Iris DeMent on recording In Spite of Ourselves: ‘I’d open my mouth and nothing would come out’

Iris DeMent is feeling the strain of living in a divided country. “Worried, sick worried. And I don’t use that word lightly,” she says. “It’s a constant battle not to succumb to illness from it. And that’s why I put this album out. It was medicine for me. And I figured if it helped me it might help somebody else. I’m daily thinking about how to stay afloat, worrying about what could be coming next. I’m 62. You know we’ll ride it out, do what we can, but these are dark days.”

The album in question is the characteristically honest, outspoken and tender Workin’ on a World, her first studio album in eight years and a timely reminder that love is stronger than hate and that her gritty, distinctive voice, both as a writer and as a singer, still has a particularly uplifting way of picking out the positives.

As she sings on the title track: “Oh, but then I got to thinkin’/ Of the ones who came before/ Of all the sacrifices that they made/ To open up so many doors/ Doors I got to walk through/ On streets paved for me/ By people who were workin’ on a world/ They never got to see ...”

DeMent, warm and thoughtful, is speaking from her home in the solidly Republican state of Idaho, which she shares with her husband, the singer-songwriter Greg Brown, their adopted Russian-born daughter, Dasha, and a three-legged one-eyed pug. It was Brown’s daughter, Pieta Brown, also a singer-songwriter, who pushed her stepmother to finish the album after it was sidetracked by the pandemic. Now she’s on tour, with two Irish concerts this weekend.

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Her new songs are arguably her most political. She says that she was always “talking about this stuff, the stuff that affects us humans here on planet Earth”.

She says that, in the rousing Goin’ Down to Sing in Texas, “when I sing ‘Thank you to those brave women in the Squad’ I’m singing about my sisters who are suffering. Isn’t that what I’ve been talking about all along? I’m reaching out. Here is something that is in front of me that matters. The personal is now political. I mean, how can this not be personal? In this country right now people are dying. People are dying from poverty in the richest country in the world, right under my nose ... America is a very difficult place to live in right now, and it has been like that for poor people for a very long time.

“And I do feel that I’m putting myself on the line when I play that song, especially in this country. So each night when I sing that song there is a moment I do pause. I mean, there is a risk I take singing that song, but the risk of not doing what I feel is right is greater.”

That righteous anger shares space with a sense of melancholy, resilience and truthfulness that have been hallmarks of her work since she first broke through, with the album Infamous Angel, in 1992. Originally viewed as a country singer, DeMent now describes herself as a folk singer, albeit one with roots in old-time country, folk and gospel.

This is no surprise. Gospel music and hymns are key features of the Pentecostal tradition in which she was raised. Born in Arkansas in January 1961, the youngest of 13 children, she moved to California with her family when she was very young.

“My parents were not folks who people looked up to, treated them respectfully ... They were poor working-class cotton pickers, just struggling folks.” They made big sacrifices for her and her siblings, she says. “And I wanted to give back to them. To this day I feel so blessed that [her breakthrough song, Our Town] picked me so I could do that.”

Although she began to doubt her Pentecostal beliefs when she was about 17, she was totally immersed in that life and found it difficult to follow her musical ambitions for some years. But “the next thing I knew I got what I thought was the call,” she says. “To this day I feel like somebody walked into the room and spoke to me: ‘That’s what you’re going to do,’ clear as day ... and that’s how Our Town fell out of the sky.”

At the age of 25 she had lived in this Pentecostal bubble all her life. “We were discouraged playing with the neighbours’ kids – that’s how much of a bubble we were in. Sometimes we were in church seven nights a week. Oh, and I loved church. The music was fabulous. To this day I still sneak into these little Pentecostal halls, close my ears to the dogma, because the music is just so moving to me. When I cut through the hellfire and all that, there is something underneath that makes me just sit there and weep.”

But DeMent also believes that these born-again churches have helped lead the United States into its current difficulties. “There was all the really unhealthy nonsense that has escalated to where we are in this country, the fascist takeover of the USA.” She was initially surprised by the born-again movement, “but I shouldn’t have been, because the negative, dogmatic, ignorant parts of that faith really locked nicely into fascism.”

