New Haven Register (Sunday) (New Haven, CT)
DeMent brings pure country voice, evocative lyrics to Old Saybrook
OLD SAYBROOK — For whatever reason, we don’t get much Iris DeMent around here in Connecticut — and that’s just a shame.
DeMent is, after all, one of America’s great singersongwriters.
Her pure, unvarnished country folk voice and her direct delivery, combined with the evocative stories she tells, move people.
The good news is that for the first time in a couple of years, DeMent will make a rare appearance in these parts on Wednesday night with a show at The Katharine Hepburn Cultural Arts Center.
DeMent, a native of Arkansas who also was raised in southern California, now lives in rural southeast Iowa — and is married to another one of America’s great songwriters, Greg Brown.
She is blessed with a voice that’s golden — sort of in a similar way to the way the voices of Dolly Parton, Emmylou Harris or Alison Krauss are golden — coupled with an ability to write beautiful, often deceptively simple-sounding songs about complex subjects.
She has offered what for many people is a favorite slice of Americana ever since her debut album, “Infamous Angel,” came out in 1992.
Showtime is 7:30 p.m. Pieta Brown opens. Tickets are $45 and $48, available in advance at thekate.org or 877-503-1286. The Kate is located at 300 Main St.
For her sixth and latest album, 2015’s “The Trackless Woods,” DeMent chose to write an entire album of music about poems from a book of Russian poety by Anna Akhmatova that a friend lent to her.
When she picked it up and read it, “I didn’t feel like I was alone anymore,” DeMent says in a bio on her website. “I felt as if somebody walked in the room and said to me, ‘Set that to music.’ ” So that’s what she did.
The result is a beautifully crafted work that is quite unlike any of her previous work — which also helps fill in gaps in her own life and that of her adopted Russian daughter.
“I learned from this project that I don’t have just one voice, I have lots of voices, and they’re all connected somehow,” DeMent says. “Something happened on this record because the music wasn’t tied to a place from my past or my family history, but it was linked to my daughter by way of her cultural history.
“I realized writing these songs that I’m linked in some way to another world, as well,” she said, “and I can hear it in the music, in the way I sang and the choices I made.”
DeMent has performed and recorded over the years with many of the greats, including John Prine, Merle Haggard, Ralph Stanley, Emmylou Harris and Steve Earle. David Byrne and Natalie Merchant covered her “Let The Mystery Be” on MTV Unplugged.