Iron & Wine: A Letter for the Archive

Since The Creek Drank the Cradle [2002], Samuel Beam, under the assumed title of Iron & Wine, has released a further five studio albums, the sophomore Our Endless Numbered Days [2004]; the experimental The Shepherd’s Dog [2007]; the pop-induced Kiss Each Other Clean [2011]; the jazz-centred Ghost on Ghost [2013]; and, most recently, the acoustic-echo that is Beast Epic [2017], respectively. Beyond the primary releases, a string of three intermediate EP’s, excluding limited editions and live-recordings, from The Sea & the Rhythm [2003], Woman King [2005], and to the collaborative album In the Reins [2005], accompanied by the Tuscan, Arizona band Calexico, have achieved critical acclaim. In addition to In the Reins, two successive releases, 2015’s covers-album Sing into My Mouth, working alongside Band of Horses’ principle singer and writer, Ben Bridwell, and 2016’s Love Letter for Fire, written and recording with Jesca Hoop, have formed what may be categorised as a ‘Duets Series’. Since 2016, Beam has gone on to release two more Volumes within his ongoing Archive Series, Volumes 3 and 4; a full-length LP, Beast Epic, in 2017; and the accompanying EP, Weed Garden, in 2018. As is evidenced in this comprehensive list, attempting to write about Beam’s authorial craft, whilst keeping an article contemporary to his output, is no easy feat.

With each release, Beam permeates his verses with, what he himself as termed, ‘associative language’, as he constructs his narratives by intermittently cutting from the principle story-arc of a song to an aphoristic or comparative vignette; it is a technique which, through the use of analogical-comparisons, Beam creates a contrast between the literal and figurative renderings of a scene, with the former achieved through the inclusion of ‘very specific, direct language’[1]. In essence, Beam establishes a song’s narrative focus before then drawing the reader’s attention to a seemingly unrelated image, only to then return to the established story of the song’s opening; take, for instance, the first two verses of Passing Afternoon:

There are times I walk from you like some passing afternoon/summer warmed the open window of her honeymoon/ and she chose her yard to burn but the ground remembers her/ wooden spoons, her children stir her bougainvillea blooms// There are things that drift away like our endless, numbered days/ Autumn blew the quilt right off the perfect bed she made/ and she chosen to believe in the hymns her mother sings/ Sunday pulls its children from their piles of fallen leaves (emphasis added)

To begin with, Beam’s alternating use of a first-person perspective, usually referenced with the first line of each verse, to that of a third-person omniscient narration, in his recalling of the dissipation of a mother’s family-life for the remaining three lines, brings two protagonists to Passing Afternoon’s forefront: the narrator and an unnamed woman. Gradually, the separate narratives coalesce into an intertwined-arc through the penultimate line of the third verse, as Beam recalls ‘but my hands remember hers, rolling around the shaded ferns’, as a once intimate embrace is distilled from his memory. With the piecing together of the two characters’ stories, Beam reveals, by the concluding two verses of Passing Afternoon, that the song is an account of an apparent shared history between the pair, rather than a disassociated amalgam of two separate narrative-arcs. However, by its end, the narrator’s place within the narrative, whilst alluding to a furtive love affair with the woman, is still not certain. Returning to the extract, and alongside the alternating narrative-voice, these lines are replete with figurative comparisons: within the excerpt alone, the featured similes — noting the narrator’s distance from the song’s addressee, with the act of walking away akin to that of the ‘passing’ of a listless day to the sorrow felt with the inevitable drifting ‘away’ of ‘things’ — focus upon separation, setting out from another and the eventual sense of loss endured as a result. Additionally, Beam’s personified references to both summer and autumn warming and disrupting, respectively, the mother’s tended home present, again, the theme of loss through the seasons’ encroachment upon her family’s safety: eventually, summer’s pleasant warming, experienced during her ‘honeymoon’, becomes, due to the ominous allusion to winter’s claiming of her children, tucking ‘in […] her fragile china dolls’, a devastating threat, by the fourth verse. Throughout Passing Afternoon, there is a melding of the events of the woman’s life and the temporality of the seasonal cycle, as a new season ushers in a new era of her life: introduced as a newlywed, in summer; she is shown to have found a home by autumn; in spring, she is a cautious mother, reticent to allow her children independence from her; and by winter, as stated previously, she has lost her ‘fragile’ children to the season. With this brief overview alone, it is evident that Beam’s language, in his detailing of a narrative’s events, creates, often in tandem, starkly literal and deliberately opaque depictions of a scene.

This holistic study of Beam’s authorial craft will analyse specifically how, through his alternating use of narrative-voice and the consistent inclusion of figurative language, his piecemeal story-arcs are formulated; two albums have been selected from Beam’s oeuvre: Achieve Series Volume No.1 [2015] and Love Letter for Fire [2016]. The pairing of these works — Archive Series Volume No.1 and Love Letter for Fire— highlights two differing approaches for Beam during the compositional stages of each collection: while the former is a reflective collation of songs written and recorded prior to Beam assuming the moniker of Iron & Wine, the second release features songs written with another songwriter, Jesca Hoop, and marks not only a first for Beam, as noted previously, but it is also Hoop’s ‘first crack at writing duets’[2] (emphasis added). With these albums, the characteristics of Beam’s verse — particularly his ‘use associative language’; his pastoral settings; and his searching transitory characters — underpin these outwardly disparate releases, despite their differing compositions. Temporarily, whilst released just under fourteen months from each other, there is a chronological shift within Beam’s oeuvre through the creation of the Archive Series and, beyond both records marking a new undertaking, the uniting of the two albums produces, due to the timeframe of their writing, an overview of Beam’s authorship.

