“No one is the savior they would like to be,” Sam Beam
laments on “Lovesong of the Buzzard” from his new, much-lauded album,
The Shepherd’s Dog.
A certain spiritual longing exists deep within the songs
Beam—who records under the name Iron & Wine—so
carefully crafts out of vivid imagery, striking lyricism, and
thoughtful arrangements. Throughout The Shepherd’s Dog, Beam
uses religious symbolism (wings, smoke), raw elements (bones, ashes),
and of course the unspeakable power of sound to beautifully contemplate
human existence and beyond.
“In our days, we will say what our ghosts will say/We gave the world
what it saw fit, and what’d we get?” asks Beam on the hushed
“Resurrection Fern.” “Like stubborn boys with big green eyes, we’ll see
everything/in the timid shade of the autumn leaves and the buzzard’s
wing.”
Beam is not simply a singer. He is not just a guitarist. Not simply
a songwriter. Beam is an artist. Music just happens to be his channel
of choice. With chords for a medium, Beam plunges to the core of what
it means to be alive. “I want to write something that seems true in a
certain way, and that’s what I understand,” Beam recently told the
music website Pitchfork. “I try to write human songs or human
experience [songs].”
Beam has been pondering the human experience through bare-boned folk
song since Iron & Wine debuted with The Creek Drank the
Cradle in 2002. He followed the first album with 2004’s Our
Endless Numbered Days, 2005’s The Woman King EP, and, again
in ’05, an incredible EP collaboration with Calexico called In the
Reins.
The Shepherd’s Dog is Beam’s fullest album to date. His
arrangements have grown from the wispy, barren feel of voice and guitar
to an expanded palette that includes dub, blues, and West African
instrumentation. Beam’s love for minimal, traditional folk music
remains, but this time around it’s decorated by lush percussion and
dense grooves.
A trained screenwriter, Beam coalesces picturesque scenes made of
raspberry scents and dogwood trees with intriguing lines like, “The
postman cried while reading the mail” for songs that bleed raw life.
“I’ve been making the meaning they lack,” Beam proclaims in “House by
the Sea,” a creaky, bluesy cut whose narrator could easily be a higher
being. “And I’ve been burning that book they come back to.”
Among smoke swirls, black valleys, old bones, chapel bells, and
begging eyes (open and shut), Beam takes his listeners to a dreamy,
dreary world on the verge of slipping away. He wonders about God, about
childhood, about the Devil, about the weeds that grow tall and the
birds that can’t fly and the soldiers that never come home. Immersed in
instrumentation warm like cotton fuzz against the skin and soft like
morning light bending against the home, The Shepherd’s Dog is as
free as it is broken, easy as it is hard.
“I wanted to make these layers of entertainment where you could
listen in one sitting and maybe pay attention to the lyrics and get
something from that,” Beam recently said on NPR’s World Café
radio show, “otherwise you could get something from the music and all
little textural things.”
Whatever you choose to take from Iron & Wine, it’s destined to
move you to take more.