Oscar Buzz: Who's ahead in this year's key races?
the everybodyfields - "Worth Keeping"
Album Stream: Listen to Mindy Smith's Christmas album My Holiday
Today is World AIDS Day. Appropriately enough, it's also the day that the line-up was revealed for Dark Was the Night, a compilation release which will benefit AIDS/HIV awareness group, The Red Hot Organization.
Twilight author Stephenie Meyer has made no secrets about her love of music and how certain songs and bands have played into her writing, especially Muse. Each of the books in the series have come with a playlist, posted by Meyer on her official website, and she's thanked a handful of bands in each of her credits.
It takes little more than a (rare) fogless fall day to make a trip to San Francisco's Golden Gate Park worth quite a trek, but the long list of artists gracing its green fields during the Hardly Strictly Bluegrass festival might help considerably if travel plans were somehow still in question. Oh, and the shows are free.
Sam Beam & Co. are already hitting the European festival circuit hard, and they'll return Stateside to play a slew of dates across the U.S. and Canada on into November.
Rothbury kicked into high gear on Friday, as Jakob Dylan ushered in the afternoon with a set of dusty Americana tunes. Sporting a wide-brimmed hat and sunglasses that could've reflected a nuclear blast, Dylan looked like Sheriff Cooley from O Brother, Where Art Thou? while singing in a comfortable, cool baritone. “Let me be the first up here to say ‘Happy 4th of July,’” he said, drawing applause from the crowd of Wallflowers fans and wandering passerby.
Calexico will release its latest album, Carried to Dust, this fall on Touch and Go/Quarterstick, featuring a revolving door of musicians and special guests.
Sensitive souls take heart; Iron & Wine has added a few dates to its U.S. tour in April. The U.S. shows are scheduled between international jaunts for Sam Beam, Sam Beam’s beard, and Co. In March, the band will be in Australia and New Zealand. In May, it'll be in England, Ireland and Scotland.
Alternately, you can just wait until June and see Iron & Wine at Bonnaroo with like every other band in the universe.
Complete U.S. dates:
April
9 - New Orleans, La. @ House of Blues
10 - Tallahassee, Fla. @ The Moon
11 - Orlando, Fla. @ The Plaza Theatre
12 - Ft. Lauderdale, Fla. @ Revolution Live
13 - Jacksonville, Fla. @ Freebird Live
14 - Atlanta, Ga. @ Variety Playhouse
15 - Chapel Hill, N.C. @ Memorial Hall
16 - Richmond, Va. @ The National
17 - Greensburg, Pa. @ Palace Theater
18 - Kalamazoo, Mich.@ Royal Oak Theater
19 - Grand Rapids, Mich. @ Calvin College Fine Arts Center
20 - Louisville, Ky. @ Headliners Music Hall
21 - Chicago, Ill. @ Vic Theatre
22 - Chicago, Ill. @ Vic Theatre
June
14 - Manchester, Tenn. @ Bonnaroo
Related links:
Paste: Iron and Wine announces tour dates
IronandWine.com
Iron & Wine on MySpace
Got news tips for Paste? E-mail news@pastemagazine.com.
Google the phrase "Sam Beam looks like." Just do it.
Now that you've had a good laugh at the expense of the extremely talented singer/songerwriter (And really, what's wrong with you?), let's get down to business. Today, via Iron & Wine's MySpace blog, Beam (or, more likely, Beam's manager) announced that the group will partake of a brief, eight-date tour this April.
For those of you outside of Louisiana, Florida, Georgia, Michigan and Kentucky, go ahead and begin the requisite fan begging for more dates/towns/venues in the comment section of the blog, because Beam won't be seeing you this go-round. He's lived his life in the South, and in the South he'll remain for this tour. (Expect that one date up in Michigan. Technicalities!)
Last year, Beam released his third studio album, The Shepherd's Dog, to much critical acclaim. Not only did the album debut at number 24 on the Billboard 200 chart, but it was also named the tenth best album of the year by none other than the very magazine that this here website belongs to.
Get ready for the upcoming mini-tour by watching the following music video of "Boy With A Coin," and then head over here to purchase tickets - but hurry! It's a pre-sale, and there are only a limited number currently available for the taking.
