Iron & Wine

Growing A Bard

Writer: Dave Sims
Features, Issue 36, Published online on 25 Sep 2007 Page 1 of 3 Next >

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.”

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Iron & Wine

Growing A Bard

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