In order to develop a focus upon Beam’s verse throughout his career, this article has been divided into two parts: the first instalment centres upon the two aforementioned records of Achieve Series Volume No.1 [2015] and the collaborative album Love Letter for Fire [2016]: the former being the first volume of the rolling Archive Series and the latter being Beam’s first full-length duets-record of original material; indeed, while Beam’s sister, Sarah, has featured upon Iron & Wine’s albums up to Kiss Each Other Clean as a backing vocalist during both the recording and touring of the albums, and having collaborated with Rhiannon Giddens for a cover of Bob Dylan’s Forever Yong [1974], in 2015, Love Letter for Fire is Beam’s first fully collaborative effort with another vocalist, as Hoop has co-written the collection in partnership with Beam. From this two album approach, a clear compendium, if you will, of Beam’s lyricism will be established, highlighting the characteristics of the songwriter’s language from the beginning of Iron & Wine to Beam’s more recent endeavours. While the first part of the article will be divided into The Archive Series and The Duet Series, the second, an authorial analysis of Iron & Wine’s sixth album, Beast Epic, and the ‘companion piece’[3] Weed Garden [EP], will form the backbone of another essay, with an attention towards Beam’s latest releases and how the subjects of these records revisit the characteristic tropes within his body of work as a whole. With Beam himself treating the songs ‘like poems’[4], for this article and its accompanying part these verses have been analysed as such.

The Archive Series: Volume No. 1

With Archive Series Volume No.1, Beam revisits the writings which preceded his first album, The Creek Drank the Cradle [2002], grouping together a selection of unreleased, and largely unheard, material from the debut’s composition. Following Volume No. 1, Beam has added a further three Volume to the collection; unlike Volume No.1, Volume No. 2 [2015] does not include original content, featuring, instead, two cover songs: Neil Young’s Albuquerque and The Four Tops’ It’s the Same Old Song, respectively[5]. Volume No.3 [2017], however, is an amalgam of the preceding releases of the series, with the third Volume consisting of two original unreleased songs, A Stranger Lay Beside Me and Miss Bottom of the Hill, and, as with the first instalment of the series, the songs of the third Volume were once again written prior to the debut release, The Creek Drank the Cradle [2002][6]. Most recently, the latest entry within the series, Volume No. 4, includes eight acoustically re-rendered songs from The Shepherd’s Dog: Innocent Bones, Boy with a Coin, The Devil Never Sleeps, Flightless Bird, American Mouth, Peace Beneath the City, Resurrection Fern, Pagan Angel and a Borrowed Car, Lovesong of the Buzzard[7]. So far, the series has enable Beam to revisit, and, in the process, reflect upon his earlier recordings, likening the process to ‘looking at old photographs’[8]. While proceeding to head forward with new material, the Archive Series permits a glance back to the road travelled so far.

Volume No.1 is neither an LP or an EP, but, rather, a collection that marks, to a degree, a return to the bracket of the ‘compilation album’: a title previously applied to Around the Well [2009], itself a record featuring celebrated covers of Stereolab [Peng! 33]; The Flaming Lips [Waiting for Superman]; The Postal Service [Such Great Heights]; and New Order [Love Vigilantes], respectively. These covers were included alongside a selection of B-sides that span Beam’s oeuvre: from the reflective nostalgia of Sacred Vision to the introspective narrative of The Trapeze Swinger’s titular character. In contrast to Around the Well, Volume No.1 features solely original material compiled ‘from the same batch’[9] of recordings made prior to the release of Beam’s debut, The Creek Drank the Cradle. Indeed, while Beam selected twelve songs for The Creek Drank the Cradle, more tracks remained unused and, with the exception of those included upon The Sea & the Rhythm (EP), ultimately, unreleased. In this regard, Volume No.1 occupies a liminal space within Iron & Wine’s chronology: a new release of old material.

By revisiting his archived pre-debut recordings, Beam explores, first and foremost, the formulation of his authorial craft; here, the listener is presented with sixteen selected songs from the precursory days of Iron & Wine, all of which have been grouped, ostensibly, due to the simple, practical point of their temporality, rather than having been collated through some adherence to an overarching theme: these songs were written and recorded over the same period, and have been released as such. However, and unlike Beam’s later works as Iron & Wine, Volume No.1 is without a defined or uniting narrative thread — with the Volume constructed from the ‘the same batch’ as The Creek Drank the Cradle the two albums share the point that they have both been ‘plucked from a big pile of songs’[10] with neither release ‘written as a record’[11] — but is, instead, united by the core characteristics that have since permeated his writing: the use of varied metrical feet; a penchant for figurative comparison; the use of the natural landscape to frame the events of a narrative; the travelogue-aspect of a story-arc; and the use of a central couple, living together or apart, as the protagonists.

In relation to Beam’s characters, and as is evident throughout the rest of his body of work as Iron & Wine, Beam places the intimate alongside the abstract by way of a shifting narrative perspective, alternating the use of the singular personal pronoun ‘I’, and the possessive ‘my’, with the collective pronoun ‘we’. Throughout Volume No. 1, Beam’s use of first-person narration works in tandem with the singular second-person pronoun ‘you’, transitioning his focus intermittently from the speaker’s view-point to that of a secondary-party, as is highlighted within Two Hungry Blackbirds’ interrogative refrain of ‘if I could be over you if the sky starts falling/would you be happy under me?/if I could be under you if the earth was burning/could you be trusted over me?’ (Emphasis added). From this, and as is evident within Volume No.1 as a whole, it is apparent that the subjects of Beam’s narratives are divided, predominantly, between two individuals: the speaker, or voice, and an accompanying figure. Indeed, this trope of a central couple was the principle thematic focus for Ghost on Ghost, Iron & Wine’s fifth full-length album, a point which Beam outlined in a 2013 interview with NPR’s All Things Considered:

What I do is just go through the songs and see if I can pick out, you know, something that ties them together. And this one [Ghost on Ghost], I had a lot of songs that had this central character — this couple. They weren’t necessarily the same couple. It was this couple against the world in a certain way or against one another. They were working something out. I felt, loosely, it was fun to make this imagined story where if you were interested in taking the time, you could almost imagine each song was like a new adventure for this couple.[12]

As is noted here in regards to Ghost on Ghost’s cast, Beam’s characters remain amorphous, physically nondescript phantoms. From the above extract, Beam’s comment that the pair at the forefront of Ghost on Ghost ‘weren’t necessarily the same couple’ creates an ambiguity that attests to his process of piecing narratives together, rather than writing ‘a record from start to finish’[13]. Akin to Ghost on Ghost, Volume No.1 of the Archive Series can be viewed as centring upon, either, a single collective, and therefore a single on-going narrative-arc, or sixteen entirely separate vignettes, detailing the experiences of an array of principle characters. The image of a couple, however, remains a constant anchor throughout Volume No. 1 and so form, to an extent, a uniting image to tether these songs together.

