Sam Beam was a painter and filmmaker who happened to
write songs as a hobby for seven
years before a friend loaned him
a 4-track recorder. He went
wild with the humble device
in his Austin home studio,
producing, performing, and
recording what was to become
the first Iron and Wine album,
The Creek Drank the Cradle,
in 2002. Featuring acoustic
guitars, banjo, and slide guitar,
the album was immediately
compared to the work of Nick
Drake, Simon and Garfunkel,
Neil Young, and John Fahey.
That same year, Beam
recorded the song “The Trapeze
Swinger” for the film In Good
Company, and his version of
the Postal Service’s “Such Great
Heights” was featured in the
film and soundtrack to Garden
State. In 2005, Beam stepped
away from Iron and Wine
long enough to collaborate
with the band Calexico—a
band known for its trademark
fusion of Southwestern rock,
traditional Mexican music, and
jazz—on the EP In the Reins.
In 2007, I&W released a third
full-length, The Shepherd’s Dog,
which was produced by Brian
Deck at his Chicago-based
Engine studio. Deck added just
the right amount of studio polish and encouraged Beam to
explore synthesizers and effects
to go beyond the acoustic-heavy
sound of previous albums. The
results were nothing short of
stellar, and The Shepherd’s Dog
was subsequently voted one of
the year’s 10 best albums by
Paste magazine.
Producer Brian Deck
returned for this year’s Kiss Each
Other Clean sessions, continuing the creative partnership that
he and Beam have developed
over the course of three albums.
The comfort level and respect
between Deck and Beam allows
for a unique working relationship where they push each other
to experiment, while still letting
the songs naturally evolve in
the studio. Not another hippy-dippy folk wannabe, Beam has
become one of today’s greatest
story tellers, crafting meticulous
recordings that mingle memories of his parents’ record collection and hits heard scanning
the car radio on family drives.
With Kiss Each Other Clean,
Beam again pushes Iron and
Wine into new territory with
layered textures and polyrhyth-mic sounds created with heavily
processed guitars and synths.
It’s an incredible mélange of
folk, African, rock, country, and
Jamaican musical traditions, all
mixed up with ’60s and ’70s
pop influences.
We recently spoke to Beam
about his deceptively nonchalant approach to guitar playing
and tones, his collection of cool
old guitars and boutique amps,
and why melody trumps all.
music around, and my parents
were also big into classic ’60s
Motown, so that’s what I heard
a lot of as a kid. But I came up
in the early ’80s, too, so New
Wave was a big deal, skate punk
was a big deal. By the time I
was 12 or 13, I was just playing
for a hobby, maybe an hour or
two every now and then. It was
just friends playing together at
someone’s house. We weren’t
doing any shows or anything. At
15, I started playing punk rock,
because that was what I was
listening to and that was what
I could play, y’know—barre
Sam Beam playing a late-’70s or early ’80s Gibson L-6S Deluxe during sessions at Clava Studios in Chicago. His
guitar boat is stocked with a 1972 Gibson SG Standard (middle) and two Taylor flattops. Photo by Piper Ferguson
What aspects of your upbringing and childhood environment influenced the development of your sound?
Well, I grew up in the Carolinas,
where there was a lot of country
