Cassandra Jenkins Artistfacts

1984-
Cassandra Jenkins is a New York singer-songwriter whose music incorporates elements of indie rock, folk, ambient, and experimental sounds. Jenkins' lyrics often focus on personal experiences, interactions with others, and observations of the world around her.
Jenkins was born into a musical family. Her parents played on cruise ships and hotel bars in the 1980s, performing Top 40 hits, jazz standards, and the American songbook. Summers were spent on the folk festival circuit, where she admired the lifestyle of the working musicians and befriended a host of Appalachian fiddle prodigies.
Before turning 12, she toured with her family band playing folk music at festivals. Jenkins' brother was a violinist, and her sister wanted to sing, so Jenkins became a guitarist by default.

"It's always been functional guitar playing," she shrugged to Mojo magazine. "I've never thought of myself as an instrumentalist because I would just learn to get the job done. We did 'Homeward Bound' by Simon and Garfunkel, some American gospel stuff, and eventually my siblings and I started to infiltrate the playlist with songs that we really liked."
During Jenkins' angsty teenage years, she just wanted to listen to grunge and play in a high-school garage band. "I definitely didn't enjoy performing when I was a teenager," she told Mojo. "It felt very forced. And then when I started writing my own music and performing my own music, I was like, Oh I actually really love performing when it feels like it's authentic to me."
Dreaming of designing album sleeves for a living and enthralled by the Providence noise duo Lightning Bolt, Jenkins enrolled at Rhode Island School of Design, where she studied visual arts. "That music was really exciting to me, especially growing up in a household of jazz," she said. "Maybe it was a little bit of my rebellious spirit, but I think it was just genuine curiosity."
Jenkins graduated from the Rhode Island School of Design in 2006, which led to a two-year stint working on the picture desk of the New Yorker magazine.
Her debut EP was self-titled and released in April 2013. In 2017, she released her first album, The alt-country-ish Play Till You Win, and played in Eleanor Friedberger and Craig Finn's touring bands.
Jenkins has a strong interest in astronomy and birding, which often influences her music. Her song "Aurora, IL," for instance, was part inspired by William Shatner's space voyage aboard the Blue Origin space shuttle.

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