One in the Sacred Now, Ana Egge and Iris DeMent at Knuckleheads Garage

 

Iris DeMent and Ana Egge

I’ve been sitting with it for a week. One morning I wake up, and “The Sacred Now” jangles in my head telling me that’s the heart of the show. The next morning, “Heart Is a Mirror” says it’s the introduction that led to “Sacred’s” conclusion. I abandoned a draft.

 In many ways, Ana Egge and Iris DeMent's show at Knucklehead's Garage was such a simple and direct statement from both. But it’s hard to overestimate the complexity and power of what that means in this fragile new world of rejoining one another in public.

 At one point during DeMent’s set, she said, “Did someone tell you all to be quiet?” 

We laughed. 

“If I’m not talking, you can get to know your neighbor.”

 It was indeed that quiet. Egge had set the hushed, warm tone of a roomful of friends getting to know each other, more interested in listening than talking. It’s the way she celebrated the “Cocaine Cowboys” with no apologies, the way she talked about the girls of New York with the ghost of Lou Reed and her friend Anthony by her side.

 Egge sings with a soft but solid push that reaches across the room. When she sang the words “Sweet Jane,” I felt like I needed to revisit The Cowboy Junkies’ Margo Timmins. I’m not comparing the two singers so much as I heard a sense of lineage, and this new voice so perfectly of this moment. 

As she sang about a father mechanic and his daughter who struggles to connect with him, as she danced around the room with her own daughter, as she remembered a moment when it seemed everyone in the world was transfixed by an eclipse (when ideologies didn’t matter, just our shared humanity), time and again Egge drew the room close.

 On the opening performance of Egge's new single, “Heart Is a Mirror,” bassist Chris Donahue vamped a bit for the instrumental break. Egge noted, “We start the show with a bass solo.”

 Donahue would be out there all night. He was the musical heart, always the pulse. What better place to start?  

Iris, Chris, Ana play

 It was on DeMent’s “Say A Good Word” that the three first shared the stage, also at the precise midpoint of the evening. DeMent spent the main set at the piano. She began with a couple of songs in the personal, almost private vein Egge took, both from Sing the Delta, DeMent's first home. But then she sang the marching “Working on A World,” a song that declares “privilege just to be working on a world that I may never see.”

 That’s when she called out Egge.

DeMent began quietly, in a voice not that distant from Egge’s, “The home’s become such an angry place/Friends now wear an enemy’s face/The chasm’s grown so wide….”

 This is right where both artists work, shouting across that chasm even as they whisper. It made perfect sense when DeMent built a bridge out of the word “magnanimity,” read like a phrase from another language, making us believe there’s a way forward.

 When Egge left the stage again, DeMent began to fight through the thickets of that belief. Armed with gospel chords that occasionally sprawled and expressed everything from confusion to jubilance, DeMent anchored her set at the intersection of blues and freedom songs, honoring John Lewis, Rachel Corrie, and that person fighting by your side.

She would talk about Mahalia Jackson as “a real woman” and identify the Good Samaritan as “the real one,” not the demagogue of the moment. She would even give voice to a character from Chekhov, after a quick tender story about her college professor with a trunk of dog-eared books. “The Cherry Orchard” would speak through a woman facing the end of everything she knows, as aristocracy gave way to capitalism, managing to find new life in death.

Darkness in light and light in darkness wove their way through the night, DeMent admitting, “there is no separating the good stuff from the bad,” Egge acknowledging “There’s never going to be a way to make this easy,” the two together saying, “Life is so hard, who isn’t scarred?”  

Knuckleheads before the show

Perhaps DeMent’s bravest statement came with the song “Goin’ Down to Sing in Texas.” Starting with the level of fear in a fascist state (not just the one in the title but increasingly the whole of the country and the world), the song pays homage to the Chicks for taking the heat for what they said about their Governor, the one who started not only the longest American war in history but the one just after it, the one that drew the most antiwar protest since Vietnam. She not only ripped the “war criminal” who lied about WMDs, and all his celebrity friends, but she called out, “Hey, Mr. Bezos, I’m talking to you.” She declared herself right by the side of all Americans taking a knee against police violence. This declaration--along with the Biblical promise that the very "rocks will cry out" at such injustice--drew the loudest applause of the evening.

Back when she first sang “Wasteland of the Free” in 1996 (a song she didn't need to sing this night to make the point), she railed against a world where “the poor have now become the enemy.”  With “Texas,” she makes it clear what her enemy is.

It's the opposite vision of “The Sacred Now,” the song for which she brought Egge back to close the set. This Byrds-like rocker offered the perfect meeting place for these two voices (hell with Donahue’s consistent support, three voices). “We remember, then forget again,” they sang. “All is lost,” then, “some hope is found.”

But “those who stand to gain draw dividing lines,” DeMent sang. The enemies are those trying to separate this room the whole night’s been about bringing together. “We can’t speak,” she acknowledges, “but still somehow, we all share the sacred now.” The most political line in the whole song is “it’s not a dream, it’s the sacred now.” That, coupled with the encore, “Let the Mystery Be,” declared it time--to set ideological divisions aside and build what's possible out of this sacred space.