DSP Shows Presents:
Iris DeMent w/ pieta brown
Sunday, June 30th
Gateway City Arts | Holyoke, MA
Show 8pm | Doors 6pm
Food will be available from The Bistro at Gateway City Arts until 10pm. The bar will be open until the end of the show. Call (413) 650-0786 for more information about dining at Gateway City Arts.
Iris DeMent
https://www.irisdement.com/
It was by pure chance that Iris DeMent opened the book of Russian poetry sitting on her piano bench to Anna Akhmatova’s “Like A White Stone.” She’d never heard of the poet before, and didn’t even consider herself much of a poetry buff, but a friend had lent her the anthology and it only seemed polite that she skim it enough to have something interesting to say when she returned it. As she read, though, a curious sensation swept over her.
“I didn’t feel like I was alone anymore,” remembers DeMent. “I felt as if somebody walked in the room and said to me, ‘Set that to music.’”
So she did. The melody just poured out of her almost instantly. She turned the page and it happened again, and again after that, and before she even fully understood it, she was already deep into writing what would become ‘The Trackless Woods,’ an album which sets Akhmatova’s poetry to music for the first time ever.
There’s no getting around that the music is in DeMent, too. Twenty-three years after her debut, she’s creating some of the most poignant music of her career, bridging two seemingly disparate worlds with every note.