Southern Comfort:
April:
9 - New Orleans, La. @ House of Blues
10 - Tallahassee, Fla. @ The Moon FSU
11 - Orlando, Fla. @ The Plaza Theatre
12 - Ft Lauderdale, Fla. @ Revolution Live
13 - Jacksonville, Fla. @ Freebird Live
14 - Atlanta, Ga. @ Variety Playhouse
19 - Grand Rapids, Mich. @ Calvin College Fine Arts Center
20 - Louisville, Ky. @ Headliners Music Hall
Related links:
Paste: Signs of Life 2007 : Best Music
Paste: Review of Iron & Wine
"The Shepherd's Dog"
Iron & Wine on Myspace
Got news tips for Paste? E-mail news@pastemagazine.com.
Sam Beam is the man that keeps on giving. First, he delighted us with the release of The Shepherd’s Dog. Then, he extended his band's North American tour dates. Now, Beam will be distributing his gift of song across the European continent.
Already scheduled for shows in the U.K., Iron & Wine will be extending its stay on the east side of the Atlantic through Jan. 30. For more information regarding tour dates and buying tickets be sure to check out the band’s tour page.
Dates:
November
2 - Bristol, England @ St. George's
3 - Nottingham, England @ Rescue Rooms
4 - Reading, England @ Reading Arts Concert Hall
26 - Tucson, Ariz. @ Fox Tucson Theatre
27 - San Diego, Calif. @ 4th & B
28 - Los Angeles, Calif. @ Orpheum Theatre
30 - Oakland, Calif. @ The Paramount Theater
December
2 - Portland, Ore. @ Crystal Ballroom
3 - Seattle, Wash. @ Moore Theater
4 - Bellingham, Wash. @ Mt. Baker Theatre
6 - Boise, Idaho @ Egyptian Theatre
7 - Magna, Utah @ The Great Saltair
8 - Denver, Colo. @ Paramount Theatre
9 - Albuquerque, N.M. @ El Rey Theater
10 - Dallas, Texas @ Palladium Ballroom
11 - Austin, Texas @ La Zona Rosa
January
14 - Barcelona, Spain @ Apolo
15 - Milan, Italy @ MusicDrome
16 - Vienna, Austria @ Szene
17 - Dachau, Germany @ St. Jakob-Kirche
18 - Brussels, Belgium @ Ancienne Belgique
19 - Paris, France @ Divan du Monde
20 - Hamburg, Germany @ Fabrik
21 - Aarhus, Denmark @ Voxhall
22 - Stockholm, Sweden @ Södra Teatern
23 - Oslo, Norway @ Rockefeller
24 - Lund, Sweden @ Mejeriet
25 - Copenhagen, Denmark @ Lille Vega
26 - Cologne, Germany @ KultureKirche
27 - Amsterdam, Netherlands @ Paradiso
28 - Frankfurt, Germany @ Mousonturm
29 - Bielefeld, Germany @ Forum
30 - Berlin, Germany @ Passionskirche
Related links:
IronandWine.com
Paste: Iron & Wine: Growing a Bard
Iron & Wine on MySpace
Got news tips for Paste? Email news@pastemagazine.com.
Guero’s Taco Bar in Austin, Texas, sits near the top of South Congress Avenue—a steep, buzzing thoroughfare that slouches casually toward downtown over the South Congress Avenue bridge (with its famous bat population) and resolves on the steps of the State Capital. The popular taqueria is where I’m meeting Sam Beam, sole proprietor and architect of one of the most surprising and welcome musical success stories of the last five years, Iron and Wine. On the west side of the street, among the restaurants and vintage record stores, a circus poster hangs in the window of a shop that, apparently, deals exclusively in circus posters. “Burly Bill,” it says, “Strongest Beard in the World,” and indeed our Bill is depicted lifting a cast-iron cannon muzzle with his painfully taut whiskers. Burly Bill also happens to be a ringer for Beam, whose own soup-catcher may constitute the most impressive facial growth for a folksinger this side of Richie Havens. It seems like Austin would fit Sam Beam like the record sleeve on a vinyl 78. Iron and Wine makes literate, eclectic, deeply affecting folk and roots music that takes its place unselfconsciously beside that of such Austin luminaries as Townes Van Zandt (whom Beam cites as a major influence), Jimmie Dale Gilmore and Willis Alan Ramsey. Yes, there was something inevitable about Iron and Wine’s move from South Florida to the Live Music Capital of the World two years ago.
