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• Iris Dement

Iris Dement has been writing songs for more than 30 years but her very first song, "Our Town," which she wrote at the age of 25, might still be her most enduring. Its plain and plaintive liturgy about home and the people who live there crosses the geography of the earth and sets up street signs in the heart and the soul without obviously demarcating the train tracks dividing those zones. Her words describe the simple beauty of an old lover's face, which reminds you of youth or a broken-down car, which reminds you of real freedom. She was one of my late mother's favorite songwriters and my mother was nothing if not a real fan of simple and profound sentiment in songwriting. If you have tickets to Dement's sold-out show at the Old Steeple at 7:30 p.m. tonight, don't be surprised if you see a guy who looks like me in the back of the room smiling through damp eyes ($50, $45 advance).