Further to this shared commonality between the songs, the Series’s first release evidences another penchant of Beam’s verse: as means to broaden the scale and scope of his narratives, Beam frequently utilises both a subjective and an omniscient first-person perspective, as is noted within Postcard’s opening six lines with ‘This postcard tells you where we’ve been/ And dirty dreams of pious men/ Who wake in fear but sleep again/ With what they’ve done/ With what they’ve done/ With all they’ve done’ (emphasis added). Here, while opening Postcard with the use of second (you), first (we’ve) and, to an extent, third person (referencing the pious men) narration, respectively, the narrative is expanded beyond the immediate parameters of the two unnamed principle characters by way of the omniscient narration: the ‘fear’ that wakes the ‘pious’ men draws the narrative from the narrator and their partner to an apparently unrelated scene. This approach is evident within both the chorus and lines fifteen through to twenty-three[14] of Postcard, which have been divided into separate five lined verses below[15] for clarity; with lines fifteen through to nineteen, Beam outwardly removes any and all narration from either a first or second person perspective:

The meadow birds have found the bones/ of righteous men like ragged clothes/ like precious stones/ and fell like evil in the end/ in aid of them, those evil men/ those perfect men – Postcard (chorus)

Some knuckle broken on disease/ Which pulled a preacher off his knees/ A callous whisper through the trees/ Blows ‘patience, boy’/ ‘More patience, boy’ –Postcard (ll.15-19)

And watch her children by flame/ The ones you gave your father’s name/ Whose evil and his love remain/ Inside you boy, inside you boy, inside you boy –Postcard (ll.20-23) (emphasis added)

Thematically, Postcard centres in part upon religious devotion in light of the conflicted and flawed state of an individual, from the piety of those fearful men referenced within the song’s opening lines to the duality of ‘evil’ and ‘love’ inherited by the addressed ‘boy’ of lines twenty through to twenty-three. The narrative’s characters are, regardless of their fidelity to their faith, tested in their lives, left flawed but, ultimately, human in their struggles: the ‘pious men’ are drawn to lust; the ‘prophet’, unnamed and forgotten, dies without an audience, posthumously remembered; the ‘righteous’ men are left without burial, known equally for their virtuosity as they are for their evil; and the ‘preacher’ is forced to abandon his prayer to face his immediate situation. As previously noted, it is through the intermittent and recurring presence of Beam’s speakers that the multiple threads of his narratives can be drawn together.

Indeed, Beam has noted the malleability of the narrative threads of his lyrics, stating, in an interview with David Dye for NPR World Café when discussing Ghost on Ghost, that the songs ‘go together because we say they go together, and when you say they go together you start to look for connections when they don’t really; if you look too close it all falls apart’[16]. Subsequently, it is a typical characteristic of Beam’s writing that a defined linear narrative is omitted for a more fragmentary, piecemeal approach to constructing a song’s story-arc. Take, for instance, the identity of the character of ‘the boy’ featured within Postcard, whose identity is something of a running ambiguity. When delineating Beam’s use of the common noun ‘boy’, it is possible to analyse lines fifteen through to sixteen and lines seventeen through to twenty-three separately. An initial analysis, with both scenes grouped together into one continuity, as in the album’s lyric-booklet, produces the interpretation that the ‘callous whisper’ of ‘boy’ is a condescension addressed to the praying preacher, with the man chastised as a mere child, possibly in his naive understanding of his religious belief and his practice. Due to the use of enjambment, Beam bleeds the preacher’s disturbed prayer with the whisper permeating the forest, outwardly uniting the two instances. However, with a second reading, it is possible to infer that lines seventeen through to twenty-three are rather part of a return to the principle narrative, with the ‘boy’ an entirely separate character from the penitent preacher. Beam follows line nineteen’s imperative of ‘More patience, boy’ with the coordinating conjunction ‘and’, amalgamating the disparate scenes into a single narrative. Here, ‘the boy’ is addressed directly through the use of the second-person pronoun ‘you’, as Beam writes ‘And watch her children by the flame/ the ones you gave your father’s name/ whose evil and his love remain/ inside you, boy’ (emphasis added). From this, it is possible to infer that the ‘callous whisper’ was not heard by the preacher, but rather by the surrogate father ‘watching her [his partner’s] children by the flame’ (ll.20) (emphasis added), and it is he, rather than the preacher, that is identified by the condescending label of ‘boy’. Now, the allegorical image of a preacher, or minister, halting their prayer in order to address a present danger, ominously labelled as ‘a disease’, serves as a brief aside to the present narrative told by the speaker. At this point, a moment of figurative digression is placed alongside the through-line arc of a pair, possibly lovers, recalling their past together: the abstract and the literal coalesce.

Further to this, and in relation to the narrative as a whole, ‘the boy’ is also defined as the antecedent of the pronoun ‘you’, with the identity of the addressee of the song’s opening line, ‘This postcard tells you where we’ve been’, disclosed. It is due to instances akin to this initial vagueness, with the referent of the song unknown to the listener, that the seemingly peripheral characters of Beam’s verses — here, the ‘righteous men’; ‘the evil men’; and the praying ‘preacher’ — are elevated to an equal standing in their importance to the narrative as the principle narrator and the ‘boy’, creating, in the process, a deliberate ambiguity of character and setting. To outline, this study of Postcard is anything but definitive, and my analysis of the song’s narrative has been carried out as a means to highlight one possible reading. While open to interpretation, Beam’s vignettes are not disassociated, but are, like is characteristic of his writing throughout his oeuvre, rather loosely connected through a series of aphoristic metaphors and similes, with the central narrative of a song consistently drawn to an analogical scene[17] before returning to a principle story-arc. It is an approach deftly executed by Beam, as a single listen of an Iron & Wine song, let alone an entire album, asks the listener to assemble divergent scenes into a synthesised narrative; evidently, clarity is not Beam’s intention: if the listener wishes to search for a defined narrative, or meaning, then they are invited to do so.

