Sam Beam returns to Austin with his first new album in over six years
By Jeff McCord
Sam Beam has always taken a whimsical approach to his songwriting. His characters glide, trip, dodge disasters, lie to themselves, and do their best to love and live.
Light Verse is the first full-length Iron and Wine album in more than six years, though Sam hasn’t been entirely idle. He made a 2019 EP with Calexico, another EP of Lori McKenna songs, and a documentary/concert film called Who Can See Forever. (Sub Pop released the soundtrack in 2023, Sam screened the film here a couple of months ago. The filmmakers are still working on wider distribution.)
Yet for an artist whose stock and trade are his songs, there haven’t been a lot of new ones lately. His last album was the dark-ish, Trump-era, Beast Epic, from 2017. The pandemic was a pause for everyone, of course. But for Sam, it was more than that.
“It was so chaotic,” he recalls. Sam just turned fifty but you’d never know it. In Austin on tour for Light Verse, he’s tanned, relaxed, looking not a day older than when he lived in Dripping Springs over a decade ago. Yet despite appearances, he experienced something.
“I’ve definitely gone through dry spells before. This one just felt different. Every time I would sit to play guitar or try to write something, all that info and stuff was in the background of your mind, the political and cultural chaos and fear of the disease, all these things. And I just didn’t really want to write about that.”
So Sam played the guitar, worked on his artwork, and waited things out. And he listened to a lot of music.
“One of the people I was listening to a lot was Lori McKenna. I had heard her stuff, but I wasn’t super familiar. I thought she was really great. I didn’t have any completed songs of my own, so I went in the studio, and made a record of some of her material.”
And the wheels started turning again.
“I had these great [McKenna] songs to record. And I just loved making records. That’s really where I started this journey. I like playing. As a kid, I liked strumming around [on] the guitar, but it didn’t really catch on with me until I began recording music and making something. I come from this visual art background. When I have something I can focus and change and manipulate and develop, it becomes something for me. So it was really a matter of just getting back in touch with where my passion for music started.”
Energized, his new songs started coming into shape. In contrast to the dark period now behind him, they were lighter, more playful.
“Most musicians are ridiculous people. We just joke around all the time. But when it came time to sit and write a song, it was time to say what you mean about life. It’s an important space to be able to be vulnerable and open and honest to how you feel about things. But it’s also a little one-sided. Sometimes it’s mostly about balance.”
Like the couple in “All In Good Time”, who fall in love and watch their lives spiral out of control in absurd ways.
“There are definitely great love songs where they boil it down and focus on the perfect distillation of a relationship. Those songs are great. But a song like this one, where it lists all of these things that happened to them; some are good, some are bad, some contradict the others because our feelings are not the same all the time. It felt more like life; it just keeps going and going.”
There are many sides to all these new songs, the deluded narrator of “Taken by Surprise”, the optimism of “Sweet Talk”, the player in “Anyone’s Game”, who says “First they kiss their lucky dice and then they dig themselves a grave.”
Balance. Hope. Life. Time. It’s all here.
Light Verse has a new simplicity, too, albeit one that incorporates everything from acoustics to dense orchestrations. For the first time, Sam made the record in Los Angeles.
“Some of the people that were playing in my band were from L.A., and they had made records with this guy Dave Way. They had been in my ear about it. I was excited about going there, and I’ve been playing some shows with Andrew Bird and a lot of people in his band are from L.A., and so some of them came out and played. And [former Austinite] David Garza was there.”
Garza is featured prominently on the new record. I ask Sam if he knew Garza when he lived here.
He laughs. “We met. I never played with him before. I didn’t get to know him as much as I would have liked to, because I was out in Dripping Springs. Honestly. I’ve met more people from Austin at European music festivals than I did when I lived in Dripping Springs.”
Sam had his hands full when he lived here. His five kids were all young. Emerging from the pandemic, with the youngest of his kids now 14, the passage of time seems very pronounced.
“Those themes have always been part of what I’ve been writing about,” Sam admits. “You know, sometimes they’re more in the forefront, and sometimes they’re just color in the background. This one feels in the foreground, because we all went through this thing recently. It’s a very relaxed, straightforward sounding record, throwing these themes and tones on top of one another and seeing what that sounds like. But the songs are a little more complicated. Most of the songs are about loss, to be honest. And but at the same time, that loss is part of the larger picture of our snapshot of our life experience. It’s just one of the parts.”
FOLLOW IRON & WINE
Artist: Iron & Wine
Date: 8-2-24
Set List:
“All In Good Time”
“Anyone’s Game”
“Sweet Talk”
Album: Light Verse (Sub Pop Records 2024)
Musicians: Sam Beam – lead vocals, guitar; Elizabeth Goodfellow – drums; Lauren Baba – violin; Rhea Estelle – violin; Robert Burger – keys; Kathryn Ernst – bass
Credits:
Producer: Deidre Gott; Production Assistant: Confucius Jones; Audio Engineer: Jake Perlman, Rene Chavez, Simón Marulanda-Mesa; Audio Mix: Rene Chavez, Simón Marulanda-Mesa; Cameras: Renee Dominguez, Manoo Sirivelu, Ryan Olszewski; Edit: Renee Dominguez; Host: Jody Freaking Denberg