“Yeah I don’t really come to Austin a whole bunch,” he says nonchalantly over our first round of mojitos. Beam actually lives among the outliers of Austin, an hour away, in Dripping Springs. “My wife has family here so we thought we’d live in Austin, but it wasn’t like we came out here [for music]. My wife is a midwife, and there’s only so many states where you can do that. Texas is a place where she can work.” So much for musical and cultural serendipity. Yet this confession seems to fall in line with the rest of Beam’s improbable career, which took him from his birthplace in South Carolina to Virginia, then Florida before ending up in Austin, a residence he suggests at the beginning of our conversation may not be permanent.
With a BFA from Virginia Commonwealth and an MFA from Florida State’s prestigious film school under his belt, as well as a job teaching cinematography, Beam’s main concern with switching from film to music was not that it would represent a major shift in disciplines or a loss of vocational momentum. He was more worried about the demands a music career would entail. “I was just writing songs in my spare time, and recording because it’s fun to do, and Sub Pop called me and said they wanted to put some stuff out. I had to weigh whether I wanted to put the time into it because it’s a commitment. But, in the end, it seemed too good to pass up. We did it and they strongly suggested that we go on tour,” he laughs, “and I had to put a band together, because I didn’t have a band or anything.”
The choice of music over film was, for Beam, mainly one of convenience. “Music kind of picked up, so now I just do that. I never really separated them in my mind. Different creative outlets. If you have a certain amount of creative energy, you apply it to one medium then another. Music is definitely cheaper and more immediate. But part of the draw of film to me is the multidisciplinary aspect. I always enjoyed film writing. It’s got the visual aspect to it, and the music. It has so many things you can dabble with at one time. Music is fun, too. I find music writing a lot more free.”
Sam Beam is not exactly what you’d call calculating. He follows his own muse and sets his own priorities, which seem to boil down to two things: family and creative freedom. “I’ve had a family ever since I started doing this. I was just doing [music] for fun … and then it kind of turned into a career, but I already had kids by then. So it wasn’t like I had to sacrifice everything that I was used to doing. I tour infrequently but I kinda prefer it that way. … I never gigged [before the Sub Pop deal].”
The exigencies of parenthood come up often in conversation with Beam, a father of four girls, ages 4 months to 9 years. “I can always tell the interviewers who don’t have kids,” he muses. “They ask if having kids changes anything [loud laugh]. Of course! It changes everything.”
Beam is nothing if not circumspect. He takes the important things seriously; the rest he takes as it comes. This circumspection, about life in the music industry and life in general, marks his songwriting, as it does for most great songwriters. And yes, for the record, Sam Beam is a great songwriter. He is not, as the offhand nature of his account might suggest, some hobbyist who got lucky. It’s apparent from the opening track of Iron and Wine’s first record The Creek Drank the Cradle that Sam Beam is a craftsman with impressive talent. Set aside the melodicism and deft finger-style guitar work; let the compactness and evocative potency of a single phrase like, “we gladly run in circles / But the shape we meant to make is gone” sink in. There’s hardly a line in Beam’s entire oeuvre that isn’t as carefully considered and acute. Comparisons to Nick Drake came early and often, and with Beam’s breathy delivery and world-weary demeanor, it’s an obvious parallel to make. But Beam’s writing is somehow more sagacious, and it’s not too early to say it carries more heft and wisdom than the ethereal Drake. Where Drake can be timorous and fragile, Beam is steady and gentle, like a master woodsman handling the rarest of flowers. And while he sings with an intimacy that hints at confessionalism, Beam more often taps into the declarative side of Leonard Cohen, and the character-driven perspective of Tom Waits. If this sounds like heady company for such a young and recent talent, it is—and yet Beam continues to justify the comparisons with each record.
His first effort was little more than a set of home recordings culled from two CDs Beam sent in to Sub Pop. The grainy, monophonic Creek was decidedly lo-fi, but this was more from pragmatism than any kind of Sebadoh or Guided By Voices fixation. “People talk about an ‘Iron and Wine’ sound, and whether I’ve left that or not, but, really, the sound of that first record was just what I had to work with at the time. If there was hiss or something then I definitely tried to work with that and push it, so it didn’t sound like something trying to be something else. But otherwise it wasn’t like a deliberate aesthetic choice.”
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.”
Woman King in particular was the most conceptually coherent and sonically ambitious record Beam had made up to that point. And while Woman King showed that Beam’s musical ambitions reached beyond the strictures of acoustic-driven folk music, his 2005 collaboration with Calexico, In the Reins, demonstrated a willingness to self-educate by way of putting himself under the tutelage of an accomplished rhythm section. “Those guys [in Calexico] are so talented, all you have to do—you can do anything. It gave me this fearless feeling that you can try anything. It taught me a lot about the spirit of collaboration. There’s something about letting loose of the reins [laughs], letting loose a bit, and let them do what they do. That was the whole reason I wanted to do it, to take a back seat for a while. For me it was a matter of learning how to leave space and arrangements for people to put their stamp on it. It was really freeing to me. It was fun.”