Indeed, Postcard’s fragmentary narrative-arc is telling of Beam’s writing process. Again, in the 2013 interview with NPR’s All Things Considered programme, Beam, discussing his fifth Iron & Wine album, Ghost on Ghost, comments upon the construction and the subsequent interpretations of his songs’ narratives, as he states, in response to two separate questions, that:

There are definitely a lot of narrative elements, but I’m not worried about people understanding exactly what’s happening. I treat it more like a poem, and if there’s a certain feeling or a certain wordplay or some kind of cognitive tension, I’ll go for that […] It’s always hard to decide what songs to include, because I don’t sit down to write a record from start to finish. I just kind of always work. I would like to have a group of songs that have a cohesive feel for one reason or another. I mean, that’s such a subjective thing.[18]

Beyond Beam’s piecemeal approach to writing, he has noted that The Creek Drank the Cradle ‘wasn’t written as a record; it included songs plucked from a big pile of songs that I’d been writing for years’[19], and that the songs selected for Volume No. 1 of the Archive Series were compiled from the same ‘batch’[20] as those of his debut release. While not as overtly apparent as in Beam’s later albums, several shared underlying themes permeate both The Creek Drank the Cradle and Volume No. 1, from, to list two, the peace found from familial unity, ‘two dots where the single was/three, counting the little one (The Wind is Low), to recalling the nostalgic meanderings of youth, reaching ‘halfway home and going nowhere’ (Everyone’s Summer of ’95). However, the subject of love, either achieving or yearning for intimacy with another, runs from song to song within the Volume, bringing the individual tracks together into a unified collection: this love tethers the couples of these songs together and it is a subject which Beam, in his first album without the appellation of Iron & Wine, returns to and alters in Love Letter for Fire, alongside Jesca Hoop.

The Duet Series: A Love Letter for Fire

While not the first instalment of the termed ‘Duet Series’, Love Letter for Fire is indeed Beam’s first foray into writing an album with a partner. Beam has commented that the finished songs for Love Letter for Fire were not written at once, but rather collated from a couple of melodies ‘[from] over the years’[21] that had been set aside for the purpose of a duets project. Further to the inclusion of Beam’s collected melodies, both Beam and Hoop wrote new material for the album, and so Love Letter for Fire is distinguished from the pair’s oeuvres in that they are both principle songwriters, sharing the duty together. The origins of this proposed ‘Series’, however, began for Beam with In the Reins (EP) [2005], recorded alongside Calexico. Initially, however, Calexico were prospectively attached to work with Beam at the start of the latter’s career, with the former scheduled to re-record ‘some of the songs Beam had recorded at home on his four-track’ for The Creek Drank the Cradle[22] in order to expand the soundscape of the album. The collaboration, however, did not come to fruition, and Iron & Wine’s debut release retained the sparse, unadorned intimacy of Beam’s initial four-track home-recordings. For In the Reins Beam leads the project as the principle songwriter, as he has outlined the process of crafting the album as a collaboration following the actual writing of the songs:

I had recorded them at my house as I do all my songs, and had sent them [Calexico] the recordings. In the studio, sometimes they [the songs] changed significantly and sometimes they didn’t. The fun of the project was to take these songs that only existed in a certain context and put them in the hands of a band that well-versed in different types of music[23]

Unlike Beam’s partnership with Calexico, the lyrics for Love Letter to Fire are a coalescence of both Beam and Hoop’s work, with the pair writing together in order to craft the narratives of the songs; Hoop, during an interview with KCRW’s Morning Becomes Eclectic, analogously outlined the process of collaborating with the shaping of ‘clay’[24], as both malleably altered and reshaped each other’s lyrics. Indeed, despite Beam ‘compiling’ ‘a couple of melodies over the years’ with the idea of a possible duets ‘project’[25], the finished album is, nevertheless, a composite of both writers’ styles and processes; it was a process that was pieced together, fragmentary, if you will, as Beam has explained the process to be a collecting and gathering of unused material and having the ‘other’ alter the delivered work:

We would basically each bring bits and pieces—bits of melodies or the passage of the song we’d been working on. It was a great project to bring orphans, the things that never make it into other songs we never finished. We’d bring bits and pieces to each other, and they’d be reinterpreted, pulled around and tied up[26]

Love Letter for Fire, therefore, is evidently driven by the merged, or ‘melted’[27], individualities of the two singers with the album ‘balanced’ by the pair, as Beam has highlighted that ‘where I would be cerebral she [Hoop] would bring heart; in places where I would be steady she [Hoop] would be an exclamation point’[28]. The characteristics that are attributed to Beam’s writing, however, remain evident throughout the release, as several recurring motifs typical of an Iron & Wine record are brought to the forefront of the album.

As alluded to previously, Beam frequently populates his albums with characters drawn to travelling, with individuals either searching for something or forlorn in their lost ambitions. This is not to pare the scope of Beam’s, or Hoop’s, writing to a single recurring image, but his attention is often given to wanderers, often couples, who have abandoned the homestead in order to escape or find a new life alone or with another. As noted previously in NPR’s abridged transcript of an interview with Beam, Ghost on Ghost’s protagonists evidence this interest, with the album portraying a ‘couple against the world in a certain way or against one another. They were working something out’[29] and that the narrative through-line of the songs was, to an extent, ‘the continuing adventures on the cross-country journey of this couple’[30]. Indeed, this focus upon travel, and the itinerant couples’ undertaking of such journeys, continued, intentionally or otherwise, into Love Letter for Fire, his first release of new music since Ghost on Ghost: between Ghost on Ghost (2013) and Love Letter for Fire (2016) only Sing into My Mouth, a covers album recorded with Ben Bridwell, and Volume No. 1 and No. 2 of the Archive Series were released. The collection of songs included within Love Letter for Fire furthers the travelogue narrative of Ghost on Ghost by featuring the voice of the addressee; here, Beam’s narrator is not the only speaker. With the travelogue aspect of the record in mind, when analysing Love Letter for Fire it is, therefore, useful to start with Beam’s preceding Iron & Wine release, Ghost on Ghost. Indeed, the peregrination of a central couple is the unifying subject of Ghost on Ghost, a narrative constant which Beam intermittently returns to, and is an image which was noted during James C. McKinley’s 2013 abridged article for the New York Times, as Beam discusses the ‘serendipity’ surrounding the formulation, and overall construction, of his albums, stating:

