XL COVER

Folk hero

The conversion of Sam Beam into Iron & Wine

By Joe Gross
AMERICAN-STATESMAN
Wednesday, September 26, 2007

DRIPPING SPRINGS — Sam Beam and I are sitting on the porch of his studio in Dripping Springs. The house the 33-year-old songwriter shares with his wife, Kim, and children is about 30 feet away. Beam, the artist concurrently known as Iron & Wine, is rolling cigarettes. It's blazing hot out and the hum of bugs is constant and jarringly loud at times. All you can see is Hill Country scrub. It's gorgeous or desolate, probably depending on your mood. (No wonder Lyndon Johnson loved it out here.) There's something here that belongs in Iron & Wine songs.

And yet we're talking about how fast we can drive on U.S. 290. Couldn't be more pedestrian. Couldn't be more "dad."

"Isn't it weird?" Beam says, his voice barely above a good-natured mumble. "They drive so (expletive) fast on that road. I've done it. I'm coming home from the airport, and I find myself doing about 80 and I'm like, 'What am I doing? I'm zooming past mailboxes.' "

This conversation sounds inane, but it's important because Beam is one of those songwriters who inspires fans to think he's incapable of inanity. Ever since his striking debut, "The Creek Drank the Cradle," (Sub Pop Records) appeared seemingly out of nowhere in 2002, Beam's music has felt like a password, a secret handed from person to person. Which it was until a handful of his songs made it into "Garden State," the 2004 movie that also made indie superstars out of the Shins. Beam's excellent, full-length album, "The Shepherd's Dog," his third, arrived in stores Tuesday.

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From his long hair and beard, whispered voice, gorgeous melodies and slightly Southern-gothic vibe, Beam has cultivated (consciously or not) a bit of a low-key mythos about him. I've never had more people say to me, "Oh, what's he like?" after they found out I interviewed an artist.

What's he like? Probably a lot like you, frankly. A little like millions of other children of the suburban South.

The only son of a state employee and a teacher, Beam hails from Columbia, S.C., where he seems to have had a dangerously average upbringing, with church, school and the radio all big parts. His only sister, Sarah, sings backup in his band.

"I always loved it, always gravitated toward it," Beam says of music. "My parents liked the radio and had some Motown records. When I was a kid, I didn't even think about it being a genre of music specific to a time and place."

But mostly Beam grew up listening to the radio, whatever was around. "I still remember hearing Fleetwood Mac and Carole King in my mom's car," Beam says, dragging from a hand-rolled cigarette. "It made such a specific impression on me; to hear those songs now, I just automatically smell that car."

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Many fans — probably those from the North, Midwest and West — hear something both Southern and Christian in Beam's music. Beam says neither of these things were exceptionally important to him, but that doesn't mean they're not in his work.

"We went to a Presbyterian church, sometimes a Baptist one," Beam says. "All kind of different but all loved Jesus."

Beam says, in hindsight, religion was a big part of his life. "That was my mythology as a kid," Beam says. "Those were the stories that we learned how to live life. I didn't have Zeus and Athena. We had Jesus and Job."

But he doesn't consider himself a Southern artist. "Yeah, I enjoy Southern writers, but no more so than Vonnegut or anyone else. I grew up in the suburbs. That's why Spielberg's movies did so well. 'E.T.'s' neighborhood was like everybody's neighborhood. My South was not like Faulkner novels."

Beam headed to Virginia Commonwealth University in Richmond for college, drawn by its fine arts program.

"I thought that city had a lot of charm," Beam says, which I'm pretty sure is a sentence nobody has ever said about Richmond. "The local church was a battery for Confederate weapons. Lots of ghosts around there. I like those border states where you don't know quite what the culture is. It's not North, but it's not Deep South either."

Perhaps oddly, he didn't do much with music. "I dabbled in music in college, jamming with friends now and then, but I wanted to be a painter," he says. "Like everyone else, I liked movies and started to get into photography." He met his wife and ended up in Florida after graduation, going to grad school and teaching cinematography. "I got a four-track and started to do it more seriously as a hobby," Beam says of music.

At first Beam assumed he'd just be trading songs with pals. "You know Ben Bridwell from Band of Horses?" Beam asks. (Indeed we do. Band of Horses is a Seattle indie rock band that came to prominence opening for Iron & Wine.) "His older brother Michael was one of my best friends growing up. We would hang out and give each other tapes."

Bridwell passed Beam's tape to longtime scenester/zinester Mike McGonigal, who included an Iron & Wine song on a compilation to go with his zine Yeti. Soon after, Sub Pop Records came calling.

This was weird for a couple of reasons. One, Beam says he wasn't exactly seeking a record deal. He had a little kid and a steady job. Two, Sub Pop was known as the punk rock label that birthed Nirvana and grunge. Beam's music was acoustic, layered on a four-track and mumbled.

"When I saw they were doing the Shins, I was like well, OK," Beam says. "It seemed like too good a thing to pass up, honestly. I felt like I didn't have a lot to lose."

Beam had two full CDs of material; he and the label cherry-picked songs, and "The Creek Drank the Cradle" appeared in 2002.

