Sam Beam of Iron and Wine
Photo by Craig Kief
Written with Ellen Dobbyn-Blackmore
A lazy music industry, fat and happy as the 1990s rolled in, never saw what was coming. The business hit its peak in 1999 after which file-sharing, YouTube and a sudden new propensity on the part of music fans for wholesale theft of intellectual property from their favorite artists fairly eviscerated the fatted calf of an industry that failed to adapt in time. Artists lost control of the distribution of their music and getting paid for their work became harder than ever.
The only acts that can fill stadiums now are oldies acts like the Rolling Stones or a young phenom like Lady Gaga. There has been an increased Balkanization of fan bases so that many of the listeners of different types of music aren't even remotely aware of one another. Rubbish can (and does) get more attention than genius. Rebecca Black would never have gotten a record deal before YouTube came along and proved that even a stinker like "Friday" could get a girl a record deal if the video went viral. Fans of serious, thoughtful music despaired but as egregious as it was, the new business model has also made room for singer-songwriters like Sam Beam of Iron and Wine who cannot yet fill an arena but whose fans are passionately devoted to this artist whose music brings them hope and comfort.
Beam, who started out as a solo act with a guitar, writes meaningful music with evocative and deeply layered lyrics that speak to concerns about love, life and death. He reaches a resonant place within, quietly and without any overt emotional display. His imagery is complex and avoids the pitfall of cliché that afflict the mediocre writing of many of his peers. More than anything it is his ability to create an all-encompassing atmosphere of aching intimacy, alternately forlorn and poignant, that separates him from the crowd.
Beam, a visual artist and film maker, was making his living teaching when his friend, Ben Bridwell, brought a demo tape of his to Sub Pop records which launched his musical career. His rise has been steady and his fan base has expanded to the point where he is now releasing an album with Nonesuch.
Ghost on Ghost is Iron and Wine's fifth full-length album and with it, Sam Beam is continuing to move in new directions. This album has a dreamy, jazzy quality to it along with a full band which will be a departure for fans of his solo work. About that dreamy quality, Beam said, "music, if you let it hit you, can always have a dreamy quality. It depends what kind of dreams you have. It is... art. We have an immediate emotional reaction to the wavelength."
That dreamy quality is not just in his soaring falsetto and instrumentation; it is also in the lyrics. Through his words, Beam, with his roots in visual art and film-making, conjures pictures. Beam acknowledges this: "I have a background in art so I'm definitely drawn to a visual style of communication. They're songs but I treat them a lot like poems rather than diary entries or an opportunity to put something on a soapbox or grandstanding. They're more observational."
When questioned about poetic influences (Beam cited Norman Dubie as a favorite poet) in his music, he had this to say, "As far as approaching a song more like a poem, it's more of a visceral, physical language. It's much less about describing how you feel about something and more about discovering how you feel about something by describing it. I enjoy the description of action, I like dialogue, I like nature imagery. All kinds of stuff that I put together and see what happens." Water is a particular favorite image of his. When asked about it, Beam replied energetically, "I love water. As far as writing goes it's a classic metaphor for life. We come from it. You can think of it as always moving. It's such a generous image that it's inevitable that you return to it. It has religious symbology. It's a huge part of our experience."
The one constant that remained when the music industry experienced its massive upheaval was a certain mature and educated audience hungering for a stronger and deeper connection with the music they listen to. They don't want vapid and forgettable pop songs and they expect their favorite singer-songwriters to give them something more meaningful. Sam Beam provides that connection through his particular vision and approach to archetype: "We have just a few things that we're really interested in. There's what you want, there's what you love, your acceptance of your ideas of the universe to help things make sense, these kinds of elements. We always want something and that's what drama and conflict are all about. Some songs are more clearly written than others. I try to boil it down to something at a human level and then place it in a familiar, physical atmosphere that people can relate to which usually involves some vision of nature or something that people will understand."
Beam may mine personal experience for his music but it's always in service of a universal expression. "I feel like that's at the heart of most people because it's common experience rather than a diary entry, which is always interesting, but that's interesting because it's not usually a common experience being more miserable - or more deranged or something. When I'm writing, I don't really think about those things. It's only when I'm being interviewed."
Taking a chance on annoying Beam, we asked him about his favorite books from childhood. Beam was animated in recounting the re-reading of a favorite book to his children. This points to how he reacts so emotionally to the story: "I have a lot of kids so I've been going through the process of re-reading those books from my childhood by reading to them. Fifteen years ago I might have told you something different but now I'm remembering this book, Miss Suzy (Miriam Young, 1964). She was a squirrel. She has a house in a tree and these bad squirrels come up and kick her out of her tree. They were terrible! They're like a gang of roughnecks. So she sneaks into the attic of this abandoned house and she finds a doll house full of toy soldiers. She wakes them up and takes care of them, sort of becomes their mom. Then they all decide to do something nice for her and they all go and kick the gang out of her house and she goes back to live in her tree. It's funny how when you speak about this old children's book, in my mind there's so much magic in it but when you try to describe it, it goes away. It's a strange phenomenon." He is so obviously relieved that justice is served. Adults like mercy in a story because they are so guilty while children love justice because they are so innocent. Sam Beam finds a way to hold on to that innocence and bring it to the rest of us.