It’s fun to find things that pop up here and there in your songs over and over again, and that’s how I pick what goes on a record. I had a record called The Shepherd’s Dog, and a lot of the songs got included because they had a dog somewhere in the song. On Kiss Each Other Clean, most of the songs had a river in them somewhere. This one [Ghost on Ghost] this couple kept popping in the songs. It almost felt like the continuing adventures on the cross-country journey of this couple.[31]

It is an apt summary to label Ghost on Ghost a ‘cross-country journey’, a ‘road-trip’[32] of sorts, as the songs produce a travelogue which is routed within the ever-changing landscape of America itself: chronologically, South Carolina is referenced twice (Caught in the Briars and Sundown (Back in the Briars)) before then moving onto Barstow, California (The Desert Babbler); South Chicago (Grass Widows); Milwaukee, Wisconsin (Winter Prayers); Santé Fe, New Mexico (New Mexico’s No Breeze); Washington (Lover’s Revolution); Baton Rouge, Louisiana, and Birmingham, Alabama (Baby Centre Stage). Speaking with David Dye, Beam commented that his choice of place is determined by both a particular image associated with a specific location or, as in the case of the ‘Barstow boys’ of The Desert Babbler, the wordplay from the sound made from the pairing of alliterative consonants, for instance:

They all come about differently. It was strange because I don’t really sit down and write records from start to finish, you know, I am kind of just working all the time. Some of these are old songs some of these are newer songs, but when it comes time to put a record together I try to see what could connect the songs that were developed so separately. What would they have in common, what do some of them have in common that could be included on a collection of songs? So on this one I noticed I had a bunch of songs with a couple and there were all these place names and things like that, and so it was fun to throw them together and see… it sort of felt like the continuing adventures of these people […] it’s kind of like the Sgt Pepper’s idea they go together because we say they go together, and when you say they go together you start to look for connections when they don’t really; if you look too close it all falls apart […] for instance, the Barstow thing I think I just liked the consonant explosion of Barstow, you know, and just the sound of the word. And then you think about the place […] and sometimes it’s just the launching pad for your mind to wander’[33]

For Beam, there is no fixed approach to his writing process. If anything, the only constant is that Beam is always writing and compiles his lines and melodies from disjointed scenes and vignettes. However, Beam’s reference to following a ‘sound’ is, to an extent, compatible to that of Hoop’s approach. During the initial stages of the composition of Love Letter for Fire, Hoop recounted, during an interview with KCRW’s Morning Becomes Eclectic, sending Beam a ‘ramble […] in words and melodies’[34], and it clear to see this method referenced by Beam above, with the ‘sound of the word’ leading and dictating the nature, and character, of a song: there is a ‘discovery’[35] in this free approach and it is, to Beam, the sound, the melody, that usually ‘always wins’ in the ‘little wrestling match’[36] between sound and meaning. Often, it seems that Beam’s narratives are formed, as he himself termed the process, by ‘the syncopation of how words fall out of your mouth’, and with Hoop echoing this approach the pair constructed several of the songs for Love Letter for Fire.

So far, of the four extended extracts taken from Beam’s interviews, three of which have centred upon the narrative focus of Ghost on Ghost, all detail the approach to and process of composing an album. While tightly structured — of the six principle albums, only one, The Shepherd’s Dog, has exceeded forty-five minutes — there is an apparent looseness to the unifying elements of Beam’s records, with a single image — such as the aforementioned dog, river or couple, respectively, of Iron & Wine’s previous releases — tethering the songs together into a complete collection. As previously highlighted, and in addition to the presence of a single couple, Ghost on Ghost is an album of travelling, of characters either planning or enacting a journey, and is through-line which Beam has revised and has altered succeeding the record. In partnership with Jesca Hoop, Beam draws the album’s narrative-arcs to the ongoing adventures of a transitory couple, but only now both parties are able to voice their perspectives. With each of the album’s twelve songs, Beam and Hoop’s narrators are often navigating a landscape, and so the record’s semantic field is analogous to that of Iron & Wine’s preceding long-play, Ghost on Ghost. Repeatedly, the characters are compelled to journey and so, as a result, the album is littered with dynamic lexical verbs (italicised) pertaining to travelling, as the protagonists, usually together, take flight from or return towards home: they are found ‘crossing low narrow streets at night’ (One Way to Pray); ‘following’ a lost lamb (The Lamb You Lost); getting lost and then ‘finding’ each other, only to ‘wander free’ again upon the long walk home (Every Songbird Sings) and playfully ‘get lost’ once more; fumbling around ‘the fading stars on [their] way back home’ (Kiss Me Quick); travelling homewards despite knowing that their ‘running would be long’ in reaching their destination (Valley Clouds); pressing onwards in order to complete the ‘work’ yet to be done (Soft Place to Land); before Hoop’s character is noted for being drawn ‘out of the door’ (Sailor to Siren) and away from her mother[37], beginning the cycle of travelling. While there is something of listlessness to these characters, they remain tethered to each other in their loving unison. Like Ghost on Ghost, and Archive Series Vol. 1, a central couple wanders through each song’s narrative.