While his experience with Calexico was liberating in many respects, it also sparked more confidence and a desire to get back to the production helm. “Once it comes time to start recording, it’s limitless the directions you can take, as far as arrangement goes. Definitely, I left a lot of room for other people to come in and play, and then where I could react off of what they did. They like a lot of space in their arrangements. They were always arguing for less, and sometimes I agreed with it and sometimes I didn’t.” With his ambitions stoked by his experience with Calexico, Beam dove into his most recent release with more confidence than ever, and a desire to take his vision in directions his previous records had only hinted he was capable of going.
From a purely musical standpoint, Woman King and In the Reins now feel like a bit like reconnaissance missions or deep breaths before a plunge, like Dylan’s first forays into rock territory circa 1965. But if Woman King is Beam’s Bringing It All Back Home, and Calexico is his version of The Band, that would make his new release, Shepherd’s Dog, Iron and Wine’s Highway 61 Revisited, the sort of revelatory work that doesn’t just cash out the promise of previous experimentation but also redefines the artist. On the new record, Beam reveals not only a talent for arrangement and a gift for directing fruitful collaborations (in this case with longtime producer Brian Deck), he also shows facility with a wide range of styles, and an ability to pastiche, cut and paste, and perform general stylistic mash-up wizardry as well as any rock savant you can name, from Peter Gabriel to Beck.
Tracks like “Bird Stealing Bread” from Creek had already shown Beam’s innate rhythmic sense, and Woman King explored this further, but Shepherd’s Dog loses itself almost completely to the pleasures and intricacies of rhythm, balancing layers of evolving percussive figures (mostly courtesy of Deck, an accomplished percussionist) around Beam’s melodies. Beam’s tenure in Miami seems to have made an impression, as evidenced by the Cuban influence of “Lovesong of the Buzzard.” More world-music sympathies are on display, as in the West African Highlife of “House by the Sea.” But mostly Shepherd’s Dog proceeds according to a purely intuitive program, blurring boundaries and discarding categories in service of a higher calling. Beam’s vocals have become more aggressive and present in the mix, with denser, ear-tickling harmonies like that of “The Devil Never Sleeps.” That song in particular may cause some fans’ eyes to bulge, if for no other reason than the fact that it’s now possible to rock out to Iron and Wine. Shepherd’s Dog rambles, exults and careens like no Iron and Wine record ever has.
Shepherd’s Dog also sounds like Beam discovering abilities even he didn’t know he had. And as with Peter Parker’s first web-borne flights across the rooftops, he’s as thrilled with the display as we are. Some longtime fans may bemoan the loss of quietude and the haunted feel typical of his earlier efforts, but whatever Beam has left behind is more than made up for by the driving, hook-laden effervescence of tracks like opener “Pagan Angel and a Borrowed Car,” ambient beauty “Carousel” or the funky, reggae-ish “Wolves (Song of the Shepherd’s Dog).” His lyrics have even developed an irreverent wit, as if to keep pace with the celebratory nature of the new music. The religious references are still present on Shepherd’s Dog, but the irreverence gives the album a playfulness in lines like, “God knows if Christ came back he would find us in a poker game,” from “Innocent Bones.” Yet Beam insists it’s important to keep even that line in context. “It’s not really about Jesus,” he says. “It’s about us.”
The contrast between his previous efforts and Shepherd’s Dog is striking, but Beam maintains that he’s tried to push himself artistically every time out. “Honestly I try to experiment with every record. This one I just got lucky. There was a group of songs that I was able to stretch out more. With the more chaotic kind of feel, they called for a bit more complex arrangements. Part of it was just what the songs were asking for, but definitely there was sense of discovery, for my own experience, something new for me, because that’s what it’s about really. I feel like there has also been a bigger jump than the other records because I don’t have a job now [laughs], so this is what I do. I have a lot more time to spend with them.”
