Doors open at 7:30 p.m., show starts at 8:30 p.m. Friday May 3. $25 in advance, $27.50 at the door. Variety Playhouse, 1099 Euclid Ave. N.E., Atlanta.
Iris DeMent didn’t fall off the face of the earth after her third album more than a decade ago.
She kept touring despite not having a new disc to sell.
“To my amazement, I continued to have an audience through that, and my love for singing never went away,” DeMent said. “So I guess that came across to the audience and they kept showing up. But boy, it sure feels good to have a bunch of new songs.”
Her fourth album, “Sing the Delta” came out last October.
She plays the Variety Playhouse May 3, accompanied by a bassist, drummer and multi-instrumentalist playing guitar, pedal steel guitar and mandolin.
That will allow DeMent to re-create the fleshed out arrangements of many of her new songs.
“I’m playing most of the songs from the new record, and then every night I mix in some of the other ones that I have laying around,” DeMent said of her shows. “It’s based on how we feel.”
DeMent’s lost decade and a half was not anticipated considering her hot start.
She immediately caught the attention of critics and fans of traditional country with her 1992 debut, “Infamous Angel,” which showcased her plain-spoken but potent lyricism, strong melodies and her ringing but twangy vocals. Her reputation grew with 1994’s “My Life,” which was nominated for a Grammy Award for best contemporary folk album. Next came, “The Way I Should,” in 1996, followed by that 16-year gap in original material. DeMent did release an album of gospel covers, “Lifeline,” in 2004.
After that, the years passed and she was unable to come up with songs for a new album. DeMent learned to live with the situation.
“I dealt with it the same way you deal with anything else you can’t control,” she said. “You just get up and go on and do something else. I mean, life is full of things like that that seem to want to come in their own time, and I just accepted that. The good thing that came with that is, among other things, it provided me the time, not just literally in terms of clock time, but mental time and emotional space to become a mom, which is pretty wonderful.”
For DeMent, “Sing The Delta” started to come together when she wrote the title song about 18 months ago. Until then, she had about a half dozen songs written over a period of years. But they didn’t seem connected – until the song “Sing The Delta” happened.
She wrote it at a time when the health of her mother, then 93, began to slip, and DeMent realized how much her mother had embodied and passed along the culture of the Arkansas Delta region.
“…It was the beginning of my ability to see a thread between all of the things I had written up to that point that I hadn’t recorded,” DeMent said.
The Delta region and its culture figures into nearly all of the finely detailed lyrics on the new album, as DeMent sings of family, faith, her childhood and the simple, hardscrabble life that was typical of the area.
Stylistically, “Sing The Delta” reflects the Delta region, touching not only on traditional country (“If That Ain’t Love” and “Before The Colors Fade”) but gospel-laced R&B (“The Kingdom Has Already Come” and the title track) and even some New Orleans soul (“Go On Ahead And Go Home”). One major difference with her earlier albums is that DeMent uses piano – instead of guitar — as her primary instrument on most of the songs.
“My first instrument was the piano, and I actually moved away from that when I started writing songs and making records just because I couldn’t travel with a piano,” she said.
“But at home, that’s the instrument I’ve always headed back to. I didn’t realize it until I was in the studio that I had written almost all of these songs on the piano. So it just seemed natural that I would sit down and play them that way. It felt really good to me, returning to that.”
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