“There wasn’t a whole lot to do, except party when you’re growing up,” she says. “It’s a different animal.” Kaset’s referred to Cottontown often in her lyrics; she admits every couple of years she “gets weird,” drives back to Cottontown “and hits the old back roads.”
Once liberated from the cultural shackles of Cottontown, Kaset enrolled in college where she studied poetry and English literature; it was also at college where Kaset joined her first punk-rock band, the delightfully named The Fork Hunts. “I was a really bad punk drummer at college,” Kaset says. “We reunite every year for one show, and it’s always a shit show. None of us have ever got any better at our instruments, and we’ve been reuniting for about ten years,” she laughs.
But it was her college studies that, indirectly at least, caused Kaset to migrate from punk-rock drummer to her present country-influenced singer incarnation. “After I graduated I was still writing a bunch, but I didn’t really start playing guitar until I was about 22,” Kaset says. “It was really just a better avenue to write – no-one really wants to read, so it was a better way to get an audience.”
Before branching out as a solo performer in her own right, Kaset teamed up with friend Makenzie Green in the country/punk duo, Birdcloud. With its potty-mouthed lyrical bent, and propensity for offending audiences, Birdcloud has established something of a cult following. “I grew up a lot listening to country radio, and I still listen to country radio,” she says. “It can be so bad that it’s amazing.”
Kaset says Birdcloud can usually be guaranteed of a few members of the audience walking out in disgust at one of their shows. “We actually went on America’s Got Talent last year,” Kaset says, “and we went all the way to the celebrity judges… We got booed by 2500 people.” The negative reaction wasn’t restricted to the audience; Kaset recalls judge Heidi Klum having her fingers in her ears saying, ‘Is it over?’
While Kaset’s solo material’s less likely to provoke such extreme reactions, it’s equally informed by her strong literary sensibility. Kaset admits to using the people and events she encounters around as inspiration for her lyrics. “I’m still a shitty guitar player, so a lot of what I write is defined by what I can play on guitar – a lot of what I start with is pretty primitive,” Kaset says.
The latent literary inspiration can be seen in some of the tracks on Kaset’s new record, The Quite Machine. The opening track, You Can Never Go Home Again, borrows from Thomas Wolfe’s novel, You Can’t Go Home Again, while The Salesman might suggest Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman. “There’[re] some literary references on that record,” Kaset says. “The Salesman could be like that. But it’s more literal than that – when I graduated from college I didn’t want to be a teacher, so I’ve basically worked in kitchens for the last seven years, making sandwiches. The Salesman was about one of the guys who’d come in off the trucks and take the orders – so it’s pretty literal in a way.”
Kaset has lived on and off in Australia, so she’ll be spending the Christmas season here (her husband is from Bendigo). The change in both weather and sociology are expected to provide welcome relief from her current residence in Nashville. “I’m a rare breed of southern Jew and it’s really conservative here,” Kaset laughs. “The people I spend Christmas with over in Australia don’t do lots of presents. And it’s also hot outside, so you don’t eat yourself sick.”
BY PATRICK EMERY