It remains a fascinating record. The 1990s were lousy with four-track heroes (Smog, early Pavement). But no other lo-fi acoustic indie record ever sounded so composed, so discreetly layered and so tuneful.

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One early fan was influential rock critic Byron Coley. In the '80s, Coley co-edited the uber-hipper-than-thou zine "Forced Exposure," for awhile there the very last word in underground music. He currently contributes to the British magazine the Wire and the zine Arthur. Many fans still consider his word law.

"The thing that struck me immediately about that first Iron & Wine thing, which I reviewed for the Wire, was that it was a very natural blend of the hip and the square," Coley says. "It had a very DIY vibe, which I was associating with people like Dredd Foole, Tower Recordings and people like that at the time, but it was melodically closer to very mundane sources, like Simon and Garfunkel and Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young. It sounded as though he was just coming up with good lyrics and songs without being a record collector, unlike so many of the musicians I knew, and I just thought it was refreshing as hell."

It was a record that felt deeply personal. "Sometimes there's bits and pieces of autobio in there, but a lot is just fantasy," Beam says. "I don't do confessional therapeutic songs. I like to switch around the narrator, try to make it as interesting as possible. But, of course, experiences temper your life, and that's what you draw from in some way. I rarely have a specific point to make in my songs."

When Beam started touring on the album, the first time he had ever done so, he realized the impact he was making.

"I remember starting to play shows and having people singing the songs back to me, and I was like, 'What the —?" Beam says. "It was really surreal. I was doing this as a hobby, and people were connecting with the songs."

More records followed, in much higher fidelity, but things took a qualitative leap when "Garden State" was released in 2004. The soundtrack included Beam's version of the Postal Service song "Such Great Heights." "Our shows doubled in size," Beam says. He scored again when "In Good Company" director Paul Wietz asked him to write a song specifically for the movie. "In Good Company" was pretty mainstream stuff. Beam says his taste runs more toward movies by directors like Terrence Malick, Stanley Kubrick, that sort of thing.

Did Beam see a disconnect there?

Nah. "For me, the hardest part (of songwriting) is getting that initial nudge," Beam says. "You spend days just jotting down different little things, and maybe you find something to hang your hat on. Being in a situation where they give you that nudge is bliss, really."

The result was the nine-minute "The Trapeze Swinger," which has become a signature Iron & Wine song. It's his "Desolation Row," frankly, his "Ambulance Blues."

"The idea was a song to get lost in the trance of," Beam says. "It becomes a collage of images that only sort of make sense. By the end you feel like you've gone on some kind of journey."

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It wasn't until the "Woman King" EP, released in 2005, that he decided to quit the day job, a serious moment for a dad. "That was a big leap of faith, but I really had to choose one or the other." The rapidly expanding family moved from Miami to Texas in '05. Beam's wife, Kim, is a midwife and can practice in Texas.

Beam gestures to his property. "We closed on this place the day after Hurricane Katrina hit. We were packing in the dark and I was like '(expletive) this place.' " He pauses. "That's too harsh. I actually miss it a lot. There are a lot of cool things about Miami, but hurricanes are not one of them."

But Dripping Springs? "Well, we wanted to get out of the city, my wife has family in the Austin area and it's a good place to tour from. We can do loops."

He pauses again. "I didn't really move here for the music scene," Beam admits sheepishly. "It's nice to be able to take advantage of and find nice gear. But I do shows out of necessity more than desire.

"It's more complex with more kids and it's a nice excuse for me not to tour," Beam laughs. "Some people love it, but I prefer the writing and recording. I've learned to enjoy touring, but it's not why I do it."

Perhaps not too surprisingly, he's found touring musicians who are cool with staying off the road.

"Some of the people that I got to play in this band had given up touring completely," he says. "They're all dads and they only wanted to go out for these brief stints of touring that I do. We're the band of dads."

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Beam clearly loves having a building on his property dedicated to nothing but a recording studio.

"I come from the indie film aesthetic where autonomy is the holy grail," Beam says. The sessions for "The Shepherd's Dog" were helmed by Brian Deck; Beam says he and Deck hammered out the songs themselves, then had people overdub parts. The songs sound more abstract, a little gauzier than previous albums. A little less Simon and Garfunkel, as it were.

"The palette's bigger," Beam says. "Playing with the Calexico boys taught me a lot about opening up songs to leave room for improvisation and chance." (Beam released "In the Reins," a collaborative mini-album with Calexico, in 2005.)

One of Beam's daughters runs over to us, then runs off. How many kids do you have? "Four girls," he laughs. "I'm screwed. But that said, you should see them compete for their mom's attention. Oh, boy."

Like many parents, he misses listening to music for pleasure.

"I listen while I'm doing the dishes," Beam says. "I like the new Panda Bear record. I've been listening to the Judee Sill records. And I always go back to the Beatles and Dylan."

"Have you ever played the game where you listen to a Dylan album that he made when he was at the age you are now?" I ask.

"No, oh, that sounds so depressing," Beam says. "I'd try not to do that." He falls silent. Or maybe the bugs just get a little louder.

jgross@statesman.com; 912-5926