Author: Max Brzezinski
On February 6, the premiere episode of Come Hear NC Presents: Shaped by Sound will air on PBS NC, featuring Iron & Wine. The group’s led by singer-songwriter Sam Beam, who has been gently experimenting with folk sounds since the early 2000s. Beam’s Grammy nominated songs have been featured in countless films and television shows. Now living a low-profile, homey life in Durham, North Carolina, Iron & Wine’s music continues to probe the heart of Southern life, although often taking a cosmic long view on human life more generally. Iron & Wine’s episode features a rare full band performance of established and future classics, replete with a shadow-puppet themed backdrop.
Like the man himself, there’s more to Sam Beam’s music than might first appear. He’s self-effacing in interviews, recently referring to the release of his latest record LIGHT VERSE modestly as “a little handshake with the world.” And because Iron & Wine’s music is so emotionally direct, it’s easy to miss the signs of Beam’s craft. The melodies so tug at the heartstrings, and the lyrics roll so naturally, that the tensions which churn underneath the surface of the songs only become apparent with repeated listens. “Contradictions are fun,” Beam once off-handedly quipped as he described that his songs are about nothing more than the “normal human complexities.”
We think Beam’s right but also playing it a bit coy! So, to help you dig deeper into Iron & Wine’s “fun contradictions” ahead of February 6’s air date, we’ve put together an explainer of five of the band’s key tracks. All five songs can be heard on Iron & Wine: A Come Hear NC Playlist, a Spotify mix of 20 of the band’s best tracks drawn from throughout their career. These range from Beam’s debut to his most recent LP.
“Southern Anthem” The Creek Drank the Saddle Dry, 2002
This song was perhaps the first hint that Beam’s music would interrogate the many meanings of Southerness, often counterpoising the legacy of the Old South against the more amorphous landscape of the New South. In this regard, it’s telling that while Beam HAS moved house more than most musicians, he’s always chosen Southern cities as home, whether in South Carolina, Florida, Virginia, Texas, or now, North Carolina.
Like the work of well-known Southern writers (Flannery O'Connor, William Faulkner, Carson McCullers), “Southern Anthem” shares a central preoccupation with the past -- an intense Southern nostalgia for a prior, more pastoral mode of existence. It also uses some stock figures of Southern iconography: a river baptism, a family Bible and a family gun, a clothesline, and a buckling horse, all of which wouldn’t be out-of-place in a work of Southern gothic.
But “A Southern Anthem” taps into Southern nostalgia to do something different than other southern anthems. There’s no desire to speak for The South writ large. The article “A” in the title is telling: Beam’s one anthem among many, a personal one, minor not major. In this vein, the song can be read as an attempt to disconnect private experience from grander visions of what it means to be a Southerner in the US. In Beam’s song, what’s important are his childhood memories of his grandparents’ home in Chester, SC, the salience of Southern music (it’s “the guitar” which rises again in the song), the small tragedies and renewals that everyday folks living in the South experience.
“Sodom, South Georgia” Our Endless Numbered Days, 2004
Like Bob Dylan’s “Hollis Brown,” “Sodom, South Georgia” relies on a conceit of a death and birth occurring in the same moment: the narrator’s father in the song dies as his daughter is born. Highly melodramatic, this tearjerker found Beam mining similar emotional ground as his debut but in higher fidelity (on his first proper studio album with a producer, Brian Deck) and with subtle instrumental ornamentation around the edges.
Because “Sodom, South Georgia” trades in the emotional heaviness surrounding family loss, the line in the chorus “all good white boys say ‘God is good’” at first seems out of place. But here Beam is again revising prevailing models of Southerness. If in “A Southern Anthem” was Beam’s attempt to hold on to minor elements of Southern life free from its broader history, “Sodom, South Georgia” points out the contradiction between the universalist promise of Christian love and its often-segregated practice in locales like South Sodom. With this line, an easy-to-miss riff on the hypocrisy of “all good white boys” leavens the mood of an otherwise very serious song.