A call from home—a request for tacos—pulls Beam out of our conversation and back into family life, and by this time it’s clear we’ve covered all the ground we need to for the day. The lunch crowd at Guero’s dissipates and the late-summer sun is building up to its afternoon blaze. I said earlier that Iron and Wine was a success story, but of course it’s a peculiar kind of success. Yes, Beam is in an enviable position for a folk-rock artist of his uncompromising style. He can tour Europe or headline in major U.S. cities to crowds in the thousands, and he’s had four songs on major movie soundtracks. He has yet to make an off record. He works mostly at home. But perhaps the achievement that impresses most is that he seems to have retained a near-complete detachment from industry trappings, image or scenes of any kind. Maybe the poetic gift that keeps his creative intuitions enthralled by Love, God and Death, also keeps his values equally impervious to lesser concerns, and whether Sam Beam ever learns to lift cannon muzzles with his beard, that is every bit as exotic and unexpected a feat.
Folksinger folds in more noise, edges further from bare-bones debut
Sometimes it seems impossible for an artist to rebound from a beloved acoustic LP—something about tiny guitar strums and mumbled vocals seems to invite intense, unflinching loyalty. Almost everyone who cherishes Pink Moon finds Nick Drake’s other records infinitely less beguiling, the folks who adore Springsteen’s Nebraska rarely hear redemption in Born in the U.S.A., and there are throngs of people who still haven’t forgiven Ryan Adams for repeatedly failing to reproduce Heartbreaker. Just look at how much trouble Bob Dylan got in for wailing electric at Newport: He broke poor Pete Seeger’s heart!
In September 2002, Iron and Wine—the alias of then-Miami-based folksinger Sam Beam—released The Creek Drank the Cradle, a warm, whispered collection of undressed folksongs; Beam murmured tiny, self-skewering love poems over bits of acoustic guitar and banjo, his voice barely rising above a controlled coo (legend has it that Beam—who recorded the entire record on a four-track in his basement—didn’t want to wake up his sleeping daughters). The Creek Drank the Cradle featured only Beam, singing and playing in his own home, and felt intimate, secretive and confessional. When the tapes made their way to Sub Pop, the label opted to release them as-is, with Beam credited as sole producer, writer and performer.
Beam followed Creek with The Sea & the Rhythm EP, five previously unreleased tracks from the same sessions that produced his debut. In 2004, a proper follow-up appeared: Our Endless Numbered Days boasted a full band and a professional producer (the Chicago-based Brian Deck, former drummer for Red Red Meat and occasional member of Califone, who has also worked with Fruit Bats, Modest Mouse and Holopaw, among others). While still largely acoustic, Our Endless Numbered Days was richer, bigger and undeniably more ambitious. In 2005, six-song EP Woman King further showcased Beam’s shifting aesthetic; rather than furrowing his brow and sighing into his microphone, Beam pried open his heavily-bearded mouth and sang, bellowing and mewling over—of all things!—an electric guitar. Considerably more raucous than his previous releases (although still riddled with perfect little melodies and striking lyrics), Woman King seemed like a logical stepping stone: Beam was clearly tiptoeing away from the trappings of his debut and moving toward a fuller, more dynamic sound.
The Shepherd’s Dog, Iron and Wine’s third full-length, functions in much the same way: Teaming again with his touring band (including sister Sarah on backing vocals) and Deck, Beam has managed to tweak and inflate his signature sound without sacrificing any of its considerable charm.
Beam is Carolina-born, recorded his debut in South Florida and, at present, resides in Texas. Given his proclivity for hot, sticky living, it’s not particularly surprising that Beam’s narrative sensibility is so perfectly Southern. Beam’s lyrics are rife with dark, gothic overtones, and only a Southern writer could manage to juxtapose so much splendor with so much sorrow. Accordingly, The Shepherd’s Dog is crammed full of classic Beam motifs: grass, snakes, teeth, babies, crosses, girls, ashes, blooming flowers, broken bones, ghosts, mistakes, death. Musically, Beam’s tendency toward repeated pentatonic-minor riffs (think Mississippi Hill Country blues) is also intact, and these tracks are every bit as dizzily mesmerizing as his earlier work, if not more so.
The most perceptible sonic shift is in the record’s vocals, which are doubled-up here and, occasionally, so soaked with studio effects that it’s tricky to discern whole words. Beam’s voice lurks, fuzzy and thick, behind busier instrumentation; for the first time, language is subservient to sound. Perhaps unsurprisingly, Beam admits to finding “spiritual inspiration” in Tom Waits’ 1983 opus Swordfishtrombones, and while The Shepherd’s Dog never mimics Waits’ famed chainsaw-in-a-trashcan aesthetic, it’s not difficult to hear what Beam is getting at: The Shepherd’s Dog is noisier, more layered, less comfortable and less linear than anything Iron and Wine has released to date.
