LEANING:

Her return comes on the heels of a long creative drought. She had to wait for the songs to come. "I was trying to write and the writing wasn't happening," says Ms. Dement, who is 51. "You can call it whatever name you put on that condition."

An epic case of writers block perhaps. Whatever the term, the long absence pained loyal fans first wowed by Ms. Dement's 1992 debut, "Infamous Angel," an album that featured two widely covered tunes, "Let the Mystery Be" and "Our Town."

Despite the insider buzz and positive reviews for follow-up albums in 1993 ("My Life") and 1996 ("The Way I Should"), Ms. Dement remained little-known to the music listening world at large. "In Spite of Ourselves," her deliciously ribald 1999 duet with John Prine, from an album of the same name, became a coveted cult item but was seldom heard on the radio, in part because of lyrics that Ms. Dement knew would make her own Pentecostal-church-going mother blush. "I love singing it but I never sent that CD to my mom," she says. "So as far as she knew, I was never on a John Prine record." Also on Mr. Prine's album of duets: "(We're Not) The Jet Set" ("We're the old Chevrolette-set..."), which George Jones and Tammy Wynette made famous.

Ms. Dement made another stealth attack on the zeitgeist in 2010 when her version of the hymn "Leaning On The Everlasting Arms" (from her 2004 collection of gospel standards, "Lifeline") provided the coda to the Coen brothers film, "True Grit;" but few realized whose voice was raising their goosebumps.

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