Review Summary: Travelling well-worn roads with grace, warmth, and the fearlessness of age that no longer gives a shit what anyone thinks
It’s obvious from
Workin’ on a World that Country music has come a long way since the era when professing a disliking for George W. Bush was a one-way ticket to a tanked career. A political bent outside of Toby Keith’s plastic jingoism has, here and there, made itself known on the fringes of the mainstream and a country artist can now have a political alignment other that ex-military pro-Reagan center-right boomer or can even identify as LGBT and still receive acclaim, even from people who listen to Country music on a daily basis and don’t just use it to make their music site pie charts look more interesting. On her latest album, and her first in almost a decade, Iris DeMent doesn’t just take a moment to nod to something resembling a political opinion. Much of the album is essentially a vehicle for her politics: her admiration for the activists and civil rights leaders of the past and present, her inspiration from the women who have fought for their rights, and righteous indignation against all the exploitation and greed of the neoliberal hegemony.
Nowhere is that more apparent than on the eight minute screed Goin’ Down to Texas, which sees her calling out the Lone Star State, televangelists, Islamophobes and praising those paragons of political performativity, the Squad. And if the track is just dripping with didactic self-righteousness, and if its length seems bloated in the balance of things, it still ends up the most memorable song on the album, for better and for worse. As the rest of the album shows, Iris is fed up with the bullshit, has no time for tip-toeing around political niceties. If you didn’t know what DeMent’s politics were before this album, you certainly will after, and if they’re plunked down squarely in the ex-hippy pro-Hillary center-left boomer demographic, I doubt she’d give a damn for anyone who disagreed. Problem is, as much as Goin’ Down To Texas is a jaunty little earworm that you’re going to be thinking about for a while, it’s really
not all that good of a song, especially compared to the rest of the album. Whatever your opinions on the aforementioned bluntness and bloat, the fact that she’s stretching out this bouncy little ditty for eight minutes to plop down her manifesto in your lap leaves the whole thing feeling more like a lecture from your lovable ex-activist pot-aunt than an actual song. And there are going to be a lot of people that that’s going appeals to, mostly lovable ex-activist pot-aunts. But Iris isn’t lacking in self-awareness. If anything, a track like this is a conscious shedding of any audience that would object to her political positions, a move that doubtless deserves respect.
But the rest of the album doesn’t abandon this political bent so much as let it take a back seat to the songwriting, a welcome move as eight more minutes of being beaten over the head with an I’m With Her campaign sign would have just been exhausting. Iris, still as warm and heartfelt as ever, never loses her sense of focus when it it comes to calling out the ills of the world and praising those doing something to struggle against them, but for the most part she seems to recognize the political nature of the album is carried much more effectively when she spends her energy more on strong songwriting. The soothing tenderness of Say a Good Word, a gentle piano ballad extolling the simple virtues of human kindness, the rollicking tribute to the activists who risked lives to change the world on Warriors of Love, the sweetness of Mahalia, a piano and organ tribute to the Gospel singer that’s moving in its simple solidarity and a beautiful track in its own right. Iris calls out religious hypocrisy on Let Me Be Your Jesus, or rather the vampiric nature of professed adherents who would use the promises of faith for political manipulation.
Lest we get too hung up on the political nature of the album, Iris also takes a heartfelt look at her own life on The Cherry Orchard, in which, solemn and hymnlike, she faces aging with courage and grace, bidding a gentle farewell to her youth with a sense of acceptance that maintains her unflappable grace and grit. And maybe it’s that sense of life slipping away that gives Iris so much of her political fire on this album, or at least gives the sense that she’s reveling in a sort of liberation from having to worry what people are going to think of her opinion. This new role as activist firebrand eminently suits the kind of hard-living strength that DeMent’s always carried with her, even if her delivery occasionally ends up being more of a bludgeoning than an artistic statement. But her true strength still lies with affairs of the heart, with the beauty of the every-day. So if one is left perennially impressed by DeMent’s ability to pull at the heartstrings and still keep her political fires hot, it’s no doubt thanks to the grace and grit that DeMent’s always brought to her material. And if one finds themselves off-put by some of the bluntness with which she’s making her opinions known, if maybe that bluntness jangles a bit with that grace a bit, it might help to remember that DeMent’s nothing if not justified with her sense of urgency. Whatever fears one might have that consuming this album among others is just another example of feel-good performativity, DeMent maintains her own sense of artistic integrity throughout, without a damn for how much of her audience her political beliefs are going to shed. And again, that simple fact in the world of country music, whatever moves towards inclusiveness it has made in recent years, deserves respect.
