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Notes from Now: Travelling to Newcastle with Iris DeMent
On the train ride from London to Newcastle, listening to the new Iris DeMent album, her first song, Workin’on a World, filled me. The English landscape on its east coast side slipped by, the flat farmlands, small streams, sheep, scruffy yards, pop up new villages with their square family houses circling like wagons on a plain, old villages with their worn stones, fields with solar panel crops; winter trees. I felt affection from a distance for my adopted country, the music carrying me into a sense of belonging to a wider story, as if we were all together on a journey along a track whose beginning we do not know and whose end we cannot see.
Iris had been on the tape player of my banged up old Honda a lot in my twenties, when I was still in California, singing in her nasal twang. Now here she was again, decades later, telling me a story about waking up in the early hours soaked in anxiety, the voice in her head trying to remind her, she is only “working on a world” she will never see — “just like the ancestors and lovers who came before me.” I have woken up in the early hours soaked in anxiety many times in my life, but for a while now, the anxiety has not been only for myself, but for the world my children will inhabit, so I appreciated Iris reminding me I was not alone.