The strong thematic elements of Ghost on Ghost continue the pattern of Beam's musical output. "I don't really sit and write a record from start to finish. I write all the time. It's my job. When it comes time to put out a record I look around and see what I've got. A writer can get a wide variety of subject matter but when I think about it there's a lot of stuff that you repeat, there's a lot of stuff that I come back to a hundred times. Some of these songs were written recently and some were written or started a hundred years ago. I work in a loose thematic way."
By way of example, Beam refers to a past album: "I have a record called the Shepherd's Dog and all those songs have a dog in them. You come down to similar themes, the same images. In this album (Ghost on Ghost) there's always a couple. It's them against the world, or ecstatic about something they discovered or working on something or working something out. It's a theme that binds these songs together. As we put (the songs) together I realized that this one has the briars and that one has the briars... and this one has a place, a street name. It's kind of serendipitous." And so the recurring images this time around involve a couple, not necessarily the same couple, in various situations, working things out as they move through life. The place names used in the songs carry the music all around the country. The instrumentation, though, is quite different from what he's done before. He's not about to be constrained by what he's done before when there's new territory to be discovered.
His way of working, constantly pushing for a new experience, does take some courage. Only by going deep can Beam keep coming up with new and creative ways of saying things that his audience wants to hear. His own response to the importance of courage in the life of an artist is telling: "It depends on what you do it for. Some people need it to exorcise those demons by their commonality with other human beings or they feel the need to exorcise those things or understand themselves better. When it comes up, something like a memory that's painful, I'll either use it or I won't. It depends on the situation. I'm more about the discovery rather than the exorcising quality of diary entry kind of art. I'm not really into that. I'm into discovering something new and true through putting images together that I wouldn't have necessarily thought go together. Seeing where the narrative takes you, imagining where these people are going. Something for these people that makes sense."
When asked how that manifests in his latest work, Beam said, "In Ghost on Ghost I have this song, Caught in the Briars with this line: 'the naked boys who lay down beside her sing her the saddest songs, all caught in the briars.' I have no trouble. I decided to do it but I had to think about - am I sure I want to have a line about naked boys? People can... whatever, but at the same time it's a beautiful, poetic image. I'll always err on the side of art for art's sake." The image of naked boys recurs twice more in the album and points to his desire as an artist to find the images that capture what he feels and conjure a sound-picture for his listeners. It takes courage to stand by the image in a world so fraught with ugliness but Sam Beam stakes his place and refuses to bow to the outside. He stands by his truth, takes us with him and we land in an innocent place where we can share the sublime beauty of his vision.
Followers of Iron and Wine who have become used to a certain sound have to be prepared for a process of continual evolution. Sam Beam couldn't keep making the same music time and time again if he tried. There's a certain courage to making music this way. It's what we've come to expect from our greatest singer-songwriters like Bob Dylan, Neil Young and Paul Simon to whom Beam has been compared. It's too soon to say if Beam belongs in that company. One thing is for sure, he won't be sitting around waiting for validation or trying to write hit songs.
Beam is, famously, a somewhat accidental musician. He made music for the love of it while he earned his bread as a teacher to feed his growing family. As such, his approach is process oriented and he doesn't see himself as a risk taker: "I don't ever really feel like what I was doing was taking much risk. I always thought the most important thing was to make something interesting and doing the same thing over and over again is not interesting. It comes from my art school background. People are interested in what you're doing but they're more interested in what you're doing next than what you have just done. You learn quickly that work is more about the process than the final result. I like working and trying to find new things. I feel lucky that I went to art school and I learned about critique. If you mean about putting your stuff in front of people. No criticism can be worse than art school. They just relish ripping you apart. You learn the value of what critique is and how you can apply it to your process... or the value of ignoring it which makes it more valuable."
So, is there a risk in changing the sound of his music? Beam acknowledges, "It's a risk for the listener, but yeah. You run the risk of alienating fans but I guess since I had no idea what people would be interested in in the first place, I had no idea what the formula would be to recreate that first breakout record again. I can't reproduce it; I can just keep working."
With respect to people like Dylan, Young and Simon, Beam says, "I think they definitely have a thematic through-line that you can recognize through their work even when it feels different. I think it's important as an artist to keep searching. I think it's much more important than worrying about how people are going to receive it. You can't always predict what's going to succeed. It's ridiculous, a ridiculous endeavor. Some people are going to say it's a masterpiece and other people are going to say it's a piece of shit every time you do it so it doesn't really matter. You can't worry about that. You just keep working and trying your best. I definitely feel like art school gave me this blind bravado or naïve courage because it was instilled in me that you're only worth what you've got next. You know, keeps you hungry though you can either digest it or it can you can use it to find what you haven't discovered yet. That's a really optimistic, hopeful thing."
When you sign on to become a fan of Iron and Wine, you're signing up for the long haul. Be ready to embrace whatever is coming next. Sam Beam doesn't know where it's going but he's not going to stop searching. When you listen to Ghost on Ghost remember that whenever you find yourself moved, transported or transfigured by Sam Beam, it was his vision that took you there. Trust him. He'll take you to places you don't expect but they will all be places of beauty and truth.
Grace for Saints and Ramblers from from Iron and Wine's latest album: Ghost on Ghost