Beginning with her 1992 debut, Infamous Angel, which was hailed as "an essential album of the 1990s" 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 Sing The Delta, which prompted NPR to call her "one of the great voices in contemporary popular music" and The Boston Globe to hail that collection as "a work of rare, unvarnished grace and power."
Her current release, The Trackless Woods, is an album which sets the poetry of Russian poet Anna Akhmatova to music for the first time ever.