Formed in: 2000, Miami, Florida
Key Albums: The Creek Drank The Cradle (2002), The Shepherd's Dog (2007)
Sam Beam is Iron And Wine, and Iron And Wine is Sam Beam. Under that elemental handle, the bushily-bearded singer-songwriter plays a kind of new-millennial Americana. Using his husky, whispery voice over mostly-acoustic tunes, Beam sings songs steeped in the imagery of the rural South.
Background
Beam (born July 26, 1974) grew up outside of Columbia, South Carolina, obsessed with two things: art and music. “In my room, the radio was really always forever on,” Beam recalls. “I grew up drawing. I was always drawing, all the time, with the radio on."When Beam went to University in Richmond, Virginia, he entered the arts program, thinking that he was going to be a painter. But, at Richmond, he “ended up getting into photography,” which would lead to the study of cinematography at Florida State University, where he’d meet his wife, Kim.
The couple moved to Miami so that Kim could pursue her studies in midwifery, and, coincidentally enough, started churning out kids; Beam now a beaming father-of-four. Feeling the need to support his family, Beam shelved the small, self-made films that were consuming his time —his only foothold in Hollywood being a “non-union lighting engineer, not even important enough to make the final credits” on the Mel Gibson revisionist civil-war picture The Patriot— and got a professorial gig teaching cinematography.
Beginnings
With that one creative outlet cut off, Beam turned to another: recording. Rolling tape on an aging four-track recorder after wife and child had turned in, Beam started making whisper-quiet, pseudo-folkie songs inspired by JJ Cale, Nick Drake, and Simon & Garfunkel. "I couldn't really rock out, I had to be quiet," Beam explains.
Writing about “places that I grew up, people that I knew, my family,” Beam's songs were filled with images of creekbeds and meadows, cats and dogs and snakes and birds. “Going back home to visit my parents, the landscape —both the cultural landscape and the geography— is a big influence,” he declares.
At that time, Beam wasn’t playing live, and wasn’t thinking Iron And Wine —a name he'd cribbed from a Dietary Supplement called Beef, Iron & Wine— would amount to anything other than a scattered tape-collection. “I hadn’t been recording for anyone else, even really thinking anyone would hear them," says Beam. "I didn’t want to be famous. I was just doing it late at night, a quiet little pastime.”
Arrival
Fate intervened when he sent a cassette to his pal Ben Bridwell, the Irmo, South Carolina native who, at that time, was a member of pre-Band Of Horses Seattle combo Carissa’s Wierd [sic]. From Bridwell, the tape eventually got dubbed on to Jonathan Poneman, the Sub Pop bossman still famous for “discovering” Nirvana.
Beam was signed to Sub Pop, and in 2002 the legendary label released a collection of Beam's home recordings under the title The Creek Drank The Cradle. With his hushed, of-the-land lullabies draped under a pall of tape hiss, the songs on the album sounded like lost Smithsonian Folkways recordings. Touring for the album was "rough," Beam says. “I could hear people down the front talking about the most mundane stuff, [like] their grocery lists.”
That year, Beam recorded a version of The Postal Service's single "Such Great Heights," to be used as a remix-like b-side by that band. It soon grew to be Beam's best-known song, used in an advertisement for M&Ms and on the soundtrack to the dubious movie Garden State in 2004.
Developments
That was the year that Beam made his second Iron & Wine album, Our Endless Numbered Days. Produced by Brian Deck in Chicago, it marked Beam's first-ever studio recordings. "I knew I wanted to go into the studio, if just for the experience of that, as something I’d never done before,” Beam offers. "I wanted to see how some of the ‘clarity’ of the recording influenced the songs."
With his third Iron & Wine album, 2007's The Shepherd's Dog, Beam became a studio rat. Working from a home studio at his new house in Austin, Texas, Beam labored over the longplayer. "I’d never spent more than two weeks on a studio record before," Beam sighs. "But it ended up taking six months.”
More experimental and multi-layered in approach, The Shepherd's Dog finds Beam's sad songs turned into hyper-percussive workouts. Aided by Deck and a posse of guest players (including folk from Califone, Calexico, and Town & Country), Beam borrowed from an array of ‘ethnic’ rhythms, from Highlife to Bossa Nova to Bhangra.
“We never really had trouble throwing out ideas, it was the opposite,” Beam says, of the recordings. “Our trouble was more deciding on, and sticking to, which ones we were going to do.”
With The Shepherd's Dog having reinvented what Iron & Wine is, Beam now has the liberty to take his project in any direction. Even if he never can recapture the simplicity and charm of his initial at-home recordings, Beam looks set to remain one of the more compelling figures in alternative music.
