(cancelled) Grammy-nominated singer-songwriter Iris DeMent delivers quality over quantity.

Iris DeMent would rather go hungry than write or perform songs she doesn’t believe in.

“If I wrote songs that I didn’t think of as medicine for the world, then I wouldn’t leave my house,” DeMent says. “I’m pretty happy at home; I have a lot of things that I love to do [like gardening] and a lot of people that I love. So why would I go on the road with songs that didn’t move me?”

Across a career that covers more than 20 years, the Arkansas native has recorded only four full-length records of all original songs. DeMent’s 1994 recording, Lifeline, is compiled mostly of traditional gospel sings like Fanny Crosby’s “Blessed Assurance” and G.T. Speer’s “I Never Shall Forget the Day.” Her most recent release, Sing the Delta, which came out last October, marks DeMent’s first album of all-original material since her 1996 LP The Way I Should.

The singer-songwriter made peace with her measured pace as a songwriter and doesn’t mind that she’ll never be regarded as a prolific musician.

“We have things that we dream and want, and we have what we have,” DeMent says. “I can’t tell you the day or the time when I came to the place where I was able to accept that I don’t write a lot of songs, but it’s been a few years now.”

Though the songs come sporadically, when they do arrive they’re usually coated in gold and the reception is consistently strong: DeMent’s 1994 sophomore record My Life scored a Grammy nod in Contemporary Folk and her follow-up, The Way I Should, also garnered a nomination. Her potent songwriting has earned admiration from some of songwriting’s elite like Steve Earle, Merle Haggard, Emmylou Harris and John Prine, who invited DeMent to sing four duets with him on his 1999 record In Spite of Ourselves.

“When I talk about writing, I mean writing stuff that holds up and does me some good – and when I go out into the world, it can do other people some good,” DeMent says.

She describes Sing the Delta as 12 songs that speak from her soul, come from her heart and have the potential to bring goodness into the world.

“These are the kind of songs I want to sing,” DeMent says. “I can’t make them come around all the time, but when I get a batch of them, I put them on a record and go out and sing them for people.

“When something moves me, that’s what I’m looking for in songs. I’m not looking for lyrical perfection or trying to outdo somebody else or trying to outdo myself,” she adds. “I judge whether a song is ready to sing for people by the way it feels inside me.”

Tonight, DeMent will share her soul-baring Americana at the Monterey Conference Center’s Steinbeck Forum – a show originally set to take place at the troubled Golden State Theatre – with open seating and semi-local, country-blues favorite Mike Beck opening.

“As far as putting a pencil to paper and sitting around and dreaming things up, I never quit doing that,” DeMent says. “For whatever reason, I don’t land on those meaningful, powerful songs that often.”

From start to finish, DeMent definitely landed meaningful and powerful songs with Sing the Delta. Immersed in country, folk and gospel – and lyrics with the descriptive bite of a Raymond Carver short story – the record is an intimate portrait painted in virtuous blood, blue-collar sweat and salty tears.

DeMent sits down at the piano to pound out sketches of vibrant, one-of-a-kind family images in her biographical “If That Ain’t Love”:

“My dad worked at the Movieland Wax Museum/ He was the guy who kept the cobwebs off Sophia Loren/ Every morning at five he’d get up and go to work/ Wearing his name across the pocket of his shirt.”

DeMent unleashes sultry twang – evocative of an Emmylou Harris-Patty Griffin superhuman singing machine – with effortless elegance as she lets go of “all those things that held me down” on the country ballad “Makin’ My Way Back Home.”

But the album closer, “Out of the Fire,” is one of Sing the Delta’s most compelling tracks; DeMent’s vocals resound with impressive might, almost as if she’s singing from a Himalayan mountaintop. She confronts religion and all its trappings through impenitent prose immersed in personification and metaphor: “Once you were the dawn, the dusk and the night/ Without the dream of holding you tight/ My days turned to black, I could hardly take a breath/ I stumbled my way through a fate worse than death.”

“It doesn’t really matter to me whether a song has lyrics about something that happened a while ago or about something that’s happening now, or something that might happen in the future,” DeMent explains. “If the song is deeply moving, then I can’t think of a better reason to sing it.”

Iris DeMent and Mike Beck perform at 8pm, Thursday, June 27, in the Steinbeck Forum at the Monterey Conference Center, 2 Portola Plaza, Monterey. $27. 649-4511.

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