Rainy days, moonlit nights, strolls down crowded city streets, parties, weddings, the past ten years of your life-you name it, there's a soundtrack for it. Whether you've composed it, or there's a beat throbbing through your head and pulsing through your veins, or it's elevator music pumped through the walls of your hotel room, or whether you hear it at the time-it's there.
Iron and Wine, the moniker for SubPop Records' latest beardfolk darling from Florida, Sam Beam, seems to be one of the most amazing and subtly heartwrenching pieces of soundtrack fodder I've encountered thus far. Both his full-length album ("Creek Drank the Cradle") and the recently released EP ("Sea and the Rhythm") sound as if they were culled from lazy Sundays and the dust-streaming-through-the-afterglow-of-morning light of a sleepy love affair blossoming in an abandoned, white-walled attic with creaky floors-blissful and natural, quietly flooded with the inexplicable, inescapable feeling that something important is happening.
A soft-spoken fellow with a beard that would make Ulysses S. Grant proud, Beam's career started out modestly, as he distributed lo-fi tapes throughout Florida in his downtime, when he wasn't busy teaching cinematography at a Miami college. After catching the attention of some executives at SubPop, Beam mailed them two CDs-one of which would become 2002's "Creek Drank the Cradle." Paying homage to such smoky nocturnal greats as Nick Drake and Lou Barlow, "Cradle" was, in my mind, an intimate work of genius-a wonderful piece of music borne of a natural and langorous texture. It was something that you would find in the back of an aging barn with a broken weathervane tottering from the roof, or written on the faces of two teenagers returning from mid-afternoon sweet talking and fingertip whispers in a cornfield somewhere.
Because of the soft and subtle nature of Beam's recorded work, I was admittedly a bit worried that it wouldn't translate well to live performance. I worried that it would either be too spare-just having Beam up there with his guitar and his beautiful, melancholic voice that could launch a thousand ships or maybe just sink them dead into an otherwise stormy sea-or sound out of place in the context of accompaniment (Beam brought a drummer who also did backup vocals and a supporting string player with him to the Iron Horse Music Hall that night).
I was wrong.
From the second that Beam took to the stage, I felt nothing less than a sleepy (he didn't take to the stage until at least 11:30) awe at the bare-bones, heartfelt sound of Beam and his two counterparts. The accompaniment was perfect-it wasn't too loud, it wasn't at all overpowering. I was also particularly impressed with Beam himself.
Though he certainly was quiet, though he certainly was understated as per his recordings, his voice wasn't at all thin-rather it had a full texture which resonated throughout the intimate venue. Through both his hushed lullabies and his more "upbeat" numbers, I found myself captivated by this man, this quiet sentinel for the romantic and the nostalgic, for all those who tread the thin line between keeping your memories with you and trying so hard in the backdrop of (in this case) New England fall, with all its turning leaves and colder nights, to just forgive yourself for whatever it is that so weighs down your heart. Beam coaxes us to forget what she looks like in the morning, forget the arguments with your parents, forget all the things you didn't have the courage to say-and to just live in lists: a photograph, a candle, a quiet afternoon spent on a beach somewhere. "I've a picture of you on our favorite day by the seaside," Beam sang in a beautiful performance of "Bird Stealing Bread," one of the more popular songs on "Creek Drank the Cradle." Though we're not party to these photographs, these moments of his-his lyrics and his performance alike enabled me to sympathize and to imagine, and it was all almost dream-like-something which was heightened still by the quiet, dark atmosphere of the venue, the performance and the performer himself.
Friday night's performance consisted of a pleasant mix of both new and "old" material-staples from his full-length album and some of my favorites from the EP. Beam also treated us to some more unfamiliar songs-hinting at a library of passionate wisdom that he has stored up somewhere, just waiting for the day when he can slip it past our collective consciousness once more, couched in the sparse rhythms of a banjo and his own, heavenly voice. Despite the soft nature of his sound, the man has a range to speak of-his lows sound like the supportive rumblings of a bass guitar, only (for lack of a better term) prettier, while his tremulous highs create the breezy feeling of sunflower fuzz, floating tenuously about, carried by a soft wind.
A particular gem in the setlist wasn't one of Beam's own, though, as he delivered a rendition of The Flaming Lips' "Waitin' for a Superman," a version which I would venture to say, though it's a bit of a situation of apples and oranges, far surpasses the original in its interpretation of the lyrics. "Is it getting heavy? / Well I thought it was already as heavy as it can be," Beam sang, a testament to the unbelievable weight of the world on the shoulders of the sensitive, something which the pregnant humming and quiet buzz of his voice and the devastating nostalgia of his lyrics speak to often. When Beam delivered the line "Is it overwhelming / To use a crane to crush a fly?" you couldn't help but put him into the equation-a bending willow tree trying to understand the insurmountable task of something even Atlas himself wouldn't have been able to handle.