Iron and Wine: Simple but Lovely
Singer-songwriter Sam Beam's acoustic ballads will soothe your soul
© Ben Wood
Iron and Wine's first album The Creek Drank the Cradle is an exercise in acoustic loveliness that sounds like Nick Drake or Elliott Smith on happy pills
The Creek Drank the Cradle
The Creek Drank the Cradle (2002) is the first album by Florida-based singer-songwriter Sam Beam, aka Iron and Wine. You have probably heard his cover of The Postal Service’s ‘Such Great Heights’, which has featured on ads for M & Ms and Ask.com, and on the soundtrack to ‘Garden State’.
A happier Elliott Smith or Nick Drake
This hypnotic, seemingly simple collection (created entirely by Beam at his Miami home) has the timeless feel of all good folk music. Its nearest comparisons are a cheerier Elliott Smith, or a more positive, ‘Pink Moon’-era Nick Drake. Not that these contemplative tunes are particularly upbeat - just that compared to these two doomed souls, almost anyone else is going to sound well-adjusted!
As subtly addictive as JJ Cale
Beam’s music has a womblike, lullaby quality. It’s relatively minimal but impeccably produced, most tracks sticking to a palette of softly sung, sometimes multi-tracked vocals, acoustic guitar, slide and banjo. It is most definitely trance-inducing, like Devandra Banhart, though more straight-ahead than everyone’s favourite hippie pixie – and, one imagines, the perfect accompaniment to an aromatic cigarette at the end of a long hard day.
Although on one level the album sounds nothing like Beam’s fellow minimalist JJ Cale, it shares several qualities with Cale’s music: the first time you hear it, it sounds a bit samey. But gradually the tunes creep under your guard and you realise it’s packed with great melodies and deft lyrics, and utterly charming. Then you can’t stop playing it.
The Creek… is the perfect ‘less is more’ music: in some ways there’s not too much going on here, but in the right mood, its Zen minimalism really hits the spot. Every strummed guitar melody, slide line and murmured couplet becomes a hook none the less addictive for its subtlety.
Comaprisons with Jose Gonzalez, Neil Young
Lion’s mane kicks off proceedings sounding like Jose Gonzalez. Lovely acoustic strums and soft slide guitar provide the bed for a song packed with similes for love (“a crying baby mama warned you not to wake”; “a tired symphony you hum when you’re awake”). It’s gentle, devotional, and sets the template for the whole album.
He may be a thoroughly nice chap, but Beam’s no saint: Bird Stealing Bread combines circular chord changes with jealous thoughts of his ex-love with her new man (“Do his hands in your hair sound a lot like a thing you believe in?”). Faded from the Winter is more abstract and impressionistic, while the rueful Promising Light also examines the end of an affair.
There are echoes of Neil Young’s For the Turnstiles on the banjo-driven The Rooster Moans, a doomed, Robert Johnson-style, country blues. This lost soul is riding the rails, wondering what’s happened to his life, and why he’s “end[ed] up on the devil’s rusty train”.
In the tender Upward over the Mountain Beam plays the dutiful son, trying to reassure his mother that she doesn’t need to worry about him anymore (a forlorn hope indeed), now he’s left home and found a girl.
I’m not quite sure what Southern Anthem this is saying, apart from ‘we all need something to grab hold of’. The minimal Angry Blade has shades of Nick Drake’s final, haunted ‘Pink Moon’, hauntedly asking ‘Who left you so?’
Weary Memory slows the pace down almost to a halt, with its memories of a failed marriage; Promise what you will pits the narrator’s optimism with his lover’s fatalism; and the closing Muddy Hymnal (great title) tells a murky story of betrayal.
Other Iron and Wine records
Beam has released another, more polished, album since then – 2004’s Our Endless Numbered Days – with his third, The Shepherd’s Dog, to follow in September. There’s also been a live album and several EPs, including a collaboration with TexMex indie sensations Calexico. But, much like Nick Drake's ‘Pink Moon’ or Elliott Smith’s ‘Either/Or’, this pared-down, beautiful record is him at his least diluted. Put it on at the end of a hard day and let your worries drift away…
