words and photo by Michael Todd
When he became Iron & Wine, Sam Beam was casually sifting through the shelves at a gas station in Georgia.
He was out in the middle of nowhere, he says, a lighting man on a movie set. Among other home remedies like castor oil, Beam eyed a protein supplement: Beef, Iron & Wine. And while the film school student’s four-track recordings had yet to pass the threshold of his front door, Beam was already sure-footed in the self-appraisal of his songs.
“I recognized that a lot in my writing I’m trying to show both sides of the coin — the sour and sweet,” Beam said in an interview with SPIN. “Iron & Wine seemed to fit with that duality.”
Over the 15 years since, Beam has pitted Cain against Abel in “Innocent Bones.” In “Each Coming Night,” he’s written the dichotomy of day and darkness into his lover’s lines. And in “The Trapeze Swinger,” he’s promised to make a drawing of God and Lucifer, a boy and girl, an angel kissing on a sinner, a monkey and a man, a marching band, all around a frightened trapeze swinger.
On Friday, Beam returns to Lincoln’s Rococo Theatre, having played the venue last in March 2008. Jesca Hoop will open the sold-out show. To prepare, let’s trace the path of the Southeastern songwriter, from his hushed Sub Pop beginnings through to this year’s Ghost on Ghost, an album populated with sax solos, electric piano and a rhythm section born in Motown.
1. “Such Great Heights” — Such Great Heights (2003)
Let’s meet Sam Beam where the public ear heard him first: in a bathtub with Zach Braff and Natalie Portman. The two Garden State actors, playing Andrew Largeman and Sam, are fully clothed and sopping wet. They’d just screamed into a quarry from atop a crane, and they’d just shared a first kiss. Of course, it was raining.
Back at home, as a single tear falls down Andrew’s cheek, Sam hops out of the tub onto the bathroom floor. She jumps back in with a paper cup to save that tear. It’s Largeman’s first sign of bereavement — something to keep safe in a scrapbook, if he had one — and it’s evidence of the hairline fracture in a self-built shell sealed by his mother’s recent death.
And then, just when we see that Andrew and Sam have rounded the bases from first kiss to home plate in a matter of filmic minutes, Iron & Wine gently knocks on the rest of Andrew’s shell, letting it crumble softly. This music cue, Beam’s cover of The Postal Service’s “Such Great Heights,” succeeds in its simplicity where its predecessor’s computer-processor pops and robotic drums would have failed.
The original plays like an intercepted transmission from space, something sent from on high. Iron & Wine’s version is what a boy hears when he points his walkie-talkie at the phone lines. Told another way, The Postal Service’s Ben Gibbard tried to leave his message on his lover’s machine, and when he couldn’t because of poor audio quality, he resorted to broadcasting it from a mountaintop. Conversely, Beam called his crush furtively, and when he couldn’t put words together after the beep, he went to her house in the dark of night, tapped on the window and sang his song quietly in the cold with only his breath registering on the glass.
2. “Each Coming Night” — Our Endless Numbered Days (2004)
Before we examine the musical counterpoint to Iron & Wine’s lyrics, let’s flick on the slide projector for a brief history lesson:
First slide: Around the turn of the millennium, Beam records a collection of songs to tape and sends the bunch to his hometown friend Ben Bridwell, Band of Horses lead singer, who packages them with his band’s material and sends it off to Seattle label Sub Pop.
Second slide: In 2002, Beam signs to Sub Pop, which in quick succession releases his crackling and sparse, self-made songs via the full-length The Creek Drank the Cradle and the EP The Sea & The Rhythm.
Third slide: Beam heads into the studio for the first time with Brian Deck, and records Our Endless Numbered Days with a cast including his sister Sarah Beam and bandmates Jonathan Bradley, EJ Holowicki, Jeff McGriff and Patrick McKinney.
Flip the lights back on, and cue up the album’s eighth track, “Each Coming Night.” Beam begins the fingerpicked walkdown chord structure that picks itself up with the fourth and fifth. You’ve heard it before, right? Listen closely to that major fourth chord, and a keen ear will pick up on a minor fourth interval, the small piece of drama that brings together Beam’s “both sides of the coin” lyrics.
