| February 5, 1999 |
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Calvin College Chimes
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Iris DeMent: We just want you to know who she is
Arts & Entertainment Editor In-the-know music critics compare her favorably to Joni Mitchell; John Prine says she’s “good for you,” and the Goo Goo Dolls named a worldwide top-40 hit after her -- so how come Iris DeMent only seems to get played on public radio? Not to dis our friends at WYCE or NPR -- who deserve papal dispensations for keeping radio at least halfway interesting -- but DeMent writes evocative, powerful lyrics with convincingly rootsy tunes, and her 1996 album “The Way I Should” drew raves from Rolling Stone and Spin. Perhaps that’s the problem: good lyrics weren’t in even when they were in, and DeMent’s almost-three-year-old disc asks questions, opens old wounds and sangs them blues far too realistically for pop radio’s sensitive ears. Commercial marginalization and DeMent’s own erratic muse (she claims that work on a new album is “moving very slowly”) cause her to follow a zigzagging path to success, and that path takes her to the Fine Arts Center on Wednesday, Feb. 10th, at 8 p.m. Student tickets are $3. The Calvin show starts an 8-date Midwestern tour that will wind through Chicago and Des Moines before Iris returns to her Missouri home, presumably to work on that slow-coming new record. Until then, fans of authentic (non-WalMart) country of the Lucinda Williams school will have to make do with “The Way I Should Be,” an album that deftly balances serious, stridently critical polemics (“Wasteland of the Free”), mournful ballads (“I’ll Take My Sorrow Straight”) and haunting pieces (“When My Morning Comes Around”) that ring with bluesy, existential yearning. Asked if the mix is intentional, DeMent demurs: “No ... I just feel a lot of different things in the course of a day.” Trying to pin down the elusive emotions leads to long waits of “2 or 3 years” between each of her albums (1992’s “Infamous Angel” and ‘93’s “My Life”). DeMent, who grew up in an Assemblies of God congregation and left at age 17, no longer considers herself a Christian, but the longing in her work for a morning where “from a new cup I'll be drinking/ ... and I'll wake up and find that my faults have been forgiven” has a profoundly Christian ring to it. So do her critiques of religion and society: “We got preachers dealing in politics and diamond mines/ and their speech is growing increasingly unkind” is the kind of sentiment we’d expect from The Door magazine. DeMent doesn’t “relish” writing or singing her angrier numbers: “I don’t like angering people ... but those songs do have a place as well.” DeMent stresses “real, honest songs” as her goal in songwriting, and names Johnny Cash, Loretta Lynn, Emmylou Harris, Bob Dylan and Merle Haggard as influences. Speaking of influence, the Goo Goo Dolls’ last-summer hit “Iris” is named after DeMent, whose name appeared in a newspaper when the Goos were looking for a chorus. “I think it’s great. I like my name,” DeMent laughs when questioned. Given her skills, maybe the rest of us should, as well. |
