Iron & Wine

Iron & Wine

Iron & Wine is the stage name of Sam Beam, a singer, composer and recording artist from Chapin, United States, born in 1974. His music is associated with folk, indie, singer-songwriter and acoustic styles, and his work is also described through alternative rock, americana, contemporary folk, country and folk rock.

Background

Beam is raised outside Columbia, South Carolina, where his father works in land management and his mother is a schoolteacher. He later studies at Virginia Commonwealth University, where he earns a bachelor’s degree, and at Florida State University Film School, where he completes an MFA. He lives in Dripping Springs, Texas, outside Austin. Before his first album appears, he teaches film and cinematography at the University of Miami and Miami International University of Art & Design.

The name Iron & Wine comes from a dietary supplement called “Beef Iron & Wine” that he finds in a general store. Beam writes songs for more than seven years before a friend gives him a four-track recorder. Copies of his demos are passed around by friends, and Sub Pop’s owner contacts him directly with a record deal.

Recording career

Iron & Wine’s debut album, The Creek Drank the Cradle, is released on Sub Pop in 2002. Beam writes, performs, records and produces every track himself in a home studio. The album uses acoustic guitar, banjo and slide guitar, and its sound is compared with artists such as Nick Drake, Simon and Garfunkel, Neil Young, Elliott Smith and Ralph Stanley.

In 2003, he releases The Sea & The Rhythm, an EP of other home-recorded tracks in the same vein as the debut. His second album, Our Endless Numbered Days, follows in 2004 and is recorded in a professional studio with much higher fidelity. It remains centred on acoustic material, but additional band members give the record a different sound.

Beam releases the EP Woman King in February 2005, and later that year issues In the Reins, a collaboration with Calexico. That release mostly consists of new full-band versions of earlier Iron & Wine rarities. He also releases several singles, other EPs and a number of download-only recordings, including a live album taken from his 2005 Bonnaroo performance.

Notable songs and stylistic change

One of Beam’s best-known recordings is his cover of “Such Great Heights” by The Postal Service. It appears in a commercial for M&M’s and in the film Garden State, as well as on the film’s soundtrack.

Kiss Each Other Clean, released as the fourth Iron & Wine studio album, marks another shift in style. Beam describes it as a more focused pop record, with a sound drawing on early- to mid-1970s FM radio music.