Sam Beam: The Kingpin
10:11 AM
“On Your Wings”
Speaking of God,
“On Your Wings,” is a direct appeal to the big man upstairs himself, with all
the right elements to make him listen. The song opens with gentle, acoustic
guitar strumming (because remember this is indie folk we’re talking about) and
is soon joined by Beam’s soothing voice, proclaiming, “God, there is gold
hidden deep in the ground/God there’s a hangman that wants to come around.” The
slide guitar makes its way into the song as well, which is an interesting touch
for a song of this genre. The meaning behind the song is obvious enough, being
a request for an explanation for the state of humanity and the way things are
currently. The song pleads without begging and is reminiscent of indie folk
royalty Nick Drake’s “Day is Done” with the way it’s tinted by sadness that is
masked by smooth voices and expert guitar picking with perfect timing. If Bob
Dylan and Simon & Garfunkel are what jumpstarted the whole folk movement in
the sixties and seventies, Nick Drake is what kept it going in the nineties,
while also making it more modern and shaping the path that indie folk is
currently on. Beam’s guitar playing is what really keeps the song and album
rooted in folk, with his skill emulating the Southern Gothic sound that we
sometimes hear in folk music.
“Naked as We Came”
One of the most
common themes that is rampant throughout this genre, is the thing that makes
the world go round: love. Granted, it’s not all rainbows and butterflies all
the time, like Simon & Garfunkel’s “The Dangling Conversation,” which talks
of a dying relationship or Bon Iver’s For
Emma, Forever Ago, which is an entire album dedicated to every break up
you’ve experienced ever in life. Or on the flipside, Sufjan Steven’s Illinois, which is an entire album about
his love for his home state and Bright Eyes’ “First Day of My Life,” which
speaks of a man feeling born again upon meeting the love of his life. “Naked as
We Came” falls more into the latter category of love songs, describing a couple
that has been wholly devoted to each other until the end. Here, Beam takes some
cues from another genre staple, Elliot Smith, who helped lay the groundwork
down for the genre in the nineties. Though Dylan kicked off the genre by “going
electric,” the nineties crew (Nick Drake, Elliot Smith, Ani DiFranco) kept it
simple, with just guitars and their voices serenading us through the good and
bad times.
“Sodom, South Georgia”
Even if I
weren’t a Georgia native, I’m know I would still wholeheartedly enjoy this
song, but since I am, I fucking love this song. This is one of the songs that
solidifies Iron & Wine’s place on the indie folk timeline and makes it a
stepping stone for the artists that we’ll come to hear later in the 2000s, such
as Bon Iver, Father John Misty, or the Civil Wars. Even on the first listen, we
know it’s an obvious representation of the genre, but when you listen closely,
it becomes so much more than that. “Sodom, South Georgia” grows on the
storytelling elements of indie folk that weren’t always touched on in the
nineties era of the genre, and Beam brings more metaphors, more imagery, more
layers, more everything to the lyrics. You can picture the small Southern town
that Beam croons about with lyrics like, “All dead white boys say, ‘God is
good’/White tongues hang out, ‘God is good’,” and “Sodom, South Georgia/Slept
on an acre of bones/Slept through Christmas/Slept like a bucket of snow,” and
the song nails the unnerving quiet of walking through a sleepy, small town. The
song touches on more common themes that we see in the genre, such as life and
death, and love and loss, and like many indie folk songs that came both before
and after it, it’s meant to leave the listener with something that they didn’t
have before.
If you look at a
timeline of the indie folk genre, you’ll see Iron & Wine fall right at the
turn of the 21st century and they couldn’t have had more perfect
timing. From the boldness that we got from the sixties and seventies era and
the intimacy and closeness to the lyrics and the music we see in the nineties,
Iron & Wine manages to take these elements and only improve upon them,
solidifying themselves as game changers in the genre of indie folk.
0 comments