Iron & Wine's Sam Beam and the members of Calexico convened in December 2004 at Calexico's home base of Wavelab Studios in Tucson, Arizona. The idea of working together had been tossed around for over three years, though neither bands' schedule loaned itself into making it a reality until then. The resulting session "In the Reins", is a mini-album that is a truly harmonious affair sure to satisfy fans of both bands. The seven tracks are Sam Beam originals and were fleshed out by the full Calexico band. The record also features newcomer Natalie Wyants on vocals, Salvador Duran, a local fixture of the Tucson Flamenco scene, on vocals and Botas. Of course no Wavelab experience would be complete without the appearance of Nick Luca (NL Trio/John Doe Band) and Craig Schumacher, both of whom contributed to the record in the form of engineering and performance.

TRACK LISTING

He Lays In The Reins
Prison On Route 41
History Of Lovers
Red Dust
16, Maybe Less
Burn That Broken Bed
Dead Mans Will

“I’ve always wanted to use that title,” Sam Beam says of 'Hen’s Teeth', his eighth full-length album and his sixth for Sub Pop Records. “I just love it. To me it suggests the impossible. Hen’s teeth do not exist. And that’s what this record felt like: a gift that shouldn’t be there but it is. An impossible thing but it’s real.”

'Hen’s Teeth' and his previous album, 'Light Verse', are siblings of a sort. They were recorded during the same sessions after a year-long dry spell, with the same band, at Waystation studio in Laurel Canyon. “When I’ve been on a writing kick, and the band can meet me where I’m at, they push me into something I hadn’t imagined. I’m at a point in my life where spontaneity is a lot more important to me. I don’t have as much to prove as I used to. I’m a lot freer and I love making music more than ever. There are no right or wrong answers. You just pray for your luck and try your best.”

In this case prayers were answered and luck struck hard. The musicians cohered so quickly and inspired each other so much that they were often getting songs recorded in just a few takes, sometimes at the rate of two or three per day. The two albums might therefore be thought of as fraternal twins: they share DNA and complement each other but have distinct identities and are defined as much by their differences as their similarities.

'Light Verse' (2024) took its name from a form of poetry that makes heavy use of wordplay, humor, and nonsense. Its cover depicts figures in silhouette, floating or falling through a cyanotype sky. It’s a sweet and airy album, impressionistic, at times even flirting with abstraction, a hearty shaking off of the doom and gloom of the Covid era. Many of the songs are named for ideas or feelings that gesture toward hope amidst uncertainty: 'You Never Know', 'All in Good Time' (a gorgeous duet with Fiona Apple), 'Cutting It Close', 'Taken by Surprise'.

The world of 'Hen’s Teeth' is earthier, darker, more robust and more tactile than that of 'Light Verse'. The songs have titles like 'Roses', 'Robin’s Egg', 'Dates and Dead People', 'Singing Saw'. “Run into the one you love forever / Laugh into each other’s empty mouth,” Beam sings on 'Roses', the album’s first track. It’s one of several songs in which lovers are depicted as so deeply entwined they physically merge. 'Paper and Stone' recalls that “But for the time we fell in two / You’d be me and I’d be you / One crust of bread could fit in our mouths / You’d breathe in and I’d let it out.” And on 'In Your Ocean', we find Beam “Praying for dry ground / Though I only want to drown / When I find myself swimming in your ocean.”

The cover is a portrait of Beam surrounded on all sides by flourishing ferns and other tropical plant life. He is wearing a pin-stripe jacket and holding a massive cluster of grapes, prodigious beard spilling down his chest. He could be a local harvest god or a gentleman outlaw holed up in a jungle cave. There are white feathers covering his eyes but these somehow do not suggest blindness. Rather they seem to literalize the poetic notion of an artist’s vision taking flight. The whole surreal scene is washed in humid, spooky red. It’s somewhere between Leonora Carrington and Frida Kahlo, and the contrast with the cool blue-white palette of 'Light Verse' could not be starker.

“The experiments in this one were more with genre than with form. For the last couple years one of my go-to’s has been Van Morrisson’s 'Astral Weeks', that style where jazz musicians play folk music and it blossoms in different ways than folk musicians are normally interested in doing. ‘Singing Saw’ feels like a song that Dock Boggs and Simon & Garfunkel might have done together. ‘Roses’ and ‘In Your Ocean’ are straight forward folk rock, but they build to these apocalyptic endings. ‘Dates and Dead People’ and ‘Defiance, Ohio’ take a lot from Tropicalia, which is some of my favorite music too. I don’t see it as that much different from jazz. All these forms have been in rock music forever.”

