I’ve been doing this writing-about-music thing for about eight years, so I guess I can now safely admit (without fear of completely derailing my career) that I really don’t enjoy reviewing albums. Climbing behind a bullyhorn to praise or damn the work of an artist is not my cup of tea. I have very strong and emotionally entangled responses to music – I know what I like – but I have no idea what might resonate with any single other individual on the planet.
It’s important to resonate with people. With someone. Most music resonates with someone.
Besides, people should listen to the music which moves them. I don’t want to deter anyone from listening to any music. Something which strikes me as pretentious copycat crap – because of the mood I’m in or the stage of life I’m in, what else has come through my review stack, or any other reason – might contain a single phrase which cuts straight to the core of someone else’s emotional tumult, exposing them to some kind of sense that they’re not alone and there’s light in the world after all. It’s not my place to tell anyone the way they express themselves is any more valid or important or beautiful than what someone else did. Anything anyone does to communicate from a place of truth and beauty is important if we want to progress toward a more peaceful and equitable world.
I believe music is one of the most important things we can do as human beings. Everyone should do it, or something like it, whenever they need to.
So, don’t get me wrong. I have a great affection – and somewhat obsession – for writing stories about people who make extraordinary music. I love highlighting the ways in which music’s creation intersects with the way we change the world every day – in large and infinitely tiny ways. But criticism? Not so much, usually.
That said, I do criticism now and then when I’m asked, or when I’m told. And, because I’m a sucker for tradition and the celebration of individual effort, at the end of each year, I fall in line and come up with a list of albums which struck me as the most remarkable, effective, creative, provocative, et cetera, albums of the year.
Because I almost never actually review music on this site, I thought I’d take a moment to delve deeply into some of the albums which have made my list this year, so I can hopefully serve my choices more than is possible by simply listing them and adding a video of one of the songs on the album (which is the way I usually deliver my year-end lists).
I’ll be posting in the coming weeks with closeups on these albums – one at a time. Let’s begin, shall we, with Iris DeMent’s Sing the Delta.
The song after which this album was titled is a song about longing for a certain time and place. The grass is greener, the water’s bluer, the heartache more haunting, the love much truer in some place other than here. So, DeMent sings, “Sing the delta a love song for me.” It’s a song which encapsulates all the backward glances of having moved on from a place which was once home – a place which lives now in soft focus, in the rearview. But it’s also a song about marriage and wanting what’s best for another person, in spite of yourself. The woman who’s singing is sending her lover off to pursue what he needs to pursue. She’s recognizing that this wandering pursuit has been present in her whole life, from the Delta to wherever she sits when she’s singing.
It’s a tribute. An ode. It’s a beautiful, arresting song in itself.
But the fact that she used the title of that song to stand for the rest of the album, puts a different spin on things. These dozen songs, she seems to be declaring, are songs which have come from the Delta in one way or another. Stories of truth from a certain part of the country. It’s probably the most folky album title of the year, but it also indicates an intimacy which is at once studious and intensely personal.
If the Delta were to sing, it would sing songs about faith and doubt, love and loss, fire and darkness, dirt and sweat, and a “river of tears.” Like the image on the cover of the disc indicates, these are songs which unfold behind screen doors in working class communities, where people are tired and strong and loving and linked with long, deep family roots.
They’re informed by memory – not so much nostalgia as just the haunting, unforgettable truths which once upon a time rocked our worlds. These songs can be taken on their own – and if DeMent spliced them into a set list next to “Our Town” and “Let the Mystery Be”, they would make some kind of sense – but, in the context of an album aimed at the Delta, they tell a more complex story.
Her chunky piano, slow and stumbling drums, a voice like clothes blowing on a line, like the dripping hot breeze itself…everything that happens sonically on this disc is leaning toward the southern Delta. It’s not just a study of Delta music or traditional stories and ideas. It’s literally the closest estimation humanly possible to how the Delta would make music if it could sing in a human voice.
What makes this album stand out from so many of the other singer-songwriter albums released this year is that DeMent inhabits not just the songs or the stories or the lyrics, but the complete foundational image of the album. I hear artists who write honest songs that spill the beans or recall stories of their past, or explore the sounds of life around them. But they take those tasks one at a time, hoping the effort pulls together in the end for some estimation of continuity. DeMent crawls into the body of the music and looks out through the eyes of the songs, speaks with the language and inflection of the landscape. The difference is embodiment.
DeMent has been singing from this spirit for her whole career, but I got the feeling she had been eyeing and circling that skin for years; on this album, she discovered the way to crawl inside it. A less developed artist might “Sing the Songs of the Delta” or “Sing About the Delta.” DeMent cuts the crap and just sings the delta. An exceptional effort. Listen to it now if you haven’t yet, or turn it on again and hear the food cooking on the stove, the children yelling, and beyond all that, the river’s persistent flow.
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