It's kind of surprising that Sam Beam has ended up making his life in music under the name Iron & Wine. Early on, he got a cautionary lesson from his dad.
SAM BEAM: My father used to book Motown bands in college and he imparted some wisdom on me that it's an easy gig to lose your shirt in.
He'd seen that close up.
Yeah, so I took it to heart.
It’s New Year’s Eve
and California's gonna kill you soon.
The Barstow boys,
buckeyes in the shadow of the moon.
This song is from the new Iron and Wine album. It's his fifth, titled "Ghost On Ghost." Sam Beam grew up in South Carolina; he studied art in college, then got into filmmaking. Music was just something he did on the side, for fun, until a record deal landed in his lap. I asked him if he approaches writing a song in the same way he would make a film.
There are definitely a lot of narrative elements, but I'm not worried about people understanding exactly what's happening. I treat it more like a poem, and if there's a certain feeling or a certain wordplay or some kind of cognitive tension, I'll go for that.
I know you’ll never leave me,
but we’re far from the hard light tonight.
It's interesting to me what you said about word play. I've been wondering when you're writing lyrics if it's really more about the way the words feel in your mouth, the physical sound of them, than what the words mean necessarily.
“I think it's important,
the way that they
fall
out
of
your
mouth.
I find that a lot of times
I'll come up with the
seedlings of a song
just by fooling around with the guitar or the piano
and muttering nonsense, you know,
just syllables at random.”
And sometimes you stumble upon a word or a phrase, you know, it's like a coat hanger. All of a sudden, you have something to start hanging other phrases and stuff on. But, you know, they're all different. Sometimes you have a clear idea of what you're getting into when you start, and sometimes you're just fishing.
Can you think of a song that worked that way, where it might have been some random patterns of sound that turned into a song in the end?
Well, the first track, "Caught in the Briars" was kind of like that. I've been fooling with that melody forever.
Back alleys full of rain and everything’s shining.
As holy as she can be, the trick's in the timing.
Free as the morning birds, fragile as china.
She's stuck in the weakest heart of South Carolina -
where all of the naked boys
who lay down beside her
sing her the saddest song
all caught in the briars.
You know, when you work this way, you have to be patient, too, because they don't always fall out. A lot of stuff falls out and not necessarily stuff that you want to put out. And so the "Caught in the Briars" tune I had just a naked boy is caught in briars and...(laughs)
Where did they come from?
There's something about nakedness that says, you know, you're not putting up a front. They have nothing to hide. It's an exposed vulnerable place. And then, also coupled with the idea of being exposed in the briars is not a fun idea.
It's interesting because there's another song on the album called "Sundown Back in the Briars" that has a lot of echoes of this first one. It's almost like it's the response to it.
Well, it does. They were the same song and I couldn't decide which direction to do it.
So you split it in two.
Yeah, then I did both of them.
Nobody knows when the rain may come.
Nobody wants to wake up and be cruel.
She locked the door and the sun went down
in South Carolina with nothing to lose.
All of her naked boys,
and not even I was true.
The main deal is just that it goes to a different time signature and it becomes – it starts to smooth out and feels more like a wave than the percussive jumping around of the first one. And then, you know, with that different feel, you know, it has a different emotional wave.
Do you find that there's maybe one idea or sort of inspiration that holds these 12 songs together?
It's always hard to decide what songs to include, because I don't sit down to write a record from start to finish. I just kind of always work. I would like to have a group of songs that have a cohesive feel for one reason or another. I mean, that's such a subjective thing. What I do is just go through the songs and see if I can pick out something that ties them together.
And this one, I had a lot of songs that had this central character, this couple. They weren't necessarily the same couple. It was this couple against the world in a certain way or against one another. They were working something out.
There were banged up heads
stealing first base
underneath the table
so we never said grace
falling out of bed
for the workday week
there was kissing in the cracks
of the flashflood street
there were budding blossoms
blaring Johnny Rotten
chewed up and swallowed by the
prophet they were trying to follow
picked too green and we paid no tax
on our quick romantic cul de sacs.
But it all came down to
you and I.
And so I felt, loosely, it was fun to sort of make this imagined story where if you were interested in taking the time, you could almost imagine each song was like a new adventure for this couple.
You know, the way you're describing it, it sounds almost like you're imagining it as a little movie.
Yeah, it could be, yeah. There's definitely some songs would make more interesting movies than others, that's for sure.
Have I found you?
Flightless bird,
grounded,
bleeding
Or lost you?
Sam Beam, also known as Iron and Wine, his new album is Ghost On Ghost.
Sam, thanks so much.
Thank you. It's been a pleasure.
Thanks so much.