Iron & Wine’s Weed Garden Continues a Tradition of Canonic EPs

Iron & Wine’s last album — the Grammy-nominated Beast Epic — arrived last year after more nearly four years without any new music from the band. Yet, Iron & Wine’s Sam Beam released two collaborative records in that time, one with Band of Horses’ Ben Bridwell and one with singer-songwriter Jesca Hoop. By the time Beast Epic came around, it sounded like a return to form for longtime Iron & Wine fans; the forays into the weeds with such esteemed musicians offered new perspective on singing and performing that helped shape a new record.

These six songs on Weed Garden, however, were written during that same time, but did not appear on Beast Epic for various reasons. Beam decided to revisit them at the beginning of 2018 with the same group of musicians who helped make Beast Epic. The result is a rich companion piece to last year’s LP.

Like Beast Epic, the songs on Weed Garden remain rooted in Beam’s rhythmic acoustic guitar picking and playing paired with pastoral lyrics. The first three tracks — “What Hurts Worse,” the never-before-recorded bootleg favorite “Waves of Galveston,” and “Last of Your Rock ‘n’ Roll Heroes” — build from pensive to playful before the centerpiece “Milkweed” veers off that path. A tension-ridden string ballad, “Milkweed” also borrows jazzier elements with its flickering piano fills. It’s the only song on Weed Garden that feels more like a weed than a garden — a song that keeps sprouting in new directions, in unexpected places. That experimentalism isn’t necessarily bad, or even surprising for Iron & Wine; still, it’s the garden-like serenity of the rest of the songs (especially the honest closer “Talking to Fog”) that makes this collection such a strong addition to Iron & Wine’s series of beloved EPs.