The Lisa Smith Wengler Center for the Arts Presents Iris DeMent

Grammy-nominated folk and gospel-tinged singer-songwriter Iris DeMent brings her "heady, heart-stopping music" to Pepperdine University's Smothers Theatre in Malibu on Thursday, September 29 at 8 p.m.

Tickets, priced starting at $20 for the public and $10 for full-time Pepperdine students, are available now by calling (310) 506-4522 or online athttp://arts.pepperdine.edu/. More information about Iris DeMent available at http://irisdement.com/

There's no getting around that the music is in Iris DeMent. Beginning with her 1992 debut, Infamous Angel, which was hailed as "an essential album of the 1990's" by Rolling Stone, DeMent released a series of stellar records that established her as "one of the finest singer-songwriters in America" according to The Guardian. The music earned her multiple Grammy nominations, as well as the respect of peers like John Prine, Steve Earle, and Emmylou Harris, who all invited her to collaborate. Merle Haggard dubbed her "the best singer I've ever heard" and asked her to join his touring band, and David Byrne and Natalie Merchant famously covered her "Let The Mystery Be" as a duet on MTV Unplugged. DeMent returned in 2012 with her album, Sing The Delta, which prompted NPR to call her "one of the great voices in contemporary popular music" and The Boston Globe to hail the collection as "a work of rare, unvarnished grace and power."

There's no getting around that the music is in DeMent. "Growing up, a lot of what I understood about my parents-and many of the adults in my life that were nurturing me-I understood through music," explains DeMent, who was born the youngest of 14 children in Arkansas and raised in southern California. "I remember noticing that people seem to be most their real selves when they were in the music. My dad would cry and my mom would wave her arms around when they sang church music."

Twenty-fours years after her debut, she's creating some of the most poignant music of her career, bridging two seemingly disparate worlds with every note of her most recent album The Trackless Woods, which sets Russian poet Anna Akhmatova's poetry to music for the first time ever.

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." "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.' I think if you listen to her poems, you can hear all that sorrow and that burden in them, but there's always a lightness, a transcendence somehow, a sense of victory over all that inhumanity that she was living with every day of her life." And DeMent's voice is the perfect carrier for this nuanced, joyful, sorrowful, and complicated human experience.

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