#iris dement

[myimaginaryradio]

In Spite Of Ourselves - John Prine and Iris DeMent

[sowhatifiliveinfukuoka]

Iris DeMent

[patrickelvinart]

Let the Mystery Be

IRIS DEMENT

Everybody is a wondering what and where they all came from

Everybody is a worrying about where their gona go when the whole thing's done

No one knows for certain so it's all the same to me

Think I'll just let the mystery be

Iris Dement

.

[album-tourney]

Best Song of the 90s

She's So High by Tal Bachman

Let the Mystery Be by Iris Dement

Voting ended onOct 11, 2024

[creek-rock]

Music in Conversation

I was finishing up yet another listen of the excellent new Kevin Morby record the other day when it occurred to me that the final track is a kindred spirit to the closer of Ratboys' (coincidentally, also excellent) new record. Morby's "Field Guide For The Butterflies" and Ratboys' "At Peace in the Hundred Acre Wood" close their respective projects on a note of grace, finding slivers of serenity in retreat to the natural world and offering nuanced but ultimately optimistic takes on how to move forward through the dizzying, suffocating reality of everyday life.

There's obvious musical similarity, with both tracks stripping down to plaintive lead vocals and breezy supporting instrumentation. They convey a similar sense of sonic resolution, but the lyrical commonalities are especially notable. They earnestly sing of mornings and fresh starts (always a welcome trope at the end of a record). Morby hits the open road in his Econoline, while Julia Steiner and crew sail away to "leave my old life behind." They both even address the inevitability of death and lean towards accepting time's passage with a mix of dignity and defiance. Morby squeezes all the juice he can out of this life trying "to grow wings," and Steiner hints that the titular patch of woods is a source of eternal peace.

What really cements the songs' bond, I think, is their shared emphasis on friendship as a way to mitigate pain and joyfully live out shared values of community and love — Steiner even went so far as to cite Winnie The Pooh as an influence on the song, which is so wholesome it hurts. There's something particularly beautiful about saying it as plainly as "where there are my friends, there are happy times" and "laugh through the pain / it doesn't hurt so bad when I am with my friends." I'm grateful for these albums and songs and will always think of them as cousins — which got me thinking about other songs I think of in that vein, and more broadly about when artists are seemingly in conversation with each other across the years.

☁︎

In the "songs that are cousins" category, a few other candidates immediately come to mind — Hop Along's "Sally II" and Nervous Dater's "Farm Song" are earthy, country-indebted outliers on otherwise emo-heavy albums. Sticking with the Ratboys theme, I previously wrote that their 2023 epic "Black Earth, WI" was "the stonier, less abrasive cousin" to Wednesday's ferocious "Bull Believer." Which brings me to instances of music as both homage and conversation, something that Wednesday is unparalleled in the modern era at making manifest.

☁︎

One of the many things I love about Wednesday is Karly Hartzman's willingness to wear influences on her sleeve; she talks openly about the writing process and how she layers those influences into her own songs. "Chosen To Deserve" is a prime example of this metatextual spirit — she explains "I heard “Let There Be Rock” by Drive-By Truckers. The premise is describing a fucked-up childhood, basically, and I wanted to write that song but use all my memories instead." Even DBT's straightforward chord progression played a part in how the song was structured, relying only on three chords in service of simplicity and accessibility. And going one layer deeper, "Let There Be Rock" is a nod to the 1977 AC/DC album of the same name...will circle back if it turns out there's a reference to a reference to a reference to a reference I haven't yet peeled back.

"Bitter Everyday" also invokes one of the great American songwriters, alluding to Iris DeMent's "Easy's Gettin' Harder Every Day," a deeply mournful portrait of lower-middle class decline that's somewhat perversely become one of my most reliable comfort songs. Elsewhere, "Bath County" lifts multiple memorable lines from Loudon Wainwright III's "I Am the Way (New York Town)." "Fate Is..." borrows from the Arthur Russell classic "What It's Like" and "Hot Rotten Grass Smell" opens Rat Saw God with a Bill Callahan reference. It's impossible not to hear the opening riff of Dolly Parton's "Gettin' Happy" in the re-recorded version of "Phish Pepsi," and "The Way Love Goes" owes a debt of gratitude to, naturally, Merle Haggard's "That's the Way Love Goes." (Bonus reference — it's self-evident that MJ Lenderman's "Knockin" would not exist if it weren't for Dylan's "Knockin' On Heaven's Door" before it.)

All these references fit seamlessly into the band's oeuvre and serve to enrich their lyrical depth, contextualizing the band's sound and explicitly placing them in a unique songwriting lineage. Discussing Callahan's "The Well," Hartzman notes the immediate resonance to her own personal life, along with her tendency to "collect stuff by tone." For someone with similarly avid music collection habits, it's so cool to witness my favorite band continuously layer in these easter eggs throughout their catalogue.

☁︎

I also love the path that songs can take changing hands from artist to artist over the years — Kate Wolf writing the stunning "Across The Great Divide" in the 1980s would have been more than enough on its own, but Nancy Griffith and Emmylou Harris valiantly breathed new life into her words in the 90s, as did Little Mazarn just last year. Shoutout Iris DeMent for backing me up ahead of this live cover — "this song of Kate's that I also think of as Nancy's song; in my mind, they're kind of merged somehow."

