Iris DeMent likes to play the long game. When the Pentecostal-raised but avowedly agnostic 31-year-old from Kansas City, Missouri, made her John Prine-cosigned debut on the alt-country/Americana stage, she opened her first album, 1992’s Infamous Angel, with a succinctly perfect verse that laid the foundation for a career-spanning concept of secular spirituality: “Everybody is a wonderin’ what and where they all came from / Everybody is a worryin’ ’bout where they’re gonna go when the whole thing’s done / But no one knows for certain and so it’s all the same to me / I think I’ll just let the mystery be.”
Published as part of InRO Weekly — Volume 1, Issue 9.
