Cryin' into the skillet
brief notes on John Prine and Iris DeMent
This is a slightly cleaned-up version of an email to a friend who wrote me how excited he was that his son had just turned him on to John Prine.
Well, winter has finally hit Calgary, it's minus 29 Celsius outside, and I'm avoiding taking Alice for her walk. So let me write about John Prine and Iris DeMent instead.
John died early in the first COVID wave in 2020, back in the days when fewer people, armed with the certainty that can only come from denying the existence of what you fear the most, were insisting that COVID is just a flu/cold/hoax/devilish deepstate plot to take away our godgiven freedoms. Back when such losses still came as a shock, before we normalized the denial and exiled the deaths into the far blue yonder.
After John's death, Iris DeMent wrote a brief tribute in Rolling Stone.
"John Prine was, without a doubt, one of the greatest songwriters this world will ever know. Many people more qualified than me have written about why that is. And many more will follow. Greatest or not, here’s what it comes down to for me and here’s why he rests on my heart’s mountain top: Because he cared enough to look—at me, you, all of us—until he saw what was noble, and then he wrapped us up in melodies and sung us back to ourselves.
That was the miracle of John Prine. And it was enough."
Prine belongs right up there with the great singer-songwriter troubadors like Willie Nelson, Townes Van Zandt, and Guy Clark, even if he doesn't hail from Texas. Nor does Lucinda Williams—she's from Lake Charles, Louisiana.
John Prine was born on October 10, 1946, in Maywood, Illinois. Iris Dement was born on January 5, 1961, in Paragould, Arkansas. Their duets are legendary. If you haven’t heard it, check out their hilarious, wise, and heartwarming "In Spite of Ourselves."
John was one of Iris's early champions. In the sleeve notes for her first album, 1992's Infamous Angel, he recalled how she once made him cry into his skillet of pork chops.
“DeMent starts singing about 'Mama’s Opry.' And being the sentimental fellow I am, I got a lump in my throat and a tear fell from my eyes into the hot oil.”
You might know the opening track of the album, "Let the mystery be," as the theme tune for the last two series of the excellent TV show The Leftovers.
We saw Iris on February 16, 2014, at the Cactus Cafe in Austin, Texas. She performed solo for the best part of two hours because her backing band, caught in a snowstorm on the east coast, never showed up.
"Notoriously shy, DeMent semi-hid behind a grand piano most of the night," the Austin Chronicle reported. "'I'd sing behind a sheet if I could,' she acknowledged."
Much of Iris’s repertoire that night was drawn from her 2012 album Sing the Delta, one of my top ten Albums of 2012. This was her first recording of original material in 16 years, since 1996’s The Way I Should. Sing the Delta has many echoes of the Protestant gospel songs on her 2004 album Lifeline that she grew up hearing her mom sing, even if the story she tells in “The night I learned how not to pray” (“God does what God wants to any way”) might shake the firmest of faiths.
DeMent followed up in 2015 with an album of settings of translated poems by the Russian poet Anna Akhmatova, The Trackless Woods.
We had to wait until last year for another album of original material, Workin' on a World, which made it into my 2023 Albums of the Year.
What inspired—if that is the right word—many of the songs on DeMent’s latest album was Donald Trump's election in November 2016, which left her "devastated." It's a righteous collection, her most overtly political set ever.
"I'm going down to sing in Texas," begins one especially coruscating song, "where anybody can carry a gun":
But we will all be so much safer there, the biggest lie under the sun
Go ahead and shoot me if it floats your little boat
But I'll live by my conscience even if that's all she wrote
I'm going down to sing in Texas where anybody can carry a gun
If you want to get to the heart of Iris DeMent—and the heart of the American heartland—you must listen to "Easy's gettin' harder every day," from her second album My Life.
One of the bleakest, saddest, most beautiful songs ever written. But you'll know why the good lord gave her that sweet, piercing, girly voice.
You'll cry into the skillet too.