Iris DeMent – Workin’ On A World

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Eight years on since the release of Iris Dement‘s last album, the singular and distinctive vibrato warble finally returns on Workin’ On A World, a collection of songs that embrace both the personal and the political. The album opens with the drums and piano-led country gospel title track (Working On A Building clearly an influence), suggesting she may have gone through something of an existential panic attack brought on by the pandemic, the Trump presidency and the global turmoil as she sings “I got so down and troubled/I nearly lost my head/I started wakin’ every morning/Filled with sadness, fear, and dread/The world I took for granted/Was crashing to the ground/And I realized I might not live long enough/To see it turn around”.

However, as trumpet, sax, and trombone join the party, and Richard Bennett drops in a bluesy electric guitar solo, the inspiration of those who have gone before and weathered the storm to bring change (“then I got to thinkin’/Of the ones who came before/And all the sacrifices that they made/To open up so many doors/Doors I got to walk through/On streets paved for me”) lifts the gloom to replace it with resolve (“I get up in the mornin’ knowing I’m privileged to be/Workin’ on a world I may never see”). 

Socio-political commentary continues with Going Down to Sing in Texas, an eight-minute roadhouse shuffle featuring Joe Graboff on pedal steel, released as a single two years back and addressing America’s out-of-control Republican-driven open-to-carry gun laws. As per the title, prior to lockdown, she’d gone to play at a club on the University of Texas campus, just as she’d been doing since 1992. However, this time, on walking in, she saw a notice on the wall with guidelines about how to handle your gun while you were at the club. Understandably rattled at performing in front of punters with guns on the table, she was inspired to put her feelings into words (“I’ll live by my conscience/Even if that’s all she wrote”), the song expanding from how letting anyone carry a gun doesn’t make things safer to praise The Chicks for taking a stand against the Establishment and the resulting backlash (“Any guy in a cowboy hat/Would’ve walked away unscathed”), speak of Islamophobia (“I know a couple of Muslims/They seem like decent folks to me/I’d take any one of them/Over that evangelist I’m watchin’ on T.V.”), liken George Bush to a  war criminal (“that president who lied about WMD/Hundreds of thousands of people/Are lying in their graves”), hail the progressive left-wing Democratic female senators in Congress known as The Squad, call  out Jeff Bezos,  the deaths of people of colour at the hands of the police and how the true spirit of Christianity has been crushed underfoot by America’s right wing religious zealots, remarking how Jesus threw out the moneychangers from the temple  but if he came back today  “The church today wouldn’t even/Let him through the door”. 

Her fury at what her country has become continues to boil in the airy piano and pedal steel ballad Say A Good Word  (“Home’s become such an angry place/Friends now wear an enemy’s face”), reminding that “An eye for an eye leaves the whole world blind” and, as per the title,  again calling to show magnanimity. Her adopted Russian daughter Pieta Brown sings harmony and, in something of a first for DeMent, is also the co-writer on the following two numbers. First up is The Sacred Now, a jangly 12-string mid-tempo Heart Of Gold walking beat echoing reminder that we all share the same planet (“You’re over there with yours/I’m over here with mine/We can’t speak and yet somehow/We all share the sacred now”) and followed by the mortality-themed, family remembrance piano ballad about a mother’s passing I Won’t Ask You Why (“Your mama’s tender hands/Held the needle and the thread/That stitched that pretty bonnet/You used to wear upon your head/Nobody ever dreamed/That in one groundless stretch of time/Sorrow would move in/And make the final bind”).

On the title track, she uses the phrase ‘warriors of love’ and is clearly taken with it as it also serves as the title of the similarly gospel-tinged next track, which salutes “Folks who don’t bend/Folks who don’t bow” and all those “willing to risk/An early ride in the hearse”, making specific reference to John Lewis, the Civil Rights activist who led the 600-strong protest on the Pettus Bridge in  Selma Alabama in the face of brutality and tear gas from the Alabama State Troopers in 1965, and Rachel Corrie, the American activist and member of the pro-Palestinian group International Solidarity Movement who was crushed to death by an Israel Defence Forces armoured bulldozer in a combat zone along the southern Gaza Strip during the height of the Second Intifada.

A third co-write, this time with husband Greg Brown, the intimately sung piano-led Let Me Be Your Jesus featuring John Fumo on flugelhorn keeps the imagery of those leading the fight against the “heathen press/And the infidel” going, though this time round it’s veined a certain irony in that the self-appointed saviour is patently an allusion to Trump (“Tell me who can fix it now/That’s right, only me/There’s no global warming/That’s just more of their lies”) promising to lead his people to the Promised Land “Where everyone is white”.

Piano complemented by mandolin and pedal steel and her singing evocative of the McGarrigles, The Cherry Orchard takes its inspiration from Chekov, a song about facing mortality (“A heavy stone rests on my shoulders/And leaving’s all that’s left to do”) and, as winter gives way to spring,  passing the torch to the “sureness of youth”, but warning them not to go blindly (“You say, you want your giants/If this be so, I wish you well/But be warned, they’re not compliant/And only good in fairytales”).

The musical tone switches markedly to the good time feel of Nothin’ For The Dead, buoyed up with trumpet, trombone, sax, pedal steel and Wurlitzer, which, despite lines like “Everything that lives gets battered/Every day goes dark” and the “kinda sweet but kinda sad” image of a little boy “dressed up just like his father/They’re both in matching baseball caps/From the cradle poured straight into the mold”, and that “even little children’s hearts get torn to shreds”, is actually another number about not buckling as she declares “I’m not holding back nothin’ anymore/And I’m done with being afraid of being bled/Use me up while I am living, Lord/Let’s not leave nothin’ for the dead”.

She returns to her inspirational heroes for the gospel piano stroll and organ of Mahalia and finds strength in the way Jackson “answered the call when it came through” and “gave to a world that never had your back” and how hearing her sing How I Got Over makes her feel she can too, the lyrics again drawing on Hebrew references in calling her the “very Balm of Gilead”.

When she was about six, she was galvanised on seeing Martin Luther King on TV and realised there was someone with a message people needed to hear. Fittingly she refers to him on  How Long, a piano and organ gospel soul number about bringing about social change in a world where “Power, greed, and profit/Will never feed the soul/These three shovels have dug us/A deep dark hole”, asking “How long do you stay the course/And dream the dream/When it seems evil’s won/And greed is on the throne/And you feel like the silenced voice/In the wilderness all alone?” answering in his voice  “‘Till justice rolls down like water/And righteousness flows like a mighty stream”.

She closes the album with two songs by Brown, the first a six-minute piano blues cover of his Walkin’ Daddy from 2000 that has Marty Stuart guesting on mandolin and the other, rolling out the full brass works, pedal steel and tic tac bass guitar,  his walking rhythm, country soul setting of  Waycross, Georgia by the Rev. Samuel E. Mann, III, the white Methodist pastor at St. Mark’s Church in Kansas City, Missouri who has spent four years combating racism and white supremacy, the lyrics a call to offer thanks to all those who have you along the way, taken, I suspect from one of his sermons. In the 32 years since she made her debut, DeMent has only released six previous albums, two of which did not contain original material; this is the first to do so in over a decade. Unlike many, she’s not dictated to by label demands and deadlines and only records when she feels she has something to say. This may mean a long wait for her loyal fans, but they know that when she does, then it will be insightful, thoughtful and essential listening. This is the sacred now. 

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