Gates: 6:30PM / Doors: 7:30PM / Show: 8:00PM
Public Onsale: Friday, 5/16 at 10am EST
Christian Lee Hutson + Cassandra Jenkins
‘Paradise Pop.10’ feels like you have found an unpublished collection of short stories, scrawled hastily on the sides of airsickness bags and cocktail napkins, each one detailing the life of the unwitting passenger fortunate enough to be seated next to Christian Lee Hutson on their flight to Fort Worth.
Anyone who has had the good fortune of falling in love with his first two records know that he is a keen observer of both himself and the world. From the first line of the first song on this new album, “Tonight your name is Charlotte / In a play within a play,” he reminds the listener that he is again weaving a web of autobiographical fiction. However, this time he has somehow both simplified and sharpened his style.
On ‘Paradise Pop. 10’ you will visit the CC Club in Minneapolis, a San Francisco stage production of a Tom Stoppard play, a bowling alley at the Jersey Shore, and a 2003 Subaru where two dads consider kissing each other after a game of pick-up basketball. Despite how broad the world Hutson creates is, the album gives you the impression that you are at an airport gate of sorts, and all these characters are gathered together, waiting for their lives to begin. They make light conversation with each other as their flight continues to be delayed…just another 15 minutes.
Recorded at Figure 8 in Brooklyn NY, the lifelong Los Angelino and his frequent collaborators Phoebe Bridgers, Marshall Vore, and Joseph Lorge ventured east to make ‘Paradise Pop. 10’ and picked up some friends along the way. Maya Hawke co-wrote and sang harmony on the sharp and shoegaze-y earworm “Carousel Horses.” This song is a spiritual sequel to “Age Difference,” a single from Christian’s last record, which depicts the crumbling of an unbalanced love affair. “You shouldn’t feel stupid/ I just knew before you did/ Now I’m sitting here spinning my wheels/ I bet you know how that feels.”
Accompanied by Shahzad Ismaily’s synths, Hutson’s voice shines most clearly on “After Hours.” He sings from a condominium in a corporatized Heaven to the woman he misses back on earth. “Big budget productions of the lives of your loved ones / The good stuff is behind a paywall”. Though the citizens of this Heaven are offered daily glimpses into life on Earth, our narrator prefers to imagine the minutiae of his love’s routine while he waits for her to join him.
One of the albums most sparse tracks, “Flamingos,” finds Hutson at the piano backed by Phoebe Bridgers singing harmony. In this song we catch a glimpse of an anxious traveler, fresh off a flight from Tokyo, as he weaves and bobs through a crowd to reunite with a girlfriend. “I’m taking the red eye over the dateline / A sea of slow walkers all taking their sweet time.” As he describes what he sees in her, we see him struggle to resist the urge to point out the differences between them, always reminding her of the score. “Losers remember the people who won / Winners are never afraid to lose / You only think about falling in love / I only think about you”. The listener is left with the question; if you love someone as they are, could you ever really lose?
The record is somehow both literary and unpretentious, maybe best exhibited in the final track, “Beauty School”. Katy Kirby sings backing vocals on this surprising pop-punk tinged dose of poolside folk rock. “In a mirror universe / Time is moving in reverse / I’m gonna turn my life around / everything is different now.” The lyrics to this chorus call back to that of another song from the record; “Candyland.” “Dismantling my time machine / I’ll probably put back together for the final scene.” Again, Hutson gives the keen listener the impression that he is actively re-narrativizing his life. That he has wound up somewhere he never thought he would be and is trying to wrap his head around how not to ruin it.
‘Paradise Pop. 10’ takes its name from a real life “town” set deep in the woods of Parke County, Indiana, near where Hutson spent some of his childhood. There, just past the population sign, you’ll find a row of 5 houses on one side of the road and a cemetery on the other. It could feel like a limbo of sorts, like time is frozen; leaving room for your mind to wander either backward into your regrets of the past or forward into the future, into the unknown. But if you can learn to quiet these thoughts, you might realize, you aren’t waiting at all. There is no delay. You are living. You are here.
Written by Olive Plunk
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Like the night sky itself, My Light, My Destroyer is always expanding. Cassandra Jenkins’ third full-length, out July 12 via Dead Oceans, cracks open the promise of reaching the edge of the new with a wider sonic palette than ever before– encompassing guitar-driven indie rock, new age, sophistipop, and jazz. At the center of it all is Jenkins’ curiosity towards the quarks and quasars that make up her universe, as she blends field recordings with poetic lyricism that is at turns allusive, humorous, devastating and confessional– an alchemical gesture that further deepens the richness of My Light, My Destroyer’s 13 songs.
Jenkins suffuses My Light, My Destroyer with an easy confidence, which betrays the simple truth that the road here was not without difficulty. Referring to the 2021 breakout An Overview on Phenomenal Nature as her “intended swan song,” she explains that she was prepared to hang it up when it came to touring and releasing her own music. “I was channeling what I knew in that moment– feeling lost,” she recalls. “When that record came out, and people started to respond to what I had written, my plans to quit were foiled in the most unexpected, wonderful, and gracious way. Ready or not, it reinvigorated me.”