The album opens with a few seconds of muted strumming before Beam and company launch “Pagan Angel and a Borrowed Car” with a burst of loud acoustic guitar. Muddy and upbeat, the song swings and shifts until you find yourself irrationally craving a bonfire to dance around, barefoot and giddy, tossing your hands in the air and kicking up as much sand as possible. “Carousel” sees Beam’s pipes soaked in vocoder, gurgly and wet, like he’s singing from deep inside a fish tank; the track fades in a haze of electronic honks and wheezes, bleeding into the blip-heavy “House by the Sea,” a cacophonous stomper riddled with bits of organic and inorganic sound (a classic Brian Deck studio marriage). “Boy with a Coin” is the record’s first proper single, an otherworldly mess of guitar, slightly distorted vocals and tip-tap percussion.
“Resurrection Fern” is probably the most familiar (and arresting) track on the record, comprised only of guitar, shaker, wisps of pedal steel and Beam’s breathy warble, temporarily back on top. As any proper Southerner knows, actual resurrection ferns (which attach themselves to Cypress and Live Oak trees, pulling up water and nutrients that collect on bark) are remarkable little plants: The fern earned its name from its (heartbreakingly poetic) ability to wither and appear dead in times of draught, curling in on itself, brittle, brown, small—until water appears and it unfurls, green, vibrant, alive. Botanists have long posited that resurrection ferns could go for decades (maybe even centuries) without water, only to return to form at the first sign of moisture. Beam has never shied from pumping his work full of natural imagery, and with good reason: consider the fern’s life cycle, and try not choking up a bit when he sings, “And that fallen house, across the way, it’ll keep everything—the baby’s breath, our bravery wasted and our shame.”
Sam Beam is one of the most vital new American folksingers recording today, and The Shepherd’s Dog is a brave shift away from the unembellished minimalism of his debut. Some may crucify Beam for ditching the nakedness of his earlier work, but his latest effort is just as vulnerable (and just as lovely), teeming with delicate metaphors, gut-churning guitars and moments of perfect clarity. Because as centuries of grand American songwriters can attest, there’s more than one way to sing a folksong.
If you don't end up getting your fill of Iron & Wine in the October issue of Paste, have no fear. This past weekend marked the kick off of Sam Beam and Co.'s world tour, and lucky for us they have added on some more North American dates to the last leg of it. The new dates begin on Nov. 26 in Tucson, Ariz. and will end Dec. 11 in Austin, Texas.
On top of all the traveling, Iron & Wine is scheduled to release its third full-length album, The Shepherd's Dog, tomorrow (Sept. 25). Be sure to give it a listen and check out the Paste cover story and review of the album in our new issue.
Dates:
November
26 - Tucson, Ariz. @ Fox Tucson Theatre
27 - San Diego, Calif. @ 4th & B
28 - Los Angeles, Calif.@ Orpheum Theatre
30 - Oakland, Calif. @ The Paramount Theater
December
2 - Portland, Ore. @ Crystal Ballroom
3 - Seattle, Wash. @ Moore Theater
4 - Bellingham, Wash. @ Mt. Baker Theatre
6 - Boise, Idaho @ Egyptian Theatre
7 - Magna, Utah @ The Great Salt Air
8 - Denver, Colo. @ Paramount Theatre
9 - Albuquerque, N.M. @ El Rey Theater
10 - Dallas, Texas @ Palladium Ballroom
11 - Austin, Texas @ La Zona Rosa
Related links:
IronAndWine.com
Iron & Wine on MySpace
YouTube: "Boy With a Coin"
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It’s spring 1989, and teenage curiosity-seekers have packed themselves into a high-school auditorium for an annual male “beauty pageant,” meant to be a humorous analog to the more serious female version. But of course, the strutting jocks are taking things far too seriously. Unintentional homoerotic overtones abound.
Into this burlesque strides a skinny freshman, previously known—if at all—as quiet, unfailingly sincere and, most of all, serious. But with a smirk on his face, no shirt on his chest, and—oh yes—sporting goggles, flippers and towel, this “swimmer” strides about the stage flexing his largely nonexistent muscles. The audience goes wild, and the Darwinian high-school hierarchy has been temporarily upended.
The freshman, one Sammy Beam, obviously doesn’t care one bit about popularity. As a result, he becomes the most popular kid at Chapin High School (the South Carolina alma mater he and I share) for at least the rest of the year.
