ALBUM REVIEW: Iron & Wine Adds Orchestral Elements and Playful Rumination on ‘Light Verse’

For an artist like singer-songwriter Sam Beam, who has operated under the stage name Iron & Wine since 2002, there’s always a maddening and mystifying distance between his short-hand persona (bearded, honey-hushed singing folkie) and his actual recording output (varied, layered, experimental, near-cinematic). Beam actually played into that persona a bit on his last solo full-length, 2017’s Beast Epic (ND review), with some of the most restrained and stately arrangements of his career.

Sam Beam (photo by Kim Black)

But as his new album, Light Verse, quickly affirms, he is still at heart as much a recording artist as an acoustic folkie and is largely intent on thinking about his records as wide-screen canvases on which his songs are just the raw material. This time Beam worked alongside a handful of Los Angeles-based musicians and producer Dave Way (John Doe, Macy Gray) in his Laurel Canyon studio, and the bones of the songs on Light Verse are both looser and more freely experimental, often conjuring up a more ramshackle version of the layered psych-pop elements of 2007’s The Shepherd’s Dog.

However, the real sonic departure comes from violinist and composer Paul Cartwright, who in addition to providing sweeping chamber music accompaniments on many tracks also wrote elaborate arrangements for a 24-person string section. The prominence of these strings across the record often makes them a central character, or even a foil, for Beam’s vocals.

This is clear from opening tune “You Never Know,” which begins very much in wizened Beast Epic mode before the song becomes subsumed by strings that lend an air of Beatles-esque disquiet as Beam’s layered vocals chant the song’s title. This experiment reaches its apex on the winding “Tears That Don’t Matter,” where an almost angry free-association ramble from Beam is eventually swept away in what feels like an excerpt from a full orchestral suite in the song’s latter half.

Elsewhere, the strings play a more understated role, like on the Fiona Apple duet “All in Good Time.” In one of the standout songs of the album (and his entire oeuvre), Beam and Apple chronicle a surprisingly cheerful and warmhearted tale of romantic disintegration with a kind of jocular piano barroom cheer. The two bounce lines back and forth throughout, landing pointed one liners and rejoinders with a wry and easy familiarity. “All in good time our plan went to shit,” cracks Apple at one point, with Beam responding “I told my future by reading your lips.” Apple then goes “you wore my ring until it didn’t fit,” followed by Beam’s “all in good time.”

That middle-aged blend of introspection and playfulness is rife throughout the album, with bouncier tunes like “Anyone’s Game” and “Sweet Talk” reflecting on the passage of time with a kind of tender acceptance. That mood mostly pervades, with only a few tunes, like “Taken by Surprise” and “Tears That Don’t Matter,” taking on a darker tenor. But even in those moments, Beam finds some meaning and peace (from “Tears”: “When the cynic within you finally bowed to a daughter / and the sea and its reasoning and the bones of your music / and that voice that you love and the life you were dreaming”).

Beam has always been an elliptical yet sharp songwriter, and his ability to mine his own (aging) perspective on life’s big themes continues to give his creative output verve and purpose. When you combine that with his equally engaging adventurousness as a record-maker, you have a career that easily continues to entrance.

Iron & Wine’s Light Verse is out April 26 on Sub Pop Records.