Upbeat isn’t necessarily the first word that comes to mind