Spotlight Album Review: Iris Dement "Workin' on a World"
IRIS DEMENT: WORKIN’ ON A WORLD
You might call Iris DeMent quirky, with a twangy voice that may be an acquired taste. Her stage presence is as unslick as her unvarnished vocals, as if she has no filter, yet her fans welcome her seeming vulnerability, because she seems so truthful. Most of all, she’s an incomparable songwriter, championed by John Prine, who wrote liner notes for her 1992 debut, Infamous Angel (and also included four duets with her on In Spite of Ourselves). The fact that her recorded output is so irregular (only seven albums in the last 31 years) makes each one matter. Happily, her newest one, Workin’ on a World, her first since 2015, is not only worth the wait, but one of the best this year.
The first songs of Workin’ on a World appeared soon after the 2016 election amid the attendant anxiety. “Every day some new trauma was being added to the old ones that kept repeating themselves, and like everybody else, I was just trying to bear up under it all,” Iris told the New York Times. However, her preliminary work with the legendary Jim Rooney, who produced her first albums, and Richard Bennett, who co-produced her last couple, got stalled during the pandemic. It took Iris’s stepdaughter, Pieta Brown, to step in, encourage her, and co-produce the album in Nashville with Iris, Rooney, and Bennett.
The title track, “Workin’ on a World,” sets the tone of the album. Faced with the grim reality (“I started wakin' every morning/Filled with sadness, fear and dread”), Iris finds hope in history with the backing of upbeat horns (“I don't have all the answers/To the troubles of the day/But neither did all our ancestors/And they persevered anyway”). She addresses the divisiveness in the gentle plea, “Say a Good Word” (“We drown in ill will or we swallow the pill/And go on and say a good word to them now”). She follows that up in “The Sacred Now,” a song co-written with Pieta with an infectious, John Fogerty-esque melody:
Those who stand to gain
Draw dividing lines
You're over there with yours
I'm over here with minе
We can't speak and yet somеhow
We all share the sacred now
Oh, the sacred now
In ways similar to “Living in the Wasteland of the Free” from her 1996 album, The Way I Should, several songs here ease more directly into the political arena. The rambling “Goin’ Down to Texas” (“where anybody can carry a gun”) gives positive shout-outs to Willie Nelson, The Chicks, and The Squad and negative ones to TV evangelists, Bush, and Bezos. “Warriors of Love” offers profiles in courage of John Lewis and Rachel Corrie (“Some still among us soldier on/Some from the flesh now have gone/But they've paved the very road we're traveling on/Our great warriors of love “). Most powerfully, on “How Long,” with her piano backed by organ and pedal steel, she invokes Dr. Martin Luther King, who, when asked how long he could stay the course, replied: “Till justice rolls down like water/And righteousness starts flowing/Like a mighty stream.” How long, indeed, to end racism, classism, and gun violence?
There are several ways Workin’ on a World is a family affair. “I Won’t Ask You Why” is a second Iris-Pieta co-write, about someone’s mama (her mother is a common theme in Iris’s albums). Rarely, if ever, has Iris collaborated with her husband (Pieta’s father), Greg Brown. Yet Greg contributes three songs to Workin’ on a World: the spooky “Let Me Be Your Jesus,” in which he wrote the words and Iris the music; the rolling “Walkin’ Daddy,” with Iris’s piano accompanied by Marty Stuart’s mandolin; and “Waycross, Georgia,” with words by the Rev. Samuel E. Mann III (a Methodist pastor from Kansas City, where iris lived for 20 years) and music by Greg. It’s the final song on the album – about a journey on the road home (“Smile and thank each one of those people/And then say farewell, say farewell”).
I trust that Iris isn’t saying farewell with Workin’ on a World. We need Iris DeMent’s authentic voice more than ever in the world; hopefully, her journey will continue, even if it takes awhile to get to us.
photo by Dasha Brown