Bing.
HEAVEN KNOWS, IT’S RODRIGO AMARANTE : TROPICÁLIA’S ANSWER TO JOHNNY MARR!
“Looking back, it’s like a bad film script.” RODRIGO AMARANTE
“I ’M JUST circling the same idea and probably will continue to do that for ever. I hope I’m inching closer to what I’m trying to say.” Sitting in his home studio just north of Los Angeles’s Downtown, Rodrigo Amarante is coming to terms with being a MOJO Rising star after two decades in the business. “At least I’m still ascending. Not yet descending or having my records be ‘rediscovered’ because nobody gave a shit for 20 years,” he laughs.
If descending is not on the agenda, downsizing regularly seems to be a factor in the Brazilian’s methodology. He joined rockers Los Hermanos while a student; their reunions continue to sell out stadiums in South America. As a side project, his samba big band, Orquestra Imperial, filled concert halls across the world; the Little Joy project he formed with The Strokes’ Fab Moretti and Binki Shapiro was a critical hit. For more than 10 years, however, he has been working either solo or as a co-conspirator with the likes of Gilberto Gil and Norah Jones.
“I did think moving from a rock band to a 1950s samba band was a big break, or coming to North America, where no one knows me. Looking back, it’s like a bad film script. I see a thread. In Los Hermanos I was writing more arrangements, and the Orquestra was a school, working with amazing musicians. I took a lot of what I’d learnt to Little Joy: don’t play every instrument all the time. With both my solo albums, Cavalo and [the forthcoming] Drama, there are echoes of Orquestra Imperial, definitely, but also Los Hermanos.”
And, it has to be said, of the more poetic British indie bands. He doesn’t baulk at the idea. “I love Johnny Marr, I wanted to be Johnny, but I wanted to be Morrissey, too.” But what attracted a boy from Ipanema to the humdrum towns of northern England?
“When I was younger, my family moved to the city of Fortaleza, in the north of Brazil, right on the Equator, and I was ostracised, suffocated by the eternal summer. So, yeah, there are different colours and different pressures, but The Smiths really understood the oppressive natural environment I was in. And I think that’s the goal: for me to write and dump my shit on other people’s laps and leave enough space that my songs become tools for others.”
Drama will be released by Polyvinyl on July 16.