It is thirty years now since I first heard Iris DeMent sing Our Town which led me to buying her debut album Infamous Angel, and I have been a fan ever since. Workin' On A World is only her seventh album in all that time, and the first since The Trackless Woods in 2015. I must say it has been worth the wait. One thing that annoys me about the present music scene is that musicians aren’t protesting about the horrors of what is going on in the world. In the 1960s we had protest songs and singers who really did bring awareness to the wrongs of the world and helped to bring about change. These days you get singer-songwriters selling millions of albums which are basically about nothing. Iris DeMent is an exception, Working On A World contains some of her most courageously political songs since songs like Wasteland Of The Free in the mid-1990s.
The title track opens the album and is a tribute to all the people of the past who worked to create a better world even though they didn’t live to see the results. Iris has come a long way from her early Country sound. This song is soulful, upbeat and funky, with a brass section of saxophones, trombones and trumpets to the fore. (See video below). Going Down To Texas is a scathing protest about gun laws, police brutality, right-wing evangelists, George W Bush, Donald Trump and Jeff Bezos. Iris praises the courage of The Chicks (Formerly The Dixie Chicks) and the women in the squad (Ilhan Omar of Minnesota, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York, Rashida Tlaib of Michigan and Ayanna Pressley of Massachusetts) who were victims of Trump's hateful racist tweets. She mentions how men in cowboy hats like Willie Nelson and Merle Haggard can take a stand on issues, but women who protest are vilified. Iris is fearless though. She is determined to sing her songs, even in places where anyone can carry a gun.
Say A Good Word by contrast is a much gentler appeal for magnanimity in a divided world. Iris’s voice has never sounded better than here where she sings harmonies to herself. On first listen my favourite song was The Sacred Now. It is very catchy, and I like the sentiment of the song. It ties in nicely with reading The Power Of Now by Eckhart Tolle, although I don’t know if Iris has read that book. It is one of two songs co-written with Pieta Brown who is the daughter of Iris’s husband Greg Brown. They also co-wrote I Won’t Ask You Why a moving ballad with Iris playing piano. It might possibly be inspired by her mother, but I’m not sure. Warriors Of Love returns to the political themes, and praises John Lewis who along with many others was beaten by the police in 1965 in Alabama on the Pettus Bridge. It is also a tribute to the activist Rachel Corrie who was crushed under an armoured bulldozer in Palestine in 2003. Greg Brown wrote the words to Let Me Be Your Jesus which ridicules the hypocrisy of so-called Christians who offer a promised land where everyone is white and global warming is fake news. To my ears Iris’s voice sounds almost like Kate Bush or Tori Amos on this unusual track which also has very atmospheric percussion and flugelhorn.
The Cherry Orchard is inspired by Anton Chekhov’s play of the same name. Iris gets a lot of inspiration from Russian literature. Her previous album The Trackless Woods was an adaption of poems by the Ukrainian/ Russian writer Anna Akhmatova. She and Greg Brown also adopted a Russian daughter. Nothing For The Dead returns to the brassy sound of earlier. In this song Iris defiantly says, “I’m not holding back nothin’ anymore, And I’m done with being afraid of being bled. Use me up while I’m living lord. Let’s not leave nothin’ for the dead”. Mahalia is a tribute to Mahalia Jackson whose voice Iris must have heard coming through the ether as a child with her Pentecostal upbringing. The lyrics mention a song by Mahalia called ‘How I Got Over’ which I didn’t know, but just listened to on Youtube. Mahalia was a favourite singer of Martin Luther King which leads in nicely to the next track How Long which quotes the Rev Dr Martin Luther King. He was once asked, how long do you stay the course and dream the dream?. He replied, “Till justice rolls down like water, and righteousness flows like a mighty stream”.
Walking Daddy is another bluesy song written by Greg Brown that features Marty Stuart on mandolin. It mentions the Jacks Fork river in Missouri which must be where Greg Brown comes from. The final song is Waycross Georgia which was written by Rev Samuel E Mann 111. He is a white pastor who was fired from his church because he worked for forty years fighting racism in his community. I looked up Waycross Georgia on Wikipedia and discovered that Gram Parsons used to live there. It is a fine song to end this album which I have enjoyed listening to for the last two days. It is great to have Iris releasing new meaningful music which the world certainly needs at this time. I have never seen Iris perform live, but I’d certainly try and get a ticket if she visits the UK in the future.
