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Iris DeMent
Lifeline
Flariella Records FER-2004
By Marianne Ebertowski
 These
may be needy times, but is it really another gospel album I need
right now? I don't think so, I'm much too afraid bible bashing
will become a popular pastime in some of my favorite parts of
the world. But, wait a minute, this is Iris DeMent after all,
the woman who refused to sing as long as the Iraq war was on
(a gesture that led to this worst plague of our time: death threats).
Well, I am glad she changed her mind; we would sadly have to
miss her passionate and strangely pumping church-trained voice
for quite a long time, I fear.
Why make a gospel album with only one self-written song after
eight years of silence (if you don't count her singing on John
Prine's In Spite of Ourselves)? Arkansas-born DeMent has
never been a prolific singer-songwriter. She emerged triumphantly
on the music scene in 1992 with her impressive debut album Infamous
Angel, delivered two more albums in 1994 (My Life)
and 1996 (The Way I Should, which contained critical
songs about war in general and the first Gulf war in particular).
Then, there was silence. "Hard times came in for a long
visit," as Iris DeMent explains herself in the liner notes.
In those hard times, she got divorced and finally married to
fellow-singer-songwriter Greg Brown.
'These songs aren't about religion," DeMent continues,
"At least for me they aren't. They're about something bigger
than that. There was an urgency in my mother's voice when she
sang that came out of desperation, a great need...These songs
were handed to me in the spirit of love and in that same spirit
I pass them on."
Dement's mother was a church-going (Pentecostal) woman with
a great voice who once dreamt of a singing-career. Instead, she
gave birth to fourteen children. Her youngest, Iris, made her
dream come true by realizing what she could not. Iris even let
her sing on her first album. Ms. DeMent Sr. is still alive and
I'm sure she will thoroughly enjoy this album, even though the
songs may mean something different to her than to her daughter.
So, what can it be that these songs have that is "bigger
than religion" and why was this album released on Election
Day?
Dement broke with her church, but still considers herself
an "agnostic Christian" of sorts.
There are two songs on her album, "Blessed Assurance"
and "Leaning on the Everlasting Arms," that found their
way into the church repertory of my childhood, not something
I want to particularly be reminded of. Whereas for Ms DeMent
these songs "came out of desperation," for me they
only led to desperation. That is, literally, a hell of a difference
and my breaking with the church was a matter of physical and
mental survival. These songs were most definitely not passed
on in a spirit of love, but in a spirit of insane oppression
and hatred. So, why is it, I cannot only tolerate this album,
I can even like it?
This is a lot of questions. First of all, Iris' voice sounds
in better shape than ever. It sounds like the slightly damaged
pipe of a church organ and, in spite of myself and my personal
history, that's a sound I like. She has, again, chosen to work
with a cast of excellent musicians: Stuart Duncan, fiddler and
mandolin player, has been given a roll as harmony singer; Mark
Howard plays the acoustic guitar, Dave Roe the upright bass,
Stu Basore dobro and Jim Rooney, the producer of her debut album,
has been put back in charge of the knobs. Together they produce
a sound so urgent you cannot walk away from shrugging your shoulders.
It nails your feet to the floor. You cannot help but listen,
even if, for all sorts of reasons, you don't really want to.
What makes DeMent's interpretation of these old Christian
songs "bigger than (Christian) religion" is how she
makes a point of "secularizing" Jesus as a good person
who struggled to do the right thing. I can agree with that. What
bothers me is the increasing tendency in our time to hijack religious
beliefs (of various kinds) and abuse them for political aims,
including the destruction of lives. Not that that is something
new as such, it's just that for a while (after the sixties) it
looked as if we (at least in western civilization) had overcome
that tendency for good.
That this ugly monster has raised its head again, could be
a reason to not sing these songs anymore. It can also be a reason
to continue to sing them. Iris DeMent has chosen to sing those
songs. I have chosen to listen to her and to write about it.
That this album was released on Election Day very probably had
a reason. Musicians cannot change the world they can only
do their job and take a stance, just like the rest of us. We
have no God to blame for anything, only ourselves! The choice
is ours.
www.irisdement.com
www.redeyeusa.com
www.sonic.nl
(Europe)
Contact Marianne Ebertowski at ebertowski-at-rockzilla.net
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