About the players: David Garza on guitar, Sebastian Steinberg on bass, and Tyler Chester on keyboards. Griffin Goldsmith, Beth Goodfellow, and Kyle Crane all play drums. Paul Cartwright plays violin and mandolin among other stringed instruments; he also handled string arrangements for both records. The indie-country trio I’m With Her appears on the ebullient lead single, 'Robin’s Egg', and again on the tender, mournful 'Wait Up'.

“I’m obsessed with duets,” Beam says. “Ever since I did 'Love Letter to Fire' with Jesca Hoop. I just love the form. It’s inherently dramatic. And it’s so fun. I had these songs and I finished them with I’m With Her in mind.” Arden Beam—Beam’s daughter—contributes harmonies and backing vocals on the tracks, 'Roses', 'Singing Saw', 'Defiance, Ohio' and 'Grace Notes'. Her contributions lend a personal poignancy, as well as a wonderful sonic texture, to 'Hen’s Teeth'. Born two months before the release of his debut album, 'The Creek Drank the Cradle' (2002), she is now 23 years old and a musician herself—the first of his children to appear on one of his records.

“It’s exciting, making it more of a family affair. I like making Iron and Wine records, but I like the collaboration even more. Interacting with a bunch of friends and being blown away by what they can bring, musically and emotionally, to a set of three chords. I get to play all day with these people I love and they respond by giving me their most vulnerable, expressive self. It’s the weirdest, best job ever.”

TRACK LISTING

1. Roses
2. Paper And Stone
3. Robin's Egg (feat. I'm With Her)
4. Singing Saw
5. In Your Ocean
6. Defiance, Ohio
7. Wait Up (feat. I'm With Her)
8. Grace Notes
9. Dates And Dead People
10. Half Measures

This gorgeous collection of never-before-seen artwork, behind-the-scenes photos, handwritten lyrics, exclusive commentary, and personal ephemera from Grammy Award-nominated artist Iron & Wine (aka Sam Beam) is a must-have collector’s item for every Iron & Wine fan. Accompanied by commentary from Sam himself, Love and Some Verses compiles the lyrics of more than 160 iconic Iron & Wine songs, capturing a distinctive musical legacy. Whether you're a devoted fan or a newcomer to the spellbinding world of Iron & Wine, within these pages you will form an intimate connection to the songs that have touched millions around the world.

Following 2011’s ‘Kiss Each Other Clean’, which debuted at number two on the US Billboard chart, ‘Ghost On Ghost’ is to be the fifth studio album from Austin-based Sam Beam.

While Rolling Stone said of ‘Kiss Each Other Clean’ that “pop music hadn’t seen anything like it since the heyday of Cat Stevens,” and Pitchfork said it “more closely resembles the lush, gold-toned singer songwriter records of the late 60s and early 70s - ‘Astral Weeks’, ‘Goodbye Yellow Brick Road’”, Beam felt it time to move from what he called the “anxious tension” from this record and his previous one (‘The Shepherd’s Dog’). “This record felt like a reward to myself after the way I went about making the last few,” he says.

Recorded in New York and produced by Beam’s longtime associate Brian Deck (Modest Mouse, Califone, Fruit Bats), helping achieve Beam’s vision were a group of stellar musicians including Rob Burger of Tin Hat Trio, Steve Bernstein, Tony Scherr, Kenny Wollesen, and Briggan Krauss of Sex Mob, jazz drummer Brian Blade, trombonist Curtis Fowlkes of The Jazz Passengers, bassist Tony Garnier (Bob Dylan’s band), cellist Marika Hughes, Maxim Moston and Doug Wieselman of Antony And The Johnsons, and Anja Wood. Burger (Tin Hat Trio) has worked with Beam intermittently through the years and handled arrangements for strings and horns on ‘Ghost On Ghost’.

For the album’s cover, Beam, who is also a visual artist, chose an image from the series ‘Private Views’ by noted photographer Barbara Crane.

STAFF COMMENTS

Andy says: Another mellow delight from Sam Beam. Lovely.

