Octo_Russ

Iris DeMent [My Life] 

This was a great disc to buy, one of those purchases where i was purposely trying to branch out into new genres, trying to get away from the usual stuff i always get, i would certainly classify this as Country first, but it also has elements of American Folk and Gospel, she has a real southern twang to her voice, she comes from Arkansas originally, and she was influenced by old time hymns in the Church she grew up in, so there's a lovely Gospel flavoured subject to things, maybe not necessarily religious in words, but in her observations and themes, for someone not exposed to DeMent, the first time listening to this album might give a strong indication of negative things, certainly death and sin, and regret and purposelessness, but i find it very positive and upbeat, that through the hard times there's fortitude to stand tall, in the title track DeMent laments, 'My life, it's tangled in wishes, and so many things that just never turned out right', it's a real theme of the album, it's certainly very realistic looking, instead of kidding ourselves that life's one happy go lucky round of good memories, this disc also appeared in my Blog in 2010 [25th May 2010].

Iris DeMent is American, she's now 51, she recorded this disc in 1994, the front cover photo [by Kelley McCall] is a bit naive, a photograph made to look like in a photo album, and a theme throughout the booklet, using old photo's of DeMent, like the one on the back.

It was tracks 4-6 that were superb, and i guess it's the middle one that hit me the most, called 'No Time To Cry', each of the three verses deals with a tragedy, whether it's her Father dying, an ambulance siren, or the bad news on the television, the 'solution' is to keep busy, life has a tendency to make you cynical, you're older and you just haven't got time to cry, a very acoustic song, her voice really shines out of the instrumentation, she plays acoustic guitar herself, the verses are great, dripping with sadness, and when the chorus comes in, there's an upbeat determination and fortitude to stubbornly endure, her voice rises into a major key, it's a great moment each time the chorus comes in, in the last verse the instrumentation quietens down, and it enhances her voice, and of course it heightens the power of the song when the instruments comes back in with force later in the verse, also i love the way DeMent treats the outro, she ad-libs 'no time to cry' three times, you can hear the way she accentuates things differently, a great way to finish a great song, one of her greatest compositions.

Here's Iris DeMent singing 'No Time To Cry' on YouTube.