By Jack of Hearts
Photos by Jay Douglass
I first heard Sam Beam shortly after his first album as Iron & Wine, The Creek Drank the Cradle, was released in 2002. I was living in Georgia at the time, and I was lucky enough to live within the broadcast range of a Chattanooga radio station (WUTC) whose evening programming featured an adult alternative format that reintroduced me to radio after I had spent a decade focused upon graduate study. I remember being entranced by the album’s sparse arrangements and lo-fi production, typified by the first song I happened to hear from it, “Weary Memory,” with Beam’s whispery vocal and gently-picked acoustic guitar accentuated by the drowsy glissando of a second guitar that he had overdubbed, in true DIY fashion (Full disclosure: the greatest invention of the last millennium is the bottleneck slide!)
I’ve been an avid fan ever since, even though he’s worked with bands on subsequent albums, experimenting with fuller arrangements that at times have sounded too dense or busy to me (especially on 2007’s Shepherd’s Dog and 2011’s Kiss Each Other Clean) overwhelming the songs occasionally.
But Beam’s latest Iron & Wine effort, Beast Epic, finds him working with a band yet paring back the arrangements to great effect (continuing a trend initiated on his previous album, 2013’s Ghost on Ghost) which was showcased at his concert Sunday night. Backed by a sympathetic touring band, Beam picked and strummed and sung with flair while generating an easy rapport with those of us in attendance at the Rococo Theatre.
Following a superb opening set by John Moreland, Iron & Wine took the stage beneath artificial white clouds suspended from the ceiling, with a screen at the back of the stage lit with alternating colors that summoned such images as blue skies, orange sunrises, pink-purple sunsets, and grey twilights. The band emphasized atmosphere during their concert, playing a set of songs that allowed bassist Sebastian Steinberg, cellist Teddy Rankin-Parker, keyboardist Eliza Hardy Jones, and percussionist Beth Goodfellow to assist Beam in creating postmodern pastorals, steeped in introspection.
While much has been made of Beam’s film background and the cinematic quality of his songs–a reputation that has been reinforced by the use of his songs in film soundtracks as well as his penchant for directing his own music videos–we should not lose sight of how he turns reflection inward (much as poets do who are inspired by the pastoral tradition) and traces the various shadows and light that fall upon our inner lives. He sings of our desires, disappointments, and pain–or more properly, the ghosts of our desires, disappointments, and pain (to use a word that recurs throughout his songwriting) that can haunt us as we try to find or make our way through this life, which in turn can inspire reflection upon our own horizons.
Iron & Wine led off their set with “Trapeze Swinger,” which established the brooding atmosphere for the evening, complete with muscular bass, moody cello, piano fills, and a firm backbeat to complement Beam’s percussive playing and soulful singing. His “kick-ass band,” as he called them, ably accompanied him throughout the show, leaving the stage only briefly to allow Beam a solo interlude to play a triptych of songs.
He ranged widely throughout his repertoire, playing old as well as new songs, including a “feel-good hit of the year” or two, as he referred ironically to some of his more somber tunes, adding in his genial way how they were “pretty songs about pain” or perhaps “painful songs about pretty,” all of which summed up the musical landscape of the evening aptly.
What struck me most was the reworking of songs that had been sparsely arranged originally, such as “Southern Anthem” or “Passing Afternoon,” for the band to play, or songs with fuller arrangements originally, such as “Bitter Truth,” “Rabbit Will Run,” and “Flightless Bird, American Mouth,” for solo acoustic guitar during the interlude.
No matter what the arrangement, though, Beam’s frequently percussive playing style lent all of his songs an acoustic pulse that resounded winningly with the audience, whose applause was frequently vigorous in its approval, and highlighted an Iron & Wine whose musical arrangements have “fall[en] in place, to quote lines from “Call It Dreaming,” which was the penultimate song of the concert and one of my favorites of the evening.
Touring behind Beast Epic as Beam and company are doing made for an evening rich with autumnal reflection and other imagistic impressions, which surprises me somewhat in that Beam is barely into his 40s, which is hardly the autumn of his life. But he exhibits a wisdom beyond his years that has endeared him to many since the release of his first album 15 years ago, something of which may be captured in the second chorus of “Call It Dreaming”:
Because the sun isn’t only sinking fast
Every moon and our bodies make shining glass
Where the time of our lives is all we have
And we get a chance to say before we ease away
For all the love you’ve left behind, you can have mine.
Beam shines brightly, and lets us know that we do too.
Jack of Hearts hosts “Sound + Vision” every Wednesday morning from 6 to 8 a.m. on KZUM. Listen via the KZUM Radio Free America archive and like the program’s page on Facebook.