With her closest musical co-conspirators reassembled, and producer, engineer, and mixer Andrew Lappin (L’Rain, Slauson Malone 1) behind the board, Jenkins began constructing My Light, My Destroyer from the ashes of a false start she had made while “running on fumes” after two years of touring An Overview. “When we listened back in the control room the first day, I could see a space on my record shelf start to open up, because the songs immediately felt like they were finding their home.” That spark informed the blueprint for the rest of the album, and its completion, propelled by a newfound momentum.
Even as My Light, My Destroyer was developed over the course of a year, some of the songs had been incubating in Jenkins’ notebooks for much longer. There were sonic reference points in her mind during the album’s creation: Tom Petty’s deceptively breezy folk-rock classicism, the work of songwriters like Annie Lennox and Neil Young, Robert Ashley’s Automatic Writing, her “high school CD wallet” (Radiohead’s The Bends, the Breeders, PJ Harvey, and Pavement), and David Bowie’s final gesture Blackstar; along with lyrical influences from writers like Anne Carson, Maggie Nelson, Rebecca Solnit, and the ever present work of the late David Berman.
Cassandra shares, “I became even more interested in words, translation, and the malleability of language. I’m becoming better at letting myself explore ideas before self-editing; while I was writing, I wasn’t afraid to laugh at my own jokes, which makes the process of sharing these songs that much more free and fun.”
Above all and as ever, Jenkins is drawing inspiration from the chattering electricity of the world around her, squinting through radio static with the desire to gain a greater understanding. Deftly weaving field recording, found sound, and ancillary audio (like train sounds & flight attendants) she brings attention to stranger-than-fiction moments that bring the listener in. “I feel most energized when I'm out in the world, in the mix of things,” she says. “Coming back home to New York, being with my close friends and community, riding the subway, and going to live shows made me want to channel the palpable feeling of the electricity in a room full of people— I need to be fully immersed in my environment. New York City is endlessly stimulating, and I'm very impressionable.”
Joining her in this immersion is a cast of friends pulled from across the modern indie rock spectrum, as My Light, My Destroyer far more represents a group effort than the largely solitary pursuits of its predecessor. Cassandra’s main collaborator and producer, Andrew Lappin, Palehound’s El Kempner, Hand Habits’ Meg Duffy, Isaac Eiger (formerly of Strange Ranger), Katie Von Schleicher, Zoë Brecher (Hushpuppy), Daniel McDowell (Amen Dunes), producer Stephanie Marziano (Hayley Williams, Bartees Strange), and Jenkins’ friend, director/actor/journalist Hailey Benton Gates, who jokingly suggested the title for album’s meditative coda “Hayley” when Jenkins’ didn’t come up with a follow-up to An Overview’s “Hailey.”
Jenkins bent towards natural & supernatural phenomena alike appears throughout (the Earth’s atmosphere, lizards, flowers, the galaxy, lab grown strawberries, etc) only to bring us back to the core parts of ourselves. “The record poses questions about our instinct for companionship and looks for that heartbeat, that connection, everywhere, ultimately finding it exists in a place somewhere between us and the other side of the glass.”
Notions of “light” and “destruction” might seem like ideological opposites at first glance, and My Light, My Destroyer is indeed consumed with the theme of duality. Witness the crunch of “Petco,” in which Jenkins’ “landlord pink” walls seem to cave in as she looks through a window at “two doves wrapped up in filthy and true love”—before the script flips, (literally) caught in the “sideways gaze of a lizard” encased in the titular pet store. “Aurora, IL” zooms farther out in terms of its mirrored perspectives. The song begins with Jenkins looking up at the sky, before it trades places with “the oldest man in space up on a pleasure trip” referring to William Shatner, Captain Kirke himself, “crying on local news, he couldn’t stop talking about the color blue.” Marooned in a hotel room, Jenkins explains, “I was spinning out, and tapping into that character was my way of getting a little of what he’s having, a small dose of the Overview Effect, in order to come back down to earth.”
The pivotal point on My Light, My Destroyer is the nocturnal “Betelgeuse,” in which Jenkins, in her words, reaches the zenith of her exploration in “trying to maintain a sense of curiosity as a way of staying connected with myself and nature.” Soft piano and a dialogue between two sylvan-sounding horns accompany a field recording of Cassandra and her mother, Sandra, stargazing in the illuminated night. “She is in touch with curiosity like no one else,” Jenkins says of her mother, a life-long science teacher. “I caught her in one of her many teaching moments, which reminded me that learning the night sky will take a lifetime, or more– and that’s just from the vantage point of Earth.”
Even amidst such widescreen wonder, however, there remain the earthly concerns of hardship. The lush “Only One,” reminiscent of the city-street textures of legendary pop group the Blue Nile, finds Jenkins face-to-face with Sisyphus himself—or, at least, a stick-figure drawing of the eternally burdened mythical figure. She explained this is her way of “poking fun at heartbreak’s myopic worldview–an inability to see anything but itself, and a need to wallow in the illusion of permanence. Long after I saw that sign in the window, Sisyphus reminded me that we always have the choice to see beauty in the world around us, even when it’s burning.”
Ceaseless curiosity defines My Light, My Destroyer, and it’s under that context that Jenkins decodes opposing forces contained with the album title—emphasizing the power of a straight-ahead gaze into futures, possibilities, and great unknowns in spite of how they may shake our core beings. “Staying in touch with a sense of awe is in some ways a muscle, a practice; but it’s also built into our wiring, as a function of nature- to help us remember to pause and appreciate our time on Earth, for all its chaos and beauty.”