TRACK LISTING

Caught In The Briars
The Desert Babbler
Joy
Low Light Buddy Of Mine
Graces For Saints And Ramblers
Grass Windows
Singers And The Endless Song
Sundown (Back In The Briars)
Winter Prayers
New Mexico’s No Breeze
Lovers’ Revolution
Baby Center Stage

New to 4AD, Iron And Wine deliver the perfect way to start any year.

It’s been over three years since Iron & Wine released "The Shepherd’s Dog", a collection of songs that Sam (Beam) himself described as an attempt to replicate something in the vein of Tom Waits’ "Swordfishtrombones".

While Waits fans might gasp at such a notion, making the kind of records that had brought much of their early successes would have been all too easy and living up to folks expectations never sounded all that interesting to Sam.

After all, the most fascinating journeys are the ones where you have no idea where you’re headed, and that’s what the experience of making the record turned out to be. In the end, they were rewarded with a warm reception from both fans and critics alike.

"Kiss Each Other Clean" is the next logical step and should have been done sooner had life not got in the way. As is well documented, Sam resides outside of Austin, Texas close to the middle of nowhere where he and his wife tend to a rather large homestead.

As one journalist who visited him once said, “he lives exactly as you hoped he would”. Good for us, sometimes difficult for him.

When possible, recording sessions were taking place over the course of 2010 in Chicago with Brian Deck at the helm again as well as a number of familiar names who pop up to contribute musically.

Not one to rest on laurels, "Kiss Each Other Clean" takes off where "The Shepherd’s Dog" left us with layer upon layer, rhythm upon rhythm and of course some acoustic guitar and whispering vocals for good measure. In a recent interview Sam said that the resulting ten tracks make for a “more focused pop record”, albeit with “straight-up jazz, blues and African elements” experimentally thrown in.

If we are to believe Sam on his earlier Waits-ian comparison then it’s safe to say that "Kiss Each Other Clean" could be the second phase in his own trilogy a la "Rain Dogs". One thing is certain, he’s yet to show any sign of letting up.

Collecting songs ranging from out-of-print to never-before-released, "Around The Well" spans Iron and Wine's earliest sessions which yielded the band's debut (2002's "The Creek Drank the Cradle") through to material recorded for 2007's "The Shepherd's Dog". The "Around The Well" collection is broken up into two sections. The first half is an assortment of hushed home recordings, unedited and raw, and the second highlights moments captured in the confines of proper studios with the help of other musicians, friends and engineers. The album's title comes from a line in the song "The Trapeze Swinger", a fan favourite which was written for and included in the movie 'In Good Company'. Three more songs written and recorded for the film finally make their appearance here as well: "Belated Promise Ring", "God Made The Automobile" and "Homeward, These Shoes". "Around The Well" also brings together hard-to-find covers such as The Flaming Lips' "Waitin' for a Superman" and New Order's "Love Vigilantes", along with one of Iron and Wine's earliest originals, "Sacred Vision".

"Boy With A Coin", the first single to be taken from forthcoming album "The Shepherd's Dog", is darkly playful, tumbling under its cascading melody and backwards guitar textures. A worthy example of the highest standard of songwriting displayed on the rest of the album and marks a departure in style from Beam's previous work, without betraying his blissful Americana roots.

Iron And Wine the recorded word of one Samuel Beam, Miami, Florida; is one of those one-guy-and-his-tapedeck affairs. "The Creek Drank the Cradle" is filled with hushed, restrained vocals, affecting lyrics from a naturalist's perspective, exploring relationships and the hope born from them, all of which come across as though whispered to you personally, accompanied by guitar, banjo, slide guitar. Taken as a whole, "The Creek Drank The Cradle", Iron and Wine's debut CD, is an ode to an older South; a part of America that is defined by 'traditional values', pastoral imagery and arcane manners. Or maybe that's just what we want to hear.

"Our Endless Numbered Days" is the second full-length album from Iron and Wine and it was recorded both at Sam's Miami home and in Chicago's Engine Studios with Brian Deck. On it, Sam is aided and abetted by regular touring and recording conspirators: his sister Sara Beam, Patrick McKinney, Jeff McGriff, EJ Holowicki, and Jonathan Bradley. No grand gestures here, instead the record is filled with tiny moments, little windows into our shared mortality in a way that serves to sharpen the hunger for love and connection over time rather than dull or defeat it. Listening to "Our Endless Numbered Days" makes plain Sam's deft touch with words and melody; one that allows him to turn out stories about love, loss, faith, or the lack of it that are at once personal and universal, set to music that is sweetly haunting and timeless.