During uncertain times, music is a balm and creative connective tissue provides hope when it’s needed most. It’s a sentiment Iris DeMent deeply feels and is a driving force behind her latest studio outing, 2023’s ‘Workin’ On a World.’ Attendees will get a full dose of the power of song when DeMent hits the stage on Oct. 4 at Port Washington’s Landmark on Main Street.
Sparked by the results of the 2016 presidential election that had the Arkansas native asking herself, ‘How can we survive this,’ these 13 songs reflect DeMent’s need to respond to the wave of amorality that was about to be unleashed in the forthcoming decade.
“The overall impetus for this album was pushing back to what I was taught is immoral, brutal, thuggish and not okay to sit back and watch,” DeMent said. “A lot of the songs on the record are a response to that and are sadly still very relevant.”
The breeziness of the song arrangements found throughout the album belies the impact of DeMent’s narrative flow and thought-provoking lyrics. The opening title track puts the composer’s concerns and doubts front and center in a musical arrangement that welds gospel, soul and a bit of honky-tony and finds her going from “…sadness, fear and dread” to “…join’ forces with the warriors of love.
Best of all is “Goin’ Down to Texas,” a jaunty number that finds DeMent excoriating racism, greed, police brutality and gun violence with the opening couplets saying it all. “I’m going down to sing in Texas, where anybody can carry a gun/But we will all be so much safer there, the biggest lie under the sun.”
Only DeMent’s seventh album since her 1992 debut ‘Infamous Angel’ and first since 2015’s ‘The Trackless Woods,’ this collection of songs reflects the rigor she applies to her craft. At one point, the songs were shelved in 2019 before step-daughter Pieta Brown convinced the sexagenarian singer-songwriter to resurrect them and see the project through. While the result comes off as effortless, DeMent is more about achieving a quality result versus rushing to get her music out into the world.
“I’m not in a fight with it anymore—it just takes me a long time [to finish songs],” she said. “There’s just a lot of words out there and I want to make sure that when I put them on a piece of paper and go out there and sing ‘em, I just want to feel from my head to my toes that it’s worthwhile. I feel confident enough that something will help somebody. For whatever reason, I come up with about 10 of those every five, six, seven years.”
The youngest of 14 raised in a strict Pentecostal household, DeMent’s childhood was awash in music centered around a piano the family would play and try ideas out on. A formative time came when her elder siblings were off at school, and DeMent was home with her mother, who would often play and sing along to the 1965 Loretta Lynn album, “Hymns.” It provided an epiphany to the future Americana stalwart.
“When my mom was done with her chores in the middle of the day, she’d put that record on and we would just sing up a storm,” DeMent wistfully recalled. “I saw a side of my mom I don’t remember being tuned into before that. I had a kind of secret window into her broader self through the music. Even as a child, I understood something was happening with these songs and that was bringing out something in my mom that she’s sharing with me.”
Her fascination with music carried through the first secular show she attended, a seminal Ricky Lee Jones concert at The Roxy DeMent attended when she was 18 (“What did I see—a female singer-songwriter up there by herself. Lo and behold, I spent most of my life doing that.”)
And later on, she had a fruitful creative relationship with the late John Prine. (“Singing with him and standing next to him was one of the most wonderful things that has happened to me and that I’ve been able to experience in my life.”) When asked whether the 2024 election results would yield more musical manna, DeMent admits to being unsure.
“Well, I don’t know,” she said. “I just know what’s happening now is really awful and my duty as a human with a heart is to push back as hard as I can. It’s also my responsibility to do the best I can to lift people, because that’s what we need right now. It’s hard to push back if you’re not feeling lifted. I pray to God that kind of music will come to me so I can be as useful as possible in the world right now.”
Iris DeMent will be performing on Saturday, Oct. 4, at Landmark on Main Street, 223 Main St., Port Washington. For more information, visit www.landmarkonmainstreet.org or call 516-767-6444.
