Delphinium Blue

Album: My Light, My Destroyer (2024)
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Songfacts®:

  • There comes a time in life when the world feels so incomprehensibly large and unfathomably small at once that even a flower can be a revelation. For Cassandra Jenkins, this epiphany came in the humble confines of her local flower shop. She applied for a job there, she said, with all the instinct of someone clawing for a lifeline. "That job got me through one of the bluest periods in my life," Jenkins told Mojo magazine.

    "Delphinium Blue" may, at first flush, seem like a song about floral arrangements, but Jenkins wastes no time steering it into the cosmos. "I had moments in that flower shop where I'd look at an orchid and think, 'How does this exist?'" she recalled with characteristic delight. "I have these mini-overview effects all the time - like, 'Oh my gosh, how are we not just getting sucked up into the vacuum right now?'"

    And just like that, the humble orchid becomes a portal to pondering the laws of physics and the fragility of existence.
  • The song itself took its time to bloom, with Jenkins likening it to a crustacean "crawling around the ocean floor, trying on different shells." The lyrics, she admitted, had been drifting around in the back of her mind for years before she finally teamed up with Isaac Eiger of Strange Ranger. The two got together at Eiger's home studio to give the song its form.
  • Once the track found its shell, it made its way to producer Andrew Lappin in Los Angeles. There, Jenkins brought in a small constellation of collaborators - Spencer Zahn on fretless bass, Kosta Galanopolos on percussion, and Michael Coleman on synths - to turn the song into what Jenkins calls her "melancholy bi-coastal bop."
  • "Delphinium Blue" is part of Jenkins' third album, My Light, My Destroyer, a poetic title that draws on Anne Carson's translation of the myth of Cassandra and Apollo. The album title hinges on a linguistic twist in the Greek god's name. In one interpretation, Apollo means "my god," but with a slight shift, it also means "to destroy." Jenkins took this duality - creation and destruction - and spun it into her music.

    The phrase "My lover, my light, my destroyer, my meteorite" appears on another track, "Omakase," connecting the album's title to its themes of devotion, obliteration, and the strange beauty found in both. Much like the orchids that gave Jenkins pause in her flower shop days, My Light, My Destroyer invites us to marvel at the fragile, contradictory wonder of life.

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