Iron And Wine Aren't Confused About Politics

09/18/07 5:30pm

by Matt Littlefair (CHARTattack)

While heartily laughing over the phone from his home outside of Austin, Texas, Iron And Wine's Sam Beam addressed a comment he made to London's The Independent newspaper about his new Sub Pop release, The Shepherd's Dog.

Beam had mentioned writing in a state of "political confusion," which evidently wasn't what he meant at all.

"There's no confusion about the politics. I just disagree. The confusion was more social in aspect, I think."

Beam expanded on what he was really driving at when he made the off-handed remark, and how it came to influence his current oeuvre.

"I thought he [U.S. President George W. Bush] would lose the election. You thought you knew what was going on, but it wasn't true — a situation where you're forced into a new perspective. That's kind of fertile ground for writing or painting or whatever you're doin' that's creative.

"So I think it reflected quite a bit in some of the lyrics I was doing at the time, a bit more unsettling images — images that can be interpreted in several different ways, things like that where there's no hard and true one way to read anything you're talking about."

That disquieting feeling led Beam, now a father of four, to produce another brilliant album in The Shepherd's Dog. But, he insists, this isn't a typical Iron And Wine record. Beam, along with Calexico's Joey Burns and Paul Niehaus, have taken Iron And Wine into some uncharted musical territory, going beyond their typical elegiac acoustics.

"I definitely don't want to put the same record out, so I pushed myself into uncomfortable places a lot of the time," says Beam. "Just for the sake of growing.

"This one, it was a different group of songs, so I was trying to reflect. I thought there was quite a bit of unrest underneath the songs, so I tried to reflect in the arrangements and stuff. We actually went a bit further than we originally thought, but in my mind that's good."

As for the title of the record, it's something that Beam says "doesn't really mean anything." It was more of a matter of coincidence than an intentional artistic statement.

"Honestly man, the dog thing, I honestly think it's because the dog thing kept coming up in a lot of the songs. Some of the songs got included on the record because they had a dog in 'em. It's that simple."

Beam is putting aside his well-documented aversion to touring to showcase The Shepherd's Dog. The self-described "homebody" and a band will embark on a series of seven-day excursions beginning in late September. He doesn't sound over the moon with joy about it.

"I've learned to enjoy touring, but it's not really why I do this. I just enjoy the writing and recording, but there are realities to making a living doing music."

Iron And Wine play Toronto's Music Hall on Sept. 25 and Montreal's Metropolis the next night.