Emily Kaitz – Terminally Trendy Middle-Aged Rock And Rollers Are So Damned Cute
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Posted On November 1, 1997
Like Loudon Wainwright III, Austin’s Emily Kaitz has a wonderful knack for being funny, silly and sometimes annoying, and then turning around and being amazingly poignant. And like Wainwright, her best songs are all the above.
For instance, the title song of her latest album, Terminally Trendy, seems at first just a spoof of fashion fads put to a slow, bluesy groove with the help of Bad Livers Danny Barnes and Mark Rubin. But by the last verse, Kaitz digs in: “We’re terminally trendy and it didn’t some cheap/Those tattoos cost a bundle and those needles punch deep/Our jackets may be leather, but we’re all a bunch of sheep.”
The best song here is the sardonic but ultimately sweet “I Will Stay With You”, a duet with Ray Wylie Hubbard in which two lovers pledge their eternal commitment, no matter what the future may hold — “even if I start collecting dozens of hideous porcelain poodles and demand that we display them in every room in expensive glass cabinets…”
Some of the tunes exist just for the laughs: “Small Medium At Large” (about a midget psychic running from the law), “Bob Dylan’s 300 Game” (featuring a gawdawful Dylan impersonation by Jimmy LaFave) and “Susie Rosen’s Nose” (Has anyone else already called Emily “The Female Kinky Friedman”?). Better is the completely twisted “When I’m Dead Dress Me In Drag.”
Kaitz also recently re-released on CD a late-’80s recording titled Middle-Aged Rock And Rollers Are So Damned Cute (previously available only on cassette). While in general not as memorable as Terminally Trendy, one song, the seven-minute “Open Mikes”, is Kaitz at her best. It’s about the musicians who haunt open-mike nights: the off-key sopranos, the balladeers who drone on forever, the old guys who always sing the same cowboy songs. She sees humor in the foibles of these would-be stars, but this doesn’t hide her admiration for them. “And I am touched by the youthfully exuberant and the joker with her tongue in her cheek,” she sings. That’s pretty much how I feel about Emily Kaitz.
