There’s a slew of records you could use as evidence to support the romantic idea of an album as a work of art, in which important truths about human nature crystallize into music through hours of toil in the studio. Two fine examples are 2011’s Hell and Half of Jordan and 2014’s Quiet Machine, nuanced and emotionally resonant pop albums that Nashville songsmith Jasmin Kaset made with producer Jordan Lehning. But the powerful example of artist, musician and activist Jessi Zazu, who died of cervical cancer at age 28 in 2017, inspired Kaset to try new approaches to her creative output.
“For me, it’s more about writing something that feels real, and writing something in my voice,” says Kaset, speaking with the Scene by phone from Australia, where she’s just finished a tour with her satirical country duo Birdcloud. “Just putting out the music while it’s still relevant to me. I’ve made records that have taken over a year to get out, and by the time that’s done, I’m already sitting on a whole new batch of songs. None of those songs mean the same thing to me anymore.”
With that in mind, Kaset has taken on an array of projects in the past year that require her to be “less precious” about the process, as she puts it. Working around some 150 tour dates with Birdcloud, she teamed up with electronic musician Matt Pusti (aka Makeup and Vanity Set) under the name You Drive, and their self-titled LP was released in August. She also joined forces with Quichenight’s Brett Rosenberg to create Tuxedo, which is set for release Friday via YK Records in the U.S. and Cheersquad Records in Australia.
Kaset wrote three of Tuxedo’s 10 songs herself and co-wrote one with Lehning, while the remaining six were built around musical ideas Rosenberg had stored as voice memos. As he’s done for the bulk of his recordings as Quichenight, Rosenberg wrote and performed most of the music himself, recording and overdubbing guitars, keys, bass and drums on his trusty TASCAM four-track cassette tape machine. (One notable exception: the girl group-indebted standout “A Single Right Word” features harmony vocals from Kyshona Armstrong, Sarah Bandy and Larissa Maestro, as well as cello by Maestro.) All of the recording was done in short bursts in Kaset’s backyard shed, dubbed the Hymen Auditorium, with Rosenberg creating what he describes as a “little ecosystem” for Kaset’s voice.
“You can definitely have a spontaneous performance of a fully realized song,” says Rosenberg, speaking on a separate call. “I think that was what I was trying to maintain, that candid feeling that’s easy to sing over and easy to feel like it’s done. I don’t like it when things aren’t done. When you work on something for four hours and then all you’ve got is beginning of something, and you’re not committed to a lead vocal, committed to a guitar track or whatever — for me, if you spend the equivalent of half a shift on something, you should have something that you’re prone to fall in love with.”
Quichenight at Mercy Lounge, 2/23/2018
Jasmin Kaset at Mercy Lounge, 2/23/2018
The end product is easy to love, even if the voice or the guitars aren’t always perfectly in tune or the drums aren’t always keeping time like a metronome. It feels like you’re in the room as the two work to incorporate Quichenight’s distinctive mix of highbrow humor and stylistic nods to danceable rock and pop of the ’70s with Kaset’s knack for describing complex emotional landscapes using evocative turns of phrase. Their talents come together especially well on the song “Ambassador.” As a jaunty riff boogies along, curling back into itself and repeating through most of the piece, Kaset sings about navigating the new versions of ourselves we strive to create: “I see you’ve met my ambassador / She’s aware of my best angles / Never seeming over-keen / In her use of modern language / She leads me through a dry new world / Where no one touches no one / You just can’t know how loud it gets / In the quiet of a tidy home.”
Because of Kaset’s and Rosenberg’s multiple commitments, it’s unlikely they’ll be able to play many more shows with the superb band that performed some of the Tuxedo tunes live earlier this year. That spurred Kaset to reach out and collaborate with another group of people whose work she admires, making music videos for each track on the LP. Nashvillian Nick Clark lends his stop-motion skills to the particularly striking piece for “Middle Name,” a song about how social media can give us intimate details about a person without getting us close enough to really know them. In the video, human figures reach out to one another through a frame that looks similar to a Facebook profile. Their arms end in grotesque prehensile appendages that touch but never grasp.
Tuxedo doesn’t mark a permanent turn away from elaborate production for Kaset. She has plans to go back into the studio with Lehning next year and make what she calls “my Purple Rain,” featuring songs co-written with her mother, topflight songwriter Angela Kaset. But Tuxedo is a reminder that emotional impact, however it’s communicated, is the core of what makes an album great.
