Cassandra Jenkins steps into limelight
Cassandra Jenkins’ new video for her song “Red Lips” was a spontaneous affair. “We filmed it in one night in my apartment,” says Jenkins, calling from her home base in Manhattan.
The indie folk-pop singer-songwriter created the work in collaboration with New York-based filmmaker Serena Reynolds. The two women put the emphasis on playful experimentation.
“We had a bunch of gels and clamp lights,” says Jenkins. “Serena and I were running around and changing clothes. It was like playing dress-up as a kid with one of your friends.”
“Red Lips” is one of the tracks on Jenkins’ 2017 full-length debut album “Play Till You Win.” Released last spring, the album has earned her numerous critical raves as an evocative vocalist.
The video for “Red Lips” features Jenkins holding a microphone and lip-syncing the lyrics to the stately and hypnotic dream-pop number. Superimposed on the screen is footage of burning houses and molten lava.
The song references the breathlessness that accompanies a head-over-heels love relationship: “In the sun/ in the stars/ where I gaze/ there you are.” It’s also a meditation on the obsessions that can come from living in a digital world filled with endless images.
“When I edited the video, I decided to incorporate images of fire and lava,” Jenkins says. “It was a nod to the deep powers of the psyche. An internal drama can feel as big as an erupting volcano, but it’s really just something that’s happening in the back of your mind. We all have worlds inside us. We have our own ecology.”
Before she went into the studio to record “Play Till You Win,” Jenkins thought a great deal about her favorite releases. At the top of that list was George Harrison’s 1970 opus “All Things Must Pass.”
“I always dreamed of making ‘The’ studio album,” she says. “I called all my musician friends in Brooklyn and said, ‘Let’s make a ridiculously opulent record.’ ”
Jenkins is a haunting presence on the jangly-yetsad song “Tennessee Waltz,” an original number inspired by the classic country song. There’s whispered desire in the lyrics of “Disco Death Dance”: “If we wear the same mask/ and turn towards one another/ then we can be each other’s mirror.”
A native New Yorker, Jenkins was born and raised in Manhattan. She grew up in an artistic atmosphere. Her parents, Richard and Sandra Jenkins, are professional musicians who worked a stint in the lounge band the Lynx Trio in Atlantic City in the 1980s.
Jenkins is busy with a solo career and just selfreleased “Live in Foxen Canyon,” an album recorded last year at the Come What May Music Festival in Southern California.
“It was our last night of the tour, so everyone in the band was getting a little sad to leave one another,” she says. “We had lots of friends there and the audience was very warm.”
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