Her debut record “Infamous Angel,” which just celebrated its 30th anniversary, was recently named one of the “greatest country albums of all time” by Rolling Stone. The two albums that followed, “My Life” and “The Way I Should,” each garnered GRAMMY nominations in the Contemporary Folk category.
“Workin’ On A World,” her seventh album, started with the worry that woke DeMent up after the 2016 US Presidential election: how can we survive this? As one of our fiercest advocates for human rights, Dement used the healing power of music, her spiritual and political compass, to deliver songs that are equal to the times we’re living through. The 2016 impetus inspired her to write new music for the first time in several years, to re-engage with her activism and political music.
“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,” Dement recalls in a press release. So she returned to a truth she had known since childhood: music is medicine.
“My mom always had a way of finding the song that would prove equal to whatever situation we were facing,” Dement said. “Throughout my life, songs have been lending me a hand. Writing songs, singing songs, putting them on records, has been a way for me to extend that hand to others.”
With grace, courage, and soul, Iris shares 13 anthems — love songs, really — to and for our broken inner and outer worlds. The result is not despair, but a luminous kind of hope. DeMent sets the stage for the album with the title track in which she moves from a sense of despair towards a place of promise.
“I don’t have all the answers / To the troubles of the day,” Dement sings, “But neither did all our ancestors / And they persevered anyway.” The album art of “Workin’ on a World” — like a hauntingly quiet, dark gray sky ahead of a looming Midwest tornado — is just as poignant as her lyrics. But in the bottom right corner, amidst the ubiquitous gloomy “troubles of the day” she’s singing about, appears to be a bright orange sun poking through, ostensibly symbolizing hope on the other side.
“Workin’ on a World” has brilliant flashes of humor and uplifting tenderness. The result is a hopeful album that speaks the truth, “in the way,” as she explains, “that truth is always hopeful.”
Through the 13 tracks of her latest record, Dement summons various social justice warriors, both past and present, to deliver messages of optimism: “Now I’m workin’ on a world I may never see / Joinin’ forces with the warriors of love / Who came before and will follow you and me.”
Thirty years after her debut, Dement is still creating some of the most activist, moving music of her career. On “Workin’ On A World,” she demonstrates that songs are the healing — a healing that arises through song.
“When I see a little baby / Reaching out its arms to me / I remember why I’m workin’ on a world / I may never see.”
Facing the modern world as it is right now, she not only asks us how we can keep working towards a better future, but implores us to love each other, despite our differences.
Brandon Berry writes about the Dayton and Southwest Ohio music and art scene. Have a story idea for him? Email branberry100@gmail.com.
HOW TO GO
What: Iris Dement
When: 7 p.m. May 15
Where: The Foundry Theater, 920 Corry St., Yellow Springs
Tickets: antiochcollege.edu/event/iris-dement-at-the-foundry-theater
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