Dangerous though it may be to judge character based on an event 16 years in the past, a few things haven’t changed: Beam, introvert to the core, isn’t afraid to stick his neck out, and he doesn’t like to be pigeonholed. And now, again, he’s popular almost in spite of himself. Of course, he laughs when I proffer this interpretation.
“I guess you could look at it that way,” says Beam, now better known by his musical alter ego, Iron & Wine, and a more grown-up ?rst name, Sam. “I prefer to look at it like it was a stupid, dumbass…” he chuckles, momentarily trailing off. “But yeah, I was into doing something interesting.”
Doing “something interesting” seems to have been the impetus behind In The Reins, the new collaborative EP from Iron & Wine and Tucson, Ariz., rock collective Calexico. There are 2,254 miles between Beam’s Miami home and Tucson, and almost as many between the four-track home recordings that put Beam on the map and his most recent effort, but one gets the sense he likes it that way.
“You make the best of the tools that you have,” he says of the early recordings, compiled on 2002’s The Creek Drank The Cradle and 2003’s The Sea & The Rhythm EP. “It was fun to do the home-recording stuff but it wasn’t what the whole thing was about. [And] I think it would be silly or really boring to put the same record out over and over again.”
Southwest, ho
Once word of Iron & Wine and Calexico’s collaboration leaked, tongues began wagging. How would the hushed, emotionally harrowing dynamics of Beam’s songs mesh with Calexico’s expansive, eclectic, Southwestern vibe? Quite well, it seems.
Beam’s songs were even flexible enough to accommodate an operatic interlude en Español adorning the loping 6/8 shuffle of opening track, “He Lays in Reins.” The part came courtesy of Salvador Duran, a local performer Beam met in a hotel lobby after the first night of recording and invited into the studio.
“[Salvador] starts making up some vocals and singing along, and Sam was just completely blown away,” recounts Calexico’s Joey Burns. “Salvador loosely translated them as being on this long road in somewhat of a struggle and a heartache. And Sam just thought it was perfect. It worked so well with the lyrics he had written.”
Although it’s not as obvious as Iron & Wine’s Woman King EP (released earlier this year), Beam says there’s a theme at work. “I thought it would be fun to pick some songs that had to do with some kind of entrapment, whether it was in a good way or a bad way,” he says. “‘In the Reins’ to me means a lot of different things. So each of them has to do with something in the reins of a relationship or mortality or these kinds of things.”
“They’re a bunch of my old songs that … would have never made it to an official release,” Beam adds. “I thought it would be fun to reinterpret those.”
Mortality certainly comes to the fore on the disc’s last track, “Dead Man’s Will,” a litany—presumably for surviving relatives—of what to do with the effects of someone recently passed, right down to “this bone.” Appropriately, a skeletal John Convertino marimba reinforces the whispered lines, among the first Iron & Wine lyrics anyone ever heard some five years ago.
Son of the suburban south
As Beam puts it, it’s been an “ugly road,” and a long one, since he and I last crossed paths in late-’80s suburban South Carolina. After graduating, Beam decamped for an undergraduate education in Virginia, where he met his wife, before getting his film bona fides at Florida State University. By the time most people caught up with him, Beam was teaching cinematography in Miami and recording in his spare time.
That changed when South Carolina-turned-Seattle friend Ben Bridwell (Carissa’s Weird, Horses) coaxed Beam to submit “Dead Man’s Will” for inclusion on a compilation accompanying the debut issue of art magazine Yeti. Many hearing the track assumed Beam was some sort of backwoods rustic, but the reality—if interesting—wasn’t quite as romantic.
Chapin, some 20-odd miles from Columbia, forms an interesting variant on the suburban motif. Driving through the area on Highway 76, the main two-lane drag, you’d think you were in the middle of nowhere. Yet every southward turn leads to a peninsula jutting into Lake Murray, containing impressive homes, largely occupied by Columbia’s corporate and professional class, and one lakeside golf course.
The kids at Chapin High School generally think well enough of themselves to poke fun at their rivals, further up the road, as rednecks and rubes. So it isn’t tarpaper-and-tin-roof shacks, but it’s certainly a representative slice of the modern South.
Although Beam, like many, initially ?ed his Southern aesthetic heritage—he chuckles about a high- school love of skate-punk—he’s returned to embrace the region’s distinctive imagery and cultural signi?ers in his work. EP tracks like “Red Dust” and “Prison On Route 41,” like many of his songs, trade in Southern imagery without lapsing into cliché.
