![]() She treads carefully over the faith so prevalent to her family and youth in northeastern Arkansas before the family migrated to California. DeMent’s song cinches her entire record together, an acknowledgement of our coexistence as well as the ultimate solitude of our journey’s end. through “How Long.”ĭeMent closes the album with “Waycross, Georgia.” The song feels connected across to “Wayfaring Stranger,” which has drifted through parts of three centuries. Who needs a rhyme when their voice can make such a word sing as DeMent’s does?Īfter setting up cultural conflict on the album’s first songs, DeMent ushers in a wintery chill mid-album with “The Cherry Orchard” and “Nothin’ for the Dead.” She follows those songs with others that ponder grace and resilience. She shores up that request with the song’s bridge, where she gently repeats the word “magnanimity” four times. DeMent beats it back throughout the album, but perhaps nowhere more quietly forceful than “Say a Good Word.” The song’s titular refrain is a fragile request. That thought - working toward a goal without guarantee of a return - is a refreshing one in popular vocal music, which so often slithers around solipsism. The album’s title sets up a thought that DeMent completes in the song: “I’m working on a world/I may never see.” Still, something of a narrative path emerges from it, following the writer and singer through moments of deep discontent through fight and fatigue and, by album’s end, a weary sense of hope. Nearly170 years have passed since Stephen Foster penned “Hard Times Come Again No More.” The hard times change, but the sentiment does not.ĭeMent swears the sequencing of her first album in eight years - her first of new original songs in 11 years - was the result of great consideration, but not necessarily thematic. The first line of the first song, the title track, begins: “I got so down and troubled/I nearly lost my head.” ![]() Which isn’t to say DeMent’s “Workin’ on a World” is devoid of references to time and place. “I can sit and play a melody on a piano for hours.” To that end, DeMent describes her pandemic writing process frequently starting at a piano humming along to what she played. But they’re tapped into that spirit, that unnamable thing. It doesn’t have anything to do with words. ![]() You wouldn’t have to understand a word of English to weep when you hear her or Mahalia Jackson sing. But Aretha’s music moves me to feel that. “I try to honor it and participate in it. It’s more about a feeling.ĭeMent suggests the Pentecostal upbringing from which she has grown distant still leaves behind “some unnamable thing running through the whole deal. ![]() Her new album, “Workin’ on a World,” includes the song “Mahalia.” Her interest transcends any recording or performance by gospel great Mahalia Jackson. A decade ago, she wrote and sang about how Aretha Franklin’s “Precious Lord Take My Hand” connected with her. Rather she’s more concerned with the mysterious ways music affects us. So when DeMent sings about singers, her reference points aren’t part of a timeline of popular American music that you can read about. And DeMent’s voice is one of those tools that can carry a listener away. Even that film, a period piece, has DeMent singing “Pretty Saro,” an English folk song that predates the film’s setting by centuries. This, despite her being lauded and beloved for her distinctive approach to making music since she roped off a spiritual garden of her own with "Let the Mystery Be" back in 1992.īut for an appearance in the film “Songcatcher,” which was set early in the 20th century, DeMent as a musical entity feels unmoored from the usual ways we mark time. DeMent works at a pace all her own, and by most measures appears indifferent to the tertiary trappings of music as a business. That Iris DeMent recorded and released just seven albums over the past 30 years suggests the singer and songwriter has an casual or unusual relationship with the music industry.
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