Iron and Wine with Fruit Bats
Sunday, October 26
Blueberry Hill’s Duck Room
21+ only
Tickets $10. Doors 7pm. Show 8pm.

Every music critic has a darling album to harbor as her own regardless of who else loves it, an album she protects from the weathered world of criticism, an album she ends up buying three copies of because it’s too good not to give away to friends, an album that travels across the world with her, no matter what part of the European countryside is rolling by outside her train. For me without question that album is Iron and Wine’s masterpiece “The Creek Drank the Cradle,” far and away the best album of 2002.

Iron and Wine is Sam Beam, a youngish Southern filmmaker who lives in Miami, who teaches in the film and media studies department at the University of Miami, and who happened to record some of his beautifully poetic songs on a tape that wound up in the hands of music industry executives in Seattle. The only thing stranger than that is that the label, Sub Pop, actually called Beam back.

This is Sub “Nirvana and Mudhoney” Pop, not exactly where one would expect to find a delicate, Southern-tinged folk record like Beam’s “The Creek Drank the Cradle.” Beam sounds overly blase about the whole exchange.

“I had a buddy from back home, from Columbia, South Carolina, living in Seattle,” he explains. “He had this band called Carissa’s Weird. They were talking to Sub Pop-he gave them something to listen to [of mine] and they called me. Not very complex.”

Maybe not complex, but definitely extraordinary. The album was recorded entirely by Beam in his home. All the layers of vocal harmony are his, and every element of instrumentation, from the infectious guitar melodies to the sultry banjo-picked tones (it takes a lot to make a banjo sultry) that sound like pulled heartstrings. An initial challenge to Beam was how he could go on tour and bring his self-serve sound with him.

“I thought the parts were important to the sound, so I put together a band of my friends,” says Beam. I’m still feeling giddy because Sub Pop gave me Sam Beam’s cell phone number. I’ve already accidentally told him I’m an asylum-worthy fan. He laughed politely. Everything out of his mouth is polite. He sounds like the boy next door with a light Southern accent.

“Touring is a lot of fun,” Beam continues. “My sister sings harmonies, and I have a couple other friends who play slide and banjo. We don’t really try to replicate the sound [of the album] exactly, but we try to keep the tone similar.”

The tone is dark. This is not a happy-go-lucky album for the front porch swing. Described as Southern Gothic by more than one neologism-hungry critic, Beam’s songs have the density of a Wyeth painting and are more absorbing than Bounty. Yes, elements of music traditionally thought of as Southern inflect his songs, but the work as a whole is more of an arching landscape, a terrain rather than any one place one could pinpoint as specifically Southern.

Besides, Beam lives in Miami, Florida now, which is hardly the South. “We’re on a quarter system so I teach a quarter then go off a quarter,” he says of his schedule. “My students don’t really care. There’s only a handful who know what I do on the side.”

I’m at this very moment considering transferring to a university in Florida just to sign up for class with Professor Beam. But Beam is far too low-key to indulge this kind of rock star reaction to his craft. Music is still a side project to him, and he insists that it will have to remain that way “until it starts paying the bills.” He does admit that his background in film and media has shaped his songwriting.

“Screenplays are description of action and dialogue and so it helps make more visual songs. And also the structure of editing a movie helps identify the structure of a song.”

Timing marks the structure of the Iron and Wine sound. It’s not just that there’s a banjo here and a slide guitar there for effect, it’s the deliberate positioning behind the music, the purposeful intonation behind every pluck and strum.

“I’ve always done it,” says Beam of his musical background. “My father told me early on to keep it as a hobby. I took it to heart but I never really took it very seriously. I was pursuing the film thing because I thought it would be a better way to make money.”

The “film thing” led to job security as a professor, and Beam maintains that film will always play a major role in his life regardless of where his music takes him. “I went into cinematography to have a craft, a background in college. It’s a lot of fun, but I enjoy the writing and directing part as much. I don’t see a huge separation between them.”

There are underlying similarities between all artistic mediums, but perhaps the strongest correlation can be drawn between poetry and music. “I definitely approach them as poems,” says Beam of his songwriting technique. “Then you realize that you’re doing a song-it doesn’t have to be a linear structure or anything like that. You can hint at a lot of things. I take a lot of license and approach them more as stories or poems. The seeds for the ideas come from stories, either made up, or people that I know, or myself. They come from all over the place.”

An all over the place approach left Beam with more material than could fit on his first album, hence the release last month of the Iron and Wine EP, “The Sea and the Rhythm.” The EP in no way revolutionizes Beam’s unique sound and style, and his fans are all the happier for it.

“That was stuff that we wanted to put on the first one, but didn’t really make it,” says Beam of his latest release. “The EP seemed like a good idea to be able to keep it in the public eye and put the songs out that we liked. We recorded over the summer for an album that should come out in March. Even most of the songs on that one were written when the first record came out. I felt a little bit [of pressure] but I think I identified pretty early on that it’s not very helpful so I just try to ignore it.”

Based on critics’ reaction to his material, Beam has nothing to worry about. Which leaves only one question: Why Iron and Wine? Why not, well, Steel and Whiskey?

“It seemed more interesting,” says Beam of his chosen nom de plume. “I kind of like the name. I just sort of happened upon it. I saw this stuff called Beef Iron and Wine at this country store one time when we were shooting a movie. It was by the castor oil and other gross kind of stuff, and the words just stuck. It’s a way to put the interest more on the music than the performer so I like it for that reason as well.”

I was sort of hoping for a bloody Civil War-era tale, but the country store will have to suffice. Beam’s good nature is as audible in his spoken voice as it is in his singing, and the lilting accent makes his humility all the more endearing.

“I’ll do it as long as people are interested, for sure,” he says of his success, which is sizeable, but still considered underground by mainstream standards. “I was totally shocked. Still shocked. It hasn’t really hit me. My life hasn’t really changed much.”

As a fan, a critic of his poetry and his music, I am pleased to say that, thanks to Iron and Wine, mine has.

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This entry was posted on Wednesday, October 22nd, 2003 at 12:00 pm and is filed under Cadenza. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.