At the same time, his film work has given him a solid grasp of how to structure his music, as Burns testifies: “I think he has a pretty good command of the way things naturally come together. So, whether it’s music or art or film, lyrically he definitely has a good sense of structure and phrasing and breadth and space. I learned a lot from working with him. There are a couple of tracks from our new Calexico record that I would love to get him on, just to get his genius on there.”
With such a fruitful collaboration and promising partnership, Burns and Convertino are looking forward to a joint tour. “The idea,” Burns says, “is to have both bands—Sam’s and our own—each do its own set, and at the end come together and do the EP and a couple extra tunes,” Burns says.
Although Beam readily admits “performing in general is not really my bag,” you can bet that the irreverent, risk-taking star of high-school pageants won’t miss it.
Easy as it is to complain about the sorry state of radio programming, the overwhelming album sales of lip-synchers, and the now-bordering-on-mindless-regurgitation trend of ‘80s New Wave revivalism, there’s still hope when a hitless singer/songwriter known for his hushed musings can fill an 1,100 seat theater with a healthy dose of faux-vintage-T-shirt-wearing twentysomethings.
When Iron & Wine’s Samuel Beam walks on stage, hollers and whoops erupt as he tunes his guitar and is joined by a five-piece backing band. Charmingly shy and subtly clever, he’s already befriending the front row with smirks and asides when the band breaks into “Jezebel” from his recent EP, Woman King. The gentleness of Beam’s voice is in full bloom, but it’s evident that his band likes to turn it up a few notches, changing whisper-quiet tunes like "Cinder and Smoke" and "Bird Stealing Bread" into reggae-tinged, slide-guitar jams. Beam’s sister, Sara, accompanies him on harmony vocals, fiddle and tambourine; when "Cinder and Smoke" moves into revolving verses of "oh ya ya ya," Sara’s sweet falsetto echoes after Sam’s deft tenor. The band sticks around for another four or five songs before leaving Beam alone with his guitar and wit.
Much has been made of Iron & Wine’s lo-fi 2002 debut, The Creek Drank the Cradle, and for good reason. Beam recorded it solo on a four-track in a room at his Florida home, and as he sings a wonderfully curious stanza from the album’s "Upward Over the Mountain” (“mother remember the blink of an eye when I breathed through your body?/ Sons are like birds flying upward over the mountain"), the air in The Variety Playhouse seems to whisper a delicate ‘thanks’ that Beam’s Miami room, three years old and one state south, is still accessible.
Now joined onstage again by his sister, Beam starts to pick through some guitar figures reminiscent of his arrangement of The Postal Service’s "Such Great Heights." Someone in the crowd lets out an approving yell. Beam stops in his tracks. "What are you cheering for?” he jibes, catching everyone off guard, “All of my songs start like this." He takes another minute to tune, then says, "You want to hear a cover song?" He then forges into a completely unrecognizable, but delightfully inventive version of The Sugarcubes’ “Birthday.”
The band returns for a few more songs—inflected with upbeat percussion, xylophone and electric guitar—before exiting and making way for the audience’s encore ritual. Beam returns to the stage with Sara and ends the show with a new song called "Trapeze Swinger." It’s a gorgeous tune, overflowing with mouthfuls of memory, regret and a repeated phrase that, after this show, will be difficult not to do—"Please, remember me."
It wasn't altogether certain whether Iron & Wine's sophomore album, suffused with Brian Deck’s production crispness, would be able to convey the intimacy of 2002’s homespun masterpiece The Creek Drank The Cradle. But all it took to erase the doubt was a single listen. Sam Beam’s feathery-sweet vocals set against striking acoustic flourishes carry this new set of tunes to scary-high musical and emotional vistas.
The best music often blends the old with the new to create something fresh and invigorating. The past becomes much more than some iconic, lifeless repository found on classic rock stations; it’s a still-vibrant font of inspiration. Iron & Wine’s debut provides a good example.
Iron & Wine is really just Sam Beam, a Florida cinematography teacher with a penchant for writing beautiful songs and gifted with an angelic voice to deliver them. Beam calls to mind other current acts like M. Ward and solo Damien Jurado for their low-fi warmth and deeply personal viewpoints. But you can also hear the echoes of old-time songwriters like Neil Young and Nick Drake in Beam’s acoustic purity and unapologetic romanticism.
The mix is seamless. Brief vignettes or portraits feature gently strummed or finger
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