Elsewhere on Our Endless Numbered Days similarly competing notes — which play like shifting tectonic plates — reveal themselves on “Naked As We Came” and “Sodom, South Georgia.” Ever the renaissance man, with works of visual art adding to his film reel, Beam surely realizes the effect of the most miniscule musical motions. Which brings us to…
3. “The Trapeze Swinger” — Around the Well (2009)
The wind chimes that begin the Around the Well version of “The Trapeze Swinger” might be more than a bit of window dressing.
A song whose word count nearly doubles the Gettysburg Address, it still reveals parts of itself past hundreds of listens. My recently revised interpretation, that this is a love song for ghosts, is testament to the masterwork’s expertly built structure, its adornments and hidden passageways.
Ghosts could be brushing past those wind chimes. The chords are stuck in time, repeating. Reversed guitar fades in like a passing apparition. Read the opening lines as a meeting of the recently deceased watching their own funeral, making the most of the in-between by falling in love:
Please, remember me happily
By the rosebush laughing
With bruises on my chin, the time when
We counted every black car passing
Your house beneath the hill
And up until someone caught us in the kitchen
With maps, a mountain range, a piggy bank
A vision too removed to mention
And immediately cut to the present, where the speaker’s lover has proven her own statement that “the trapeze act was wonderful but never meant to last”: their purgatory was made enjoyable by their relationship, but one of them would eventually move on to the next destination:
But please, remember me fondly
I heard from someone you’re still pretty
And then they went on to say
That the pearly gates
Had some eloquent graffiti
Like “We’ll meet again” and “Fuck the man”
And “Tell my mother not to worry”
Stick with this one through to the end, and discover your own side of the story.
4. “Resurrection Fern” — The Shepherd’s Dog (2007)
And just when we think Beam won’t write a chorus, that he’ll sing another four stanzas of verse, the resolution hits like a rainstorm in the middle of a drought. With its pedal steel guitar, understated percussion, guitar and trademark Iron & Wine two-part harmonies, “Resurrection Fern” is the return to Beam’s roots within the sonically globetrotting album The Shepherd’s Dog, his best effort.
He sings, “In our days we will live like our ghosts will live / Pitching glass at the cornfield crows and folding clothes like stubborn boys across the road / We’ll keep everything: Grandma’s gun and the black bear claw that took her dog.”
And we’re firmly planted in a sun-dappled pastoral landscape. Especially at this time of the year, with crunching leaves beneath our feet, “Resurrection Fern” is the nostalgic place of comfort that even in his most twisted tales Beam hosts within his voice. Just sing this one out loud, and all is well.
5. “Low Light Buddy of Mine” — Ghost on Ghost (2013)
And now to address the elephant in the room. We’re skipping over Iron & Wine’s 2011 release, Kiss Each Other Clean. That second album recorded at Beam’s self-built studio enjoyed the limitless studio time a bit too much. It struggled to pare its instrumentation down and suffered under the weight of extraneous auxiliary percussion, “Just the Way You Are” keyboard sounds and awkwardly placed kalimba or two.
This year’s album — which saw Iron & Wine leaving the amorphous — keeps treading the full-band path, with more precisely composed saxophone solos, and with the soulfully solid bedrock of jazz drummer Brian Blade. Other than an ending that dies suddenly, “Low Light Buddy of Mine” nails the subgenre of melancholic funk.
The sounds that create an atmosphere leave enough white space to make the air breathable. The supporting cast of a cascading piano line, a bassline that echoes the bass drum and sparse strings make sure Beam’s voice has the spotlight. The extras like a bit of jew’s harp, the scraping of a piano’s guts and clarinet play their part but know their place within the script: as extras.
And as for the album title? “It acknowledges we are not only physically on one another but we are combining souls as well,” Beam said in an interview with the New York Times. “I wish I could take credit for the line. I stole it from James Wright, the poet.”
We won’t tell anyone, Sam.
Michael Todd is Hear Nebraska’s managing editor. He knows now that a Google images search for “Sam Beam without beard” yields no results. Reach Michael at michaeltodd@hearnebraska.org.