DeMent talks about her religious upbringing with some ambivalence. On the one hand she has no time for its alliance with Trumpism, but equally she understands and respects its sense of community and spirituality, though with songs like The Night I Learned How Not to Pray, from her 2012 album Sing the Delta, you sense that the young Iris was always an independent thinker.

She says her parents were upset when she left the fold. “Both of them were, I’m sure, but my dad, once you were of age, would never interfere in your decisions. He would say, ‘You do what you want to do.’ And he was quietly supportive. Mom to her dying day had her opinions, and I’ve noticed I’ve become like her when it comes to my 24-year-old,” DeMent remarks, laughing. “Looking back now, I realise that was love. My mom was loving me in the way she could.”

DeMent’s religious background made her deeply uneasy about singing the song she’s best known for, the duet In Spite of Ourselves, from John Prine’s 1999 album of the same name. Prine’s song rejoices in its humorous, if risqué, lyrics. It was a dilemma, she says. Her friend and collaborator had just recovered from cancer, and she felt she had to support him.

“But when we went into the studio I couldn’t sing. I’d open my mouth and nothing would come out. It sounds so ridiculous now. Marty Stuart was producing, and there was a band there. And John said, ‘Iris, come on over to this little corner.’ John and I stood across from each other, and I just locked in on him, and we got through it.” Later, listening back, she knew that “it is me almost ready to break down, because it is nearly too much”.

Even today, that event touches a nerve. “I just cannot emphasise too much how much ... it felt like I was leaving the church all over again,” she says. “You know, my mom was still alive.” Indeed, a copy of the album without that song was made for her mother. “We’re going on too long about this stuff, but we are who we are. I would not have sung that song with anyone but John.”

Prine’s untimely death in 2020, from complications caused by Covid-19 still haunts DeMent. “A part of me doesn’t know yet that John’s gone. I let him linger. It’s like that with people we love, especially those that showed that belief when they were here. I feel that way about my mom and I feel that way about John too.”

Though organised religion is no longer a part of her life, DeMent’s language is dotted with references to spirits and voices. Does she see herself as a spiritual person? She laughs, then says, “Well, we have to use the words we have. Maybe what I mean by that is I’m trying to stay connected with words that aren’t capitalistically drained, that are human.” She says that, if anything, the writings she has gravitated towards in recent years have been Buddhist. She mentions a book, Going Home: Jesus and Buddha as Brothers – “I must get back to that” – by the late Vietnamese Buddhist monk Thich Nhat Hanh. “It does what I feel I’ve been trying to do in my life: find the commonality, the big story that is everybody’s.”

Her unjustly neglected album, The Trackless Woods, from 2015, was more personal. She had been given a book by the renowned late Ukrainian poet Anna Akhmatova and one day happened to open it at Like a White Stone. “I had no idea whether or not I liked the poem, but I just heard a voice telling me to set it to music. The poem was so distinctive that I said, ‘I don’t know how,’ and the voice told me, ‘I’ll help you.’ And that is how that project came about. I had no idea who she was – I’m no follower of poetry – but that happened. I became very obsessed about the album. I felt it had to be done.” In the end she set 18 of Akhmatova’s poems to music.

And there was a strange coincidence. In her exploration of Akhmatova’s life and work she discovered that the poet shared a birthday, June 23rd, with Dasha, her Russian-born daughter. DeMent was not surprised: she had been searching for a cultural connection that would help cement her relationship with her daughter.

For her shows in Dublin and Sligo she will be joined by the singer-songwriter Ana Egge and by Liz Draper, “the most amazing bassist I’ve ever heard”. She says she might include Greg Brown’s haunting The Train Carrying Jimmie Rodgers Home, a song she sang on a tribute album to her husband – but, she notes, before she met him romantically.

Our Town will definitely be on the set list. “When I sing it people sing along. The joy mixed with the grief. It’s kind of got a funereal quality. I don’t mean it is darkness. The funerals I used to attend always had that mixture of grief and community – you know, laughing and crying. That song seems to touch that place for folks.”

It won’t be the only one.

Iris DeMent is at Vicar Street, Dublin, on Saturday, October 28th, and at Sligo Live on Sunday, October 29th; the festival runs from Friday, October 27th, until Sunday, November 5th