Further to the act of travelling, the notion of home, from Know the Wild that Wants You’s imperative refrain of ‘and come home’ (Know the Wild That Wants You) to the metaphorical undertaking of becoming another’s ‘home’, within Chalk It up to Chi, is another revisited trope of the album. While travel is a regular subject within Beam’s oeuvre, the characters of these narratives are again often setting out, but with the added intention of either fleeing an old homestead or building a new one; here, the physical structure of a house is something of a sanctuary within the wilderness which surrounds them, and is a place to begin or continue a life together. Cyclically, these characters, in their flight from or towards a home, are forced to traverse a series of natural landscapes, terrains within which hold an underlying sense of danger and promise to threaten and entice, respectively, the pair. Despite this duality, however, the homestead is rendered as a refuge during Kiss Me Quick, in which the narrators prospectively plan their future together: the home shelters them and ensures the safety of their unison, as they outline that they will ‘build our house in a field gold/ When the mountain’s tumbling down and blocks the road/We’ll turn each rock into a stepping stone/ And fumble around the failing stars on our way back home’ [sic]. In spite of the dangers of the landscape, the narrators still plan to build their pastoral ideal; their safety is, to them, ensured as long as they are joined in their journeying homewards. The obstacle of the mountainside’s collapse is surmountable during their walk home, with the debris serving as a guide back to the safety of their settled life together.

IMG_E5250 — ironandwine.com/store/ No credited Artist

Through the act of journeying the album is also a sensory exploration for the listener alongside these characters; for instance, within the album’s second song, One Way to Pray, Hoop, in her reiteration of the characteristics of her partner, — with him labelled an ‘open sky receiver (Song reappears), open sea receiver (Song reappears), open land receiver (Song reappears), red ember believer (Song reappears), open eye receiver (Song reappears)’[38] — summarily encapsulate the sensorial scale of the album itself. Here, whilst conveying to the listener the appreciation and scope of the character’s reception of the environment within which they journey, Hoop is delineating the imagery which will be depicted to the listener themselves: they too, in their accompanying of the ‘receiver’, will encounter the ‘open’ expanses of the landscape. However, during these peregrinations, the natural environment is continuously shown to be egalitarian in its indifference towards the individual: at once a source of profound comfort, as is evidenced by the baptismal winds of Valley Clouds, and an obstacle to be borne, as is referenced by the unrelenting ‘hard rain’ of Soft Place to Land. In addition to these examples, water is another unpredictable feature of the landscape and is intermittently featured throughout: being an obvious source of sustenance, as in Valley Clouds’s closing verse of ‘draw cups until the water’s cold’; a route of escape, showing the narrator of Sailor to Siren ‘where to run’ when setting-out from their home; and as an overpowering force, losing one another to the ‘undertow’ of the devil’s ‘warm’ waters of Midas Tongue[39]. In relation to the latter, the force of the sea is also explored within The Lamb You Lost, as the narrator is ‘ripped’ and ‘torn’ into the sea’s ‘spin’ and ‘tide’, respectively; here, the paring of the dynamic verbs ‘ripped’ and ‘torn’ convey the personified malevolence held by the waters, and yet, in a possible reference to the titular siren of the album’s closing song, the narrators cannot help but feel ‘free’ in their acquiescence to the ‘music in the sea’. However, only the sound of a partner’s voice may break the trance, with the narrator halted in their ‘swim into the sound’, turning away from the lure of the natural by the ‘voice’ of another, which is, in this instance, the voice of rescue. Regardless of the boon or dangers within them, these expanses are to be equally savoured as they are to be endured, but they are to be done so together.

49344865_295813937805462_4885963325734649856_n — Josh Wool Photography

Anchored to the unison between these characters, and through the act of traversing these variedly vast natural spaces, the act of conversation, of communication, is integrally laced throughout the record. Beam has highlighted that, with the addition of another songwriter and singer, Love Letter for Fire offers an expansion not only upon the narrative voice of the album but also upon his usual approach to writing a record, as now, with Hoop, the ‘narrative is expanded. It’s not just a monologue; it’s a conversation’[40]; from the record’s title alone, the ‘letter’, despite its destination of a fire, indicates the process of communication with the dialogue between the writer and the recipient. As with the titular letter, for the collection we have the two characters to communicate with one another: when singing to each other Beam and Hoop disclose, at points, two differing subjective perspectives from the couple, or couples, at the centre of these songs: neither party is silent, as the album is structured by these characters’ discourses, and takes the form of, as accurately described by Harriet Gibsone, a series of ‘conversational duets’[41], with a narrative centring upon either an antagonistic or a harmonious exchange. With the exception of Midas Tongue, Bright Lights and Goodbyes, Kiss Me Quick, and Valley Clouds — all of which feature the pair singing as one throughout — over the course of the remaining nine tracks, Beam and Hoop sporadically exchange their positions as the album’s principle singer. At its most conversational, the listener is an outsider to the exchanges held between the two: Chalk It up to Chi’s barbarous metaphorical chides sound like a playful argument, with Beam’s narrator conceding to his partner’s personal assessment of his lowly situation:

You’re a sorry black boot, I’m a shiny marble/ I am old and stone/ You are mossy green/ I could be your home/ But you’ve gone and overgrown it/ I could be your home/ You won’t keep it clean/Greedy as a grain in a rainfall/ Elemental communication/ I’m a sorry black boot, you’re a shiny marble (Beam’s lines have been italicised)[42]

The self-referential metaphors from Beam’s narrator are greeted by an assertive critique from Hoop’s recipient: his observations, all of which pertain to an affiliation with a natural landscape, are outrightly dismissed. In return, he is gifted a far less polished perspective of himself, before conceding to the revised profile: inverting Hoop’s ‘you’re a sorry black boot, I’m a shiny marble’ with I’m a sorry black boot, you’re a shiny marble. From these duelling subjective narrators, Beam and Hoop construct the narrative from the opposing outlooks from both members of the couple: the single subjective perspectives of the preceding Kiss Me Quick and the succeeding Valley Clouds is omitted for the opposing opinions of these characters. Whilst the tone of Chalk It up to Chi is initially antagonistic, the pair are in accord with the chorus of ‘I’m a shiny marble, you’re a sorry black boot/ You lost your marble in your sorry black boot/ You shine them up, you get your swagger shiny black/You shine them up, you get your shiny marble back’, inviting the notion that a resolution may be found, with a few agreed concessions. The lines and verses of the album which are sung collective often evoke the image of the couple united; for instance, Kiss Me Quick’s narrators are conjoined within their unison, with both parties congruent in their prospective future together; here, Beam and Hoop shadow each other as they sing ‘we’ll build our house in a field gold/ When the mountain’s tumbling down and blocks the road/We’ll turn each rock into a stepping stone/ And fumble around the failing stars on our way back home’. Indeed, Chalk It up to Chi is the album’s clearest ‘conversational duet’, as Beam and Hoop centre the narrative upon giving the discordant attitudes of both characters room to be voiced: as defined, Love Letter for Fire is ‘not just a monologue; it’s a conversation’[43] between two people.