Cataloguing the full scope of artists who have covered "A Satisfied Mind" would be a fool's errand, but what a joy to hear the old country standard turned into Bon Iver's intensely emotional and vocoder-smothered interpretation, just as with Lucinda Williams' and Loretta Lynn's more traditional takes decades prior (not to mention Vampire Weekend's own interpolation!).

☁︎

I could go on and on, but all of this is to say that the context in which music is written and recorded can bring so much additional meaning to works that are already cherished at face value. I think of these threads a bit like the movie Annihilation, where an alien force causes interspecies DNA to splice, to mutate, and form entirely new types of organisms that the rules of nature can't account for. And ultimately, that's kinda what art's all about; the old made new, the internal made external, buoyed by human spark and interpersonal connection.

[lifeinasmalltowninjapan]

Iris DeMent (1992)

[transpondster]

John Prine and Iris DeMent, on Irish TV, singing In Spite of Ourselves

Well, he hasn’t got laid in a month of Sundays I caught him once and he was sniffin’ my undies He ain’t real sharp but he gets things done Drinks his beer like it’s oxygen... I’m never gonna let him go

[Heard this while watching ‘The Materialists’ (which, I know it has a couple of spots where it tries to pin the tail on the screenplay donkey and misses the mark by just a bit but Celine Song is such a great filmmaker and the movie completely worked for me. And it’s so nice to see Prine and DeMent singing together like COVID never happened.]

[foggyeyes]

tagged by the brilliant @bug-gribble to list 10 songs I'm listening to a lot lately. It's supposed to be ten songs from my "on repeat" playlist but I don't have one of those (i mostly just download music or listen on bandcamp, or play a tape) so if you're tagged or just want to do it (highly encouraged, my tag is your tag) that's the original prompt i guess!

but definitely do not feel like you have to write an essay like i did, i just like an excuse to blab about this stuff.

-iris dement: "our town." crying shortcut. i get nostalgic and moody at the beginning of fall, every single year. though honestly the town i imagine isn't even the one i grew up in, it's somewhere i only lived for a year and a half. i listen to this whole album all the time, but this is the song right now :(

-thundercat: "lava lamp." so dreamy. sexy, but in a way that's about lying around after sex, not actually doing anything - that's just the vibe, not what it's actually about, i think. sad sexy song, not always easy to pull off. i love that squelchy crunchy drum sound. like taking downers and having your hair played with.

-margo price: "hurtin' (on the bottle)." you know when you're partying but the whole time you can't shut your brain off? i don't drink like this anymore but i get it. classic country drinking breakup song, but unmistakably from the world of today. this is almost 10 years old now but i still think of it as new because i'm mired in the past. or whatever. i almost saw her and john prine in like 2019 but it was too expensive. and then he died! god i really should have gone. this is why you need to have savings.

-facials: "mom." excellently catchy montreal garage punk with 80s post-punk diva vocals, about being a weird little queer teenager who's obsessed with her friend's mom. "you're driving my carpool/ and you taught me at sunday school/ gotta break some rules" who among us, etc.

-the hold steady: "stevie nix." it's hard to explain, because they're a bunch of middle-aged men, but the hold steady is such a "yellowjackets" band to me. lyrically, anyway. "some nights it's just a crush, yeah and some nights it's bloodlust." okay, yeah. "she got screwed up by religion, she got screwed by soccer players...lord, to be seventeen forever" this song in particular is a (very very loose) jumping-off point for the fic i've been writing, and i think it's fun that it's about minneapolis, too. i guess most of their songs are, kinda.

-lady wray: "piece of me." i think i found this from one of those bandcamp roundup articles? i didn't know her, but she's been a backup singer for missy elliott and had a few r&b songs back in the day, one with odb. then much later, an album! lucky us. this song is really beautiful, feels classic but still of the present, like with that margo price song. like what people in the 70s would imagine soul music to be like in the future. not like, the futuristic future. just later on in time.

-locate s,1: "personalia." okay i feel like i've mentioned locate s,1 every time i do one of these, but i've been listening to her regularly for months. it would be dishonest not to mention it! all her stuff is good at the very minimum, and often genius. this one's really under my skin. she should be famous. pop music that feels like it was made for me specifically.

-j dilla: "stop." it's actually this whole album, and it's obviously an essential all-time classic. but if i have to pick a track, this one just gets into my skull and scratches like crazy. all the elements weave together in such a satisfying way. so much packed into a little package. RIP.

-liz phair: "whip-smart." i made a post about this on here but i started thinking about this one recently because it sounds like it could be pulled right out of shauna shipman's journal. "i'm gonna lock my son up in a tower til i write my whole life story on the back of his big brown eyes." i'm sure you are! the production is so cool and weird on this, all the chirpy bird sounds, that bouncy bassline.

-courtney barnett: "city looks pretty." and this one could be pulled right out of my journal! haha. god her voice is so great. i love when a song has a kind of lazy, melancholy, behind-the-beat part in the second half. she rules. seriously though, disastrously close to my internal monologue. not to gripe, but whew. i'm lucky to have songs like this at least.

bonus: i've been watching the max levine ensemble "adventures in petsitting" video a lot. a real snapshot of the early 2010s, or how it was for me. very thankful to no longer work in the service industry. also the pets in my life are getting old, so it's on my mind, and the animals in the video are really cute haha.

okay let me tag @campymonkey @jellyjamms @liveorganism @73chn1c0l0rr3v3l @the-media-pit @maggierockets and of course whoever. if you see this and you're thinking "damn why am i not tagged" it means you should have been, so act like you are. tell people you were! i don't mind.