Iris Dement - The Way I Should (1996)

Iris DeMent's 1994 My Life is the best country album released in the 1990s. Yet with its gorgeous string-band arrangements and its heartbreaking tales of home and family, it's so timeless it could just as easily have been released in the '30s as the '90s. By contrast, there's no mistaking which decade DeMent's album, The Way I Should, comes from, with its crossover-country sound and its references to Calvin Klein, MTV, child abuse, "quality time," and Beavis and Butt-head. Nonetheless DeMent's twangy Arkansas soprano and detail-filled lyrics are as sharply original as ever. DeMent's voice seems to glow on "This Kind of Happy," a love song co-written with her outspoken admirer, Merle Haggard, and on the prayer-like "Keep Me God." -- Geoffrey Himes