Are You the Sailor Or the Siren in the Tide?

Beam’s summative characterisation of a ‘duet’ as a ‘conversation’ between singers can holistically be applied to Love Letter for Fire. Like Ghost on Ghost’s narrative-arc of tracing ‘the continuing adventures on the cross-country journey of this couple’[44], Beam and Hoop, while not as overtly defined as is seen throughout Ghost on Ghost, follow a similar approach with their collaboration. Despite the pair acknowledging that each of the album’s songs was written without a fixed narrative focus, as Beam has noted that ‘each song presents its own set of rules’ [sic] and with Hoop outlining the process of permitting the songs the space to ‘morph through passages’ sent between them, it is possible to discern the point that these narratives do to some extent speak to one another. Beyond the aforementioned motifs recurring and, therefore, uniting the events of individual songs, with the album’s conclusion it is possible to identify the narrators’ discourses amalgamating into a unifying through-line. Sailor to Siren’s acoustic echo not only closes the album but also coalesces the record’s principle themes of travelling, familial unity and communication into a single narrative-arc, and serves, in part, as a response to Hoop’s forlorn narrator of a Soft Place to Land: for the first time within the album, Soft Place to Land is written from the perspective of a third-party outside of a couple, with the narrator vowing to care for a wandering traveller in spite of the disregard held towards him:

If she don’t cling to you/ If she don’t tend to you/ And give you respite from your worries/ And the wind that’s blowing through […] If she don’t pray to you/And run her fingers through/ I vow to always leave the light on/ She don’t bend to you/ And she don’t bow down too/ And put her shoulder to the burden/That is weighing down on you/ If you’re looking for a soft place to land/ The calm of a steady hand/ An unconditional friend/ If you need to take a moment to catch your breath/ Come in before you catch your death/ You don’t have to pass a test to come [home][45] (emphasis added)

In place of a conjugal love — as in Midas Tounge’s allusion to a wedding ring being ‘a halo is a band of gold/and we both have one of those [sic]’ or Kiss Me Quick’s idyllic home built ‘in a field gold’ as they ‘fumble around the failing stars on [their] way back home’— the narrator, here, is offering a promise of friendship, a place for the weary traveller to rest if his partner, ‘she’, is unforthcoming with her own offer of help. There is an implied sense of expectation facing the wanderer from their partner when they return home, and so the speaker provides an alternative, ‘unconditional’, level and vow of support. The evident devotional undertone of Soft Place to Land is seemingly addressed by this traveller, voiced by Beam, within Sailor to Siren’s opening line of ‘this tenderness comes as a surprise’, as the listener can infer that, with Sailor to Siren, this itinerant is now the principle narrator. With the reference to a ‘test’, either figuratively or literally speaking, within Soft Place to Land, the narrator of Sailor to Siren begins by acknowledging his own unfamiliarity with the generosity shown by the preceding narrator’s ‘vow’ of support, as such ‘tenderness comes as a surprise’ to him. Beyond this opening admission, the narrator is still traversing the landscape he has thus far stoically endured, ‘drinking where the riverbed was dry’, but now, in light of this ‘tenderness’, ‘the trees in the wind tremble for love’, with the terrain altered by the pair’s meeting and discourse. With Sailor to Siren’s opening lines alluding to the theme of love, both Beam and Hoop have specified that their collection ‘are not technically love songs [..] they are about love’ as ‘it’s a common experience’[46], as the song’s narrative seems to acknowledge the ‘unconditional’ friendship of the preceding Soft Place to Land, with Beam even reiterating the point throughout Sailor to Siren with the refrain of ‘you don’t even know me that well’. Love Letter for Fire is not an album of love songs but is rather a collection which explores the varying capacities and forms of love, and, at the record’s denouement, Soft Place to Land and Sailor to Siren are intrinsically linked through the subject of friendship, albeit from the two different perspectives of the unison.

Cyclically, returning to Postcard’s opening reference to a character reminiscing about their past travels, delineating the messages contained within a postcard, notes which reminded the narrator and the addressee of ‘where’ they had ‘been’, Sailor to Siren is akin to this narrative-arc, but instead centres upon two characters recalling their separate memories of commencing their lives of peregrination. While Beam’s attention to narrative voice, specifically his use of pronouns, has been discussed in relation to Volume No.1 as a whole, alternating the use of the singular personal pronouns ‘I’ and ‘my’ with the collective pronoun ‘we’, for Sailor to Siren Beam and Hoop have subtly structured the song’s narrative around a conversation between two narrators, or two strangers. Here, each narrator distinguishes themselves from the other through recounting their differing origins: Hoop’s speaker is cast-out by her mother, as Beam’s is admonished and abandoned by his father (the line numbers have been bracketed):

Mad morning light drew you out the door/ Mama didn’t need you/me anymore/ She pointed at night but you saw the stars [4-6]

Wild distant water showed me where to run/ Papa let me/you know I’m/you’re not enough/ He took out the life and left me the hole [13-15][47] (Beam’s lines have been emphasised)

