Iris DeMent: "Workin' on a World"
[Songs of Iris, 2023]
Heretical though it presumably is to diehard fans, I simply cannot get into the albums that established Iris DeMent as a country icon: her debut Precious Angel [Philo, 1992] and its follow-up My Life [Warner Bros., 1994]. In those early days, her voice sounds relentlessly emotive, so much so that after a few songs I’m somehow both worn out and unconvinced they hit their mark. But increasingly with every album since, and particularly on her last two original albums—2012’s Sing the Delta [Flariella] and this month’s Workin’ On A World [Songs of Iris]—she’s won me over. As both singer and songwriter she’s relaxed into herself. The shift from guitar to piano as focal point seems to have been critical; unlike her earlier material, which felt eagerly rushed along by the guitar, now she lets her simple church piano progressions take her wherever she needs to go, in a style reminiscent of Carole King or the McGarrigle sisters. Where once youthfulness dictated that emotional restraint was inauthentic, now her voice has mellowed out, and with the mellowing she's gained a powerful sense of conviction. And to top it all off, she's assembled an excellent band, one that can rock out or amiably shuffle along when necessary (“Workin’ On A World”, “Goin’ Down To Sing In Texas”, “Warriors Of Love”), or leave you feeling starry-eyed on the slower country dream carousel numbers (“Say A Good Word”, “I Won’t Ask You Why”, “Let Me Be Your Jesus”), with Jon Graboff’s pedal steel playing bringing a lot of the magic to the latter numbers.
While her music has become more subtle, her lyrics seem to be travelling in the opposite direction. The vast majority of Workin’ On A World is of a political bent, a kind of cathartic album in which DeMent vents her spleen about the awful state in which America and the world all over finds itself. Particularly on “Goin’ Down To Sing In Texas”, her overtly boomerish leftism comes across as politically naive, even cringeworthy at times, with mentions of “people of colour”, “Mr. Bezos”, and even “those brave women in the Squad” summoned to delineate the good from the bad, the selfish from the selfless, in a world where all we need to do is simply ‘be better’. But while her political declarations might initially induce eyerolls in some (including me), somehow and at least in part because of the sheer goodness of the songcraft on display here, her naivety ultimately becomes one of her strengths. There’s a biting focus to these songs, a focus on a celebration of courage and self-sacrifice that seems to cut through the despair and outrage. It's best realised in the powerful depictions of John Lewis and Rachel Corrie in “Warriors of Love”, but it’s there underneath pretty well every one of these songs, charged through the words and deeds of historical figures from Anton Chekhov to Martin Luther King to Mahalia Jackson, “people who were workin’ on a world they never got to see”. As DeMent elaborates, “I remember that learning the way to approach the Bible was, you asked for something you needed. You were supposed to go into a prayerful space, and then ask that material what the Word had for you… I do that now with books, and I tend to lean towards the writers that offer up their word in such a way that it can be received on any page.”