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16 November 2006 23:20

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Sam Beam: Love, God, death and a tree of bees

The famously uncommunicative singer-songwriter Sam Beam - also known as
Iron & Wine - discusses his hauntingly poetic musical world with Andy
Gill

Published: 17 November 2006

Sam Beam, the singer-songwriter who records under the nom-de-disque of
Iron & Wine, is as far removed from your average rock star as it's
possible to be and still sell records. Like Will (Bonnie "Prince" Billy)
Oldham, he sports a beard big enough to nest a family of puffins, behind
which he lurks quietly, evading the less welcome attentions resulting
from his recent celebrity. Where some in his profession jump eagerly
into the party circuit, desperate to curry favour and coverage in the
showbiz gossip columns, Beam lives quietly at home with his wife and
children, away from the bright lights.

He's recently moved further away from the showbiz scene, having
abandoned his life in Miami for Austin, Texas. It's almost as if he's
shrinking further from the limelight, like a disturbed hermit crab
scuttling his shell to another cranny of the rock pool.

You could surmise all the above from the most cursory exposure to Iron
& Wine's output, in which his low-key murmur, accompanied by his
acoustic guitar (or occasionally by band arrangements), sketches,
narratives and tableaux in which intertwine those perennial interests of
country music, love and God and death. You'll most likely have heard
Iron & Wine without intending to, as his cover of The Postal Service's
"Such Great Heights", recently released as a single, has been in heavy
rotation on an advert, forming with José Gonzalez's "Heartbeats" a sort
of one-two punch combination of quiet nu-folk persuasion.

The problem with being a reserved rising star, however, is that people
want to ask you questions, for which you don't really have that many
interesting answers. Beam may be the least forthcoming interviewee I've
ever encountered, and not through any attempt to appear aloof. He gives
the impression of simply not understanding the mechanics of the
interview, responding to questions not as opportunities to expound at
length on varied matters, but as queries requiring the most abbreviated
answers he can offer.

If he could get away with simple "yes" and "no" responses, he probably
would, but he'd do it with such pleasant, helpful humour that you
couldn't take offence.

Beam took his first steps into the music biz back in 2000, when
Seattle's Sub Pop label offered to release some songs he'd sent them.
From there, his profile has expanded with each subsequent release, up to
last year's collaborative EP with Calexico, In the Reins.

Until his recording career took off, Beam spent his days lecturing
college students about cinematography in Miami, and making his own
forays into film-making. Presumably, I suggest, the study of
cinematography must have been helpful in songwriting, in terms of things
like setting a scene and illuminating the narrative?

"Yeah, I guess so," offers Beam, "although I didn't really think about
it until people started asking me about it! But I'm sure it does. The
good thing about songs is you can leave them open-ended, whereas in film
you have to communicate something pretty quickly. With a song, you can
make it a bit more obtuse and interesting."

And with lines such as "woke like a treeful of bees", "there will be
teeth in the grass", "God, there are guns growing out of our bones" and
my favourite, "slept like a bucket of snow", Beam's songs don't lack
their more interesting aspects. At times, it's like he's tapping into
the same dark, mythopoeic imagery that informed the great country
bluesmen, refracting love, death, faith and bleak destiny through a
fevered dreamscape haunted by angels and demons; but confronting them
not with the wracked, careworn voice of a Robert Johnson or Charley
Patton, but rather the soft, emollient tone of a Nick Drake, someone,
along with Elliott Smith, with whom Beam is often compared. Doesn't he
find that a little worrying?

"Oh, I don't know," he muses, not catching my drift. "Part of you hopes
they can hear the other parts of it that are, you hope, unique, but at
the same time it's pretty flattering too, 'cos I have the utmost respect
for those two artists. It's a two-way street." But, I remind him, they
both committed suicide. "Yeah, well, we'll see what happens. Hope I can
hold on!" he laughs, quickly glossing over the point. "But really,
there's so much music around these days, I'm just happy if people are
talking about it, period."

For the moment, people are talking about Iron & Wine primarily as a
result of the expanded profile afforded by TV and movies, which seem to
have latched on to his music. His version of "Such Great Heights" has
found peculiar favour in the advertising industry: as well as its use in
UK campaigns, the song featured in American TV ads, and in the film The
Garden State. Beam admits it's strange to hear his voice in these
contexts.

"It's a little weird, for sure," he says. "They used that same song
over here in a commercial for M&Ms, the candy, and I did see that one on
the TV, and it was a bit bizarre. They played it in a movie theatre one
time when my wife had taken the kids to see a film, and they flipped
out, they thought it was hilarious!"

Ironically for someone who spent years behind the scenes on the visual
side of TV and film productions Beam now finds himself in greater demand
for his music, with increasing requests to work on film soundtracks.

While such commissions help pay the rent, Beam's energies remain
focused primarily on his records. Each project's individual songs seem
tethered to a theme: his last full-length album release, 2004's Our
Endless Numbered Days was filled with images of fire, ashes, dust, birth
and death, while last year's Woman King EP featured half a dozen songs
concerned with the biblical attitude to female archetypes. Unlike most
songwriters, however, Beam doesn't write to fit a thematic brief, but
stockpiles material, only discovering the theme later, while assembling
the songs for an album.

His next album, Beam promises, will unveil a hitherto dormant political
dimension to Iron & Wine. "I don't know how to describe it - it's born
out of confusion," he admits. "It's not a political propaganda record,
but it's definitely inspired by political confusion, because I was
really taken aback when Bush got reelected." Here's hoping the decline
in the president's fortunes doesn't draw Iron & Wine's sting.

'Woman King' and 'In the Reins' and the single 'Such Great Heights' are
out on Sub Pop Records