Of these six excerpted lines, lines four and thirteen are sung as a duet, with the second-person pronoun ‘you’ and the possessive ‘my’ remaining unaltered, as though the pair have experienced a shared yearning for travel and flight from their matriarch or patriarch, respectively. However, with lines five and fourteen, Beam and Hoop individualise themselves from the other, as both alternate between being the addressed or the addressee of their recollections of neglect. These lines establish a commonality between the pair: they are orphans in their solitary travels. At the conclusion of each of the two verses, Beam defines them separately by their origins, with the youthful optimism of Hoop’s narrator sharing a common ground with the once solitary narrator. Indeed, narratively speaking, Sailor to Siren’s focus is upon two individuals coming together through a shared sense of isolation and with the slight alteration to the lines’ pronouns, an evident kinship is identified between the travellers: their pasts are separate and yet they are entwined in their understanding of the other. At the conclusion of Love Letter for Fire, and whilst having intermittently followed two separate, often contrasting, perspectives towards ‘the concept of love’[48], the characters are united together, despite being strangers; the song concludes with a note towards a burgeoning compact: upon three occasions throughout Sailor to Siren the refrain of ‘you don’t even know me that well’ echoes within the narrative and, while initially in testament to the generosity of Hoop’s preceding narrator (Soft Place to Land), the phrase comes to qualify and validate their partnership. The final two lines of ‘hearts are thrown to strangers after all/ You don’t even know me that well’ attests to a newfound relationship, as they both confirm the truth of the aphoristic-sounding ‘hearts are thrown to strangers’ by their kindness towards each other.

The characteristics of Beam’s verse — his exploration of ‘associative’ and literal language to convey a scene; his often expansive natural landscapes; and his searching transient narrators — have been evident throughout each project, regardless of an album’s form or its period of release. However, it is Beam’s experimentation with his writing process, as in the case of Achieve Series Volume No.1 [2015] and Love Letter for Fire [2016] from revisiting archival songs to collaborating with another singer-songwriter, respectively, and with the soundscapes of his albums that binds and melds each release into a series of ‘genre potpourri records’[49]: being at once sonically distinct from the last and yet anchored by Beam’s verse and prosody. Having centred this piece upon Beam’s writing, it is evident that while drawn to the inclusion of the aforementioned tropes of his work Beam is continuously redirecting those features which are characteristic of his output: a point which he has acknowledged with the undertaking of Love Letter for Fire project:

I did have a lot of fun taking a song that could easily have been sung by two people and practicing it by myself to see if it changed the narrative. It was fun to start playing with the concept of love and what it meant when two different characters in a song would sing and how it expanded. I hadn’t really done too much research on the genre of love songs. We just kind of went in with our personal experiences and made up stuff and just tried to see what the song was asking for[50]

Again, a theme, in this instance the ‘concept of love’, cohesively underpins the album, but it is then ‘expanded’ upon during Beam and Hoop’s paired exploration of the subject: they, as Beam has previously referenced, are led by the theme. It is an approach which Beam, under the appellation of Iron & Wine, enacted for Beast Epic, studying the subject of time, as he stated within a preluding blurb for the album that ‘the rite of passage is an image I’ve returned to often because I feel we’re all constantly in some stage of transition. Beast Epic is saturated with this idea but in a different way simply because each time I return to the theme I’ve collected new experiences to draw from’[51]. Since The Creek Drank the Cradle[52], Beam’s verse, while replete with associative language, sequencing a narrative through figurative and tangible depictions, is always anchored by an underlying idea or image, which is then the uniting element of an album. It is Beam’s authorship that anchors his six albums and his peripheral work into a cohesive whole. For each release, a balance is struck between the spontaneity of Beam’s composition and the sequential ordering of a song’s narrative: when coalesced, Beam formulates his piecemeal story-arcs; Beam’s writing is both starkly literal and deliberately opaque in its detail, but its tenderness never comes as a surprise.

[1] http://www.mtpr.org/post/iron-and-wines-duty-getting-lost-musical-process

[2] https://www.kcrw.com/music/shows/morning-becomes-eclectic/sam-beam-and-jesca-hoop

[3] http://ironandwine.com/weed-garden/

[4] http://www.mtpr.org/post/iron-and-wines-duty-getting-lost-musical-process

[5] http://ironandwine.com/iron-wine-archive-series-volume-no-2/

[6] http://ironandwine.com/iron-wine-archive-series-volume-no-3/

[7] http://ironandwine.com/album/archive-series-volume-no-4/

[8] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j6p8hZRmH5s

[9] http://www.billboard.com/articles/news/6473014/iron-wines-sam-beam-talks-archive-series-volume-no-1-exclusive-first-listen

[10] https://thegreatdiscontent.com/interview/iron-and-wine-sam-beam

[11] Ibid.

[12] http://www.npr.org/2013/04/29/179845298/iron-and-wine-words-like-seedlings

[13] http://www.nytimes.com/2013/04/20/arts/music/a-word-with-sam-beam-of-iron-and-wine.html

[14] https://genius.com/Iron-and-wine-postcard-lyrics: the song’s verse structure was followed in relation to this website.

[15] https://genius.com/Iron-and-wine-postcard-lyrics: the song’s verse structure was followed in relation to this website.

[16] https://www.npr.org/2013/06/28/196582206/iron-and-wine-on-world-cafe

[17] http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2005/07/25/red-planet- Woods’s comment on McCarthy’s use of ‘analogical similes’ provided the source of the phrase ‘analogical’.

[18] NPR- http://www.npr.org/2013/04/29/179845298/iron-and-wine-words-like-seedlings

[19] https://thegreatdiscontent.com/interview/iron-and-wine-sam-beam

[20] http://www.billboard.com/articles/news/6473014/iron-wines-sam-beam-talks-archive-series-volume-no-1-exclusive-first-listen

[21] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AifcPhNqMB8

[22] http://marqueemag.com/2005/10/calexico-and-iron-wine/

[23] Ibid

[24] https://www.kcrw.com/music/shows/morning-becomes-eclectic/sam-beam-and-jesca-hoop

[25] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AifcPhNqMB8

[26] https://www.esquire.com/entertainment/music/interviews/a45079/sam-beam-jesca-hoop-love-letter-for-fire-interview/

[27] https://www.kcrw.com/music/shows/morning-becomes-eclectic/sam-beam-and-jesca-hoop

[28] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AifcPhNqMB8

[29] http://www.npr.org/2013/04/29/179845298/iron-and-wine-words-like-seedlings