Time & Perspective Quote by Iris DeMent

DeMent frames songwriting less as inspiration than as a coping technology: a slow-burn mind that can’t simply “let it go” finally finds a pressure valve. The first sentence is almost stubborn in its repetition - “bothers me… bothers me” - a plainspoken loop that mimics rumination itself. She’s describing the kind of emotional persistence that, in another context, gets pathologized as overthinking. Here, it’s reclaimed as the engine of craft.

The subtext is quietly defiant: if the world won’t resolve what’s nagging at you, you build a private courtroom where feeling can testify. “Work it out” is telling; it’s therapy language, but also labor language. DeMent isn’t romanticizing pain as fuel. She’s insisting on process - taking discomfort seriously enough to stay with it until it yields meaning, shape, maybe even mercy.

Context matters because DeMent’s music has always lived in that space where tenderness meets hard realism: small-town religiosity, mortality, family history, the ache of American life without the slogans. In country and folk traditions, there’s a long lineage of turning personal grief into communal narrative, but DeMent’s line emphasizes duration. The bother lasts. Art arrives not as escape, but as a method for living alongside the unsolved.

The intent reads like a subtle manifesto against the culture of instant emotional turnover. Her music doesn’t erase the irritation; it metabolizes it, converting lingering unease into something you can carry - a melody, a story, a room where listeners recognize their own unfinished business.