“The Trapeze Swinger,” Around the Well, 2004 (released 2009)
As in so many of Iron and Wine’s best songs, the narrator of “The Trapeze Swinger” looks back on life from the point of view of one dead, a ghost. In front of the Pearly Gates, he makes a series of requests to remember him, addressing himself in turn to – a childhood friend, a first flame, a brother, and finally, the listener. Originally recorded for a film soundtrack, “The Trapeze Singer” became a fan favorite before it ever saw wide release. Eventually compiled on Around the Well (2009) and further popularized by a Gregory Alan Isakov cover, “The Trapeze Swinger” has organically become one Iron & Wine’s best-loved and most streamed songs, all without label promotion. The song’s so well-loved that a new documentary about the band even takes its title from one of the song’s lyrics: Who Can See Forever (recorded largely at Haw River Ballroom in Saxapahaw, FYI).
Sonically and lyrically, “The Trapeze Singer” is an extended exercise in wringing thrilling variations from within the confines of a set structure. Over its nine-and-half minute run-time, the acoustic guitar and drum core of the track are gradually supplemented by slide, tom toms, a treated organ, tympani, upright bass, piano, and even an out-of-tune toy whistle in its coda. This produces an epic mood in the listener, the feeling of journeying, in which new sonic territories introduced correspond to the episodic travels of the narrator through his past.
The narrator asks to be remembered at his best, as an innocent “rug-burned baby,” a boyhood chum, a teen prankster on Halloween, a singer who perhaps took himself too seriously (“calling passers-by but much too high”), an adult depressive striving for joy, a lover, and finally a painter (Beam himself is an accomplished visual artist) of the human comedy (“I’ll do my best to make a drawing of … an angel kissing on a sinner / A monkey and a man, a marching band / All around a frightened trapeze swinger.”) The beauty of the lyrics rest in the earthy, modest approach they take to problems of great scope. They ask for basic human forgiveness and present the narrator (and singer’s) life in quotidian complexity: as just another wanderer with feet of clay seeking but not always achieving good.
“Never Meant,” single, 2024
The Midwest emo of American Football and acoustic singer-songwriter material of Iron and Wine might seem like strange bedfellows. What the two genres and artists share, though, is considerable: a certain commitment to sincere expression over cynicism in lyrics and vocals, an interest in the highs and lows of romantic relationships, and a DIY origin that put a premium on inventive musical ideas over high studio gloss and polish.
And as anyone who knows Iron & Wine’s covers of The Postal Service, New Order, and Cyndi Lauper know, Sam Beam can put a new aural spin on a well-known track. Most familiar to younger folk from TikTok memes, American Football’s original “Never Meant” is classic Illinois emo: a sprightly, proggy guitar figure tethered closely to syncopated drums, with earnestly sung-spoken vocals dancing over and under their proper key. A song of love lost, in Beam’s hands, “Never Meant” becomes more rhythmically regular, sung strongly and cleanly. The Iron and Wine version is wistful and resigned, an autumnal song of gentle regret rather than a springtime one of freshly bleeding hearts.
“Anyone’s Game” Light Verse, 2024
This song measures the distance between Iron and Wine’s lo-fi, four track beginnings in the early 2000s and now. A standout from last year’s Light Verse, it chugs with a nearly danceable rhythm and is propelled forward by an electronically treated violin. In other words, it’s a highly produced affair. Which is not to say Beam’s lost either his keen sense of melody or lyrical cleverness over the past 20 years. The song’s theme seems to be the endless circular churning of life. Obsessed with images of reincarnation, “Anyone’s Game” takes a wide-angled approach to human activity. The song has no characters, and deals in a timeframe of entire lifespans rather than day-to-day moments. In the vision of the song, the forces of creativity and destruction loop in and out of one another to direct the path of human life. We all are players in the “game” of the song’s title, and our journeys, despite surface differences, share a path in all the essentials: caught between ambition and compromise, joy and fear, self-identity and the desire for transformation.