Iron & Wine

Country-blues-flavored tracks like Creek’s “The Rooster Moans” belie a breadth of musical vocabulary that rivals Jack White’s. And Beam seems to be working his way back through a path carved by the great rock auteurs, to the pre-Smithsonian era when Son House sang with a gritty, sweat-soaked poetry. Beam’s writing never gives in to a jaded or purely ironic tone—and in 2007, that’s no small accomplishment. As with most roots-oriented music, the accusation that Beam’s writing gives in to a certain amount of nostalgia is not completely unmerited; but, if so, nostalgia rarely cut so deep or sounded so pertinent.

What Iron and Wine’s music seems to be urging toward more than anything is innocence, and the touchstones in this quest are frequently religious in nature. Beginning with his very first album, Beam’s writing has often used the specific language of Christianity, in lines like “Jesus, a friend of the weaker ones said, ‘I’m all they stole from you,’” (The Creek Drank the Cradle’s “Southern Anthem”) or the heartfelt prayer of Our Endless Numbered Days’ “On Your Wings”: “God give us love in the time that we have / God, there are guns growing out of our bones / God, every road takes us farther from home.” But while it may puzzle some that a self-confessed agnostic like Beam would find consistent inspiration in biblical images and characters that are as likely to converse with the Holy Spirit as they are to address a love interest, for Beam it’s a natural, essential part of his writing process. “I like to use [religious images] because it starts you off a little bit further along in the story. You know, you could say Bob and Jerry did this, but then you have to explain who they are. But if you say ‘Cain and Abel’ it carries a certain weight. They have a connotation everyone understands, they symbolize the duality in us all. ... I like using those, because it’s our mythology.”

Yet Beam has always insisted that the role of religion in his writing avoids propaganda of any kind. “I think there’s always been kind of a subversive quality to the way I use religion. I mean, I try to use it both ways, you know, because that’s the way life is. There are some great things about religion but there’s some really f—ed-up stuff about it too.” It seems that part of religion’s appeal for Beam is the down-and-out or desperate state of mind individuals are usually in when they find themselves asking religious questions. Such characters always make for a compelling narrative.

With a second round of mojitos on deck and a crackling, dry August heat making its presence felt on Guero’s outside porch, Beam pursues this line of thought further. It turns out that religion is not merely a cultural shorthand or creative prop for Beam but, like Johnny Cash before him, it constitutes one of the only three topics he’s genuinely interested in as a writer. “You have your three big things that you can talk about, basically, if you’re going to write something that actually means something to you as a human being, which is Love, God and Death. That’s basically the thing. Love, which occupies a lot of our time, because we don’t like being lonely. God, because everyone wants to know that there’s a reason behind what they’re doing and what the hell is going on. And death is just the reality of your finite time here.”

But Beam also realizes that writers can’t simply copy and paste spiritual gravity into their work by invoking weighty topics. It’s just that when he and his muses are cooperating, these are the themes that seem to provoke his best work. “Whatever gets your creative juice flowing. Some people write amazing protest songs because they want things to be right. That doesn’t float my boat but I say that there’s three things, there’s three guideposts, but it’s not like a math problem where you touch on one of them and it’s a decent song. I have lots of other interests, but there’s something about when you sit down to write something you want to sing over and over again, it usually comes down to one of those three things.”

Beam followed up Creek with 2004’s Our Endless Numbered Days, a studio-driven effort that ably avoided the dreaded sophomore slump as well as the loss of vitality that tends to plague more highly polished recordings. If anything, Endless improved and expanded on Creek’s sustained intimacy, and produced what is probably the definitive Iron and Wine track to date, “Naked As We Came.” Beam directed the video as one long tracking shot—beautiful and patient as the song itself. Opening at one end of a long table set in quasi still-life form, with food, books and other objects stacked at intervals, the camera moves slowly down the setting as “Naked” proceeds like a campfire hymn. As the camera reaches the end of table we see a boy and girl kiss and blush, and then run off as rain (or a sprinkler) begins to shower them. The camera retraces its path back up the table, as the drops soak into food and paper. “With a video you’re able to revisit a work, and touch on the same loose themes, but it’s tangential. For that song I wanted the feeling of time passing. I kind of ran with an image I had after watching this Peter Weir film called Picnic at Hanging Rock, where these girls get lost. There’s a moment where he showed the passing of time, with desserts and food, then he pans away and cuts back to show bugs and things.”

Beam’s restless, prolific creativity grows impatient with the slow pace of music-industry release calendars. This is part of the reason why his EPs The Sea and The Rhythm and Woman King are more than side-projects or repositories for lesser tracks. In fact, both are as complete and satisfying as his full-length releases. “I like short records in general that you can swallow in one sitting. So I like the format, but at the same time, the promotional engines that go into making records these days, it’s kind of stagnating. It’s almost frowned upon to put out anything more than every three years. This was a way to do it under the radar. I try to make it cohesive, not just throwaways. That’s why I do it, basically just to keep working.”