WHO
Iris DeMent, with Jeff Barbara and Sarah Pickle

WHEN
Saturday, January 23 at 8 p.m., doors open at 7 p.m.

WHERE
Bird's Eye View (in the Old City)

TICKETS
$15 at Disc Exchange or at Bird's Eye View.
Seating is limited.

Iris DeMent finds her life in music—and vice-versa

by Jesse Fox Mayshark

One of the best of Iris DeMent's many memorable songs begins with her lilting, breaking voice crooning, "Sweet is the melody/So hard to come by."

The song uses music as a metaphor for life, but talking to DeMent, it's clear she meant it literally too. Her show at Bird's Eye View this weekend is her second Knoxville stop since the release of her 1996 album The Way I Should, and she acknowledges an urge to move on to new songs.

"I'm anxious to," she says by phone from her home in Kansas City. "But I have to get the new material first. And I, um, I'm hopeful that I'll manage that here before long. I've got a lot of pieces of things going, and if things go the way I want them to, they'll start falling into something that looks like whole songs."

DeMent's ongoing slow dance with her muse is itself representative of her general outlook on life—at least as it can be read from the songs on her three albums. A country/folk singer and songwriter (or folk/country or adult alternative or whatever you want to call her), the Arkansas-bred DeMent devotes much of her work to subtle, inconclusive explorations of human relationships. In those dynamics—between people, between artists and art, between the physical and spiritual—she finds mysteries to be teased out, savored, lingered over.

Mining musical territory somewhere between the buoyant eclecticism of Nanci Griffith and the brooding iconoclasm of Lucinda Williams, the 38-year-old DeMent writes songs that arise from a general folk tradition without sounding either dated or exactly contemporary. That could be partly due to her somewhat cloistered upbringing and her obviously ambiguous feelings about it. After quitting her family's fundamentalist church at 16 and high school a year later, she sojourned across the South and Midwest and inevitably landed in Nashville. But at least some of the traditionalism she grew up with stuck; her work has little in common with commercial country music. As one critic wrote of her 1993 album My Life, "These are songs that sound like they've always been around."

DeMent herself can't explain where the songs come from. In the liner notes to The Way I Should, she writes, "Songwriters talk a lot about 'writing' songs, but it seems to me like I spend most of my time 'waiting' for songs. Writing is just something I do to kill the time until they get here."

In conversation she says, "The truth is, for me, I haven't ever figured out what the key is to making the environment right for songs to come along. I don't understand how that works. Believe me, if I had a clue, I'd be following the formula, because my life would be a whole lot less torturous. I don't know why they come, I don't know how they come, I just know I want them, I beg God for them, and I go through hell waiting for them."

And when they do come, she's hard pressed to explain the different tacks they take. For example, where My Life was—as the title suggests—an intensely personal album, The Way I Should broadened her scope to include a handful of overtly socio-political songs (most notably the strident "Wasteland of the Free"). The approach yielded mixed results and reviews—some critics applauded the emergence of an angry folk voice, while others missed the nuances of the earlier material.

She's reluctant to talk about what direction her new songs are taking, but it's clear she's not spending a lot of time on current events. Asked for any thoughts on the Clinton impeachment, she laughs wearily—"I'm just so worn out by it all. I have no interest. I actually got rid of my TV, so I'm about as removed from these things as you can get."

So what's it like for someone who works so hard for her songs to then put them out for general consumption?

"I honestly don't know how to answer that," she says. "On one hand, I feel like they're mine, and I'm very protective of my songs...From the first song I ever wrote, it was like, this is something that's been placed in my care and it's my job to tend to this thing. But at the same time, there's also the sense that they leave you and they become other people's possessions in an emotional sense. And that's what you want. It's a weird thing. It's mine and yet it's not mine."

The musical niche DeMent occupies by default—one shared with peers like Williams, Griffith, Steve Earle, and Lyle Lovett—has gotten a fair amount of press in the last few years. But she's not much impressed with the impact.

"The climate isn't much better for it in terms of radio than it's been in the last eight years or so," she says. "In fact, I might even say it's a little worse. I know there were a lot more public radio stations that had folk music or alternative music programs when I started than there are now. The last few years, we've been astonished at how many of them, you go to their town and they're not there anymore. That affects this music in a big way."

On the other hand, she says, "I think people have always been open to 'alternative' music, anything that makes them feel something. And people who are playing this music [on the radio] are generally pretty devoted and major music lovers, and are at least half responsible for keeping this stuff alive. I couldn't go play if it weren't for those small radio stations that play me once a week."

Maybe. But if there's anything you sense about Iris DeMent from her music, it's that someone who works this hard and cares this much about her songs will always find some way to be heard. As she wrote in her liner notes, "The waiting is not exactly what I call fun, and after 10 years of doing this and asking myself why, I believe I know the answer. As corny as it will sound, the fact is that I am in love with the songs. I guess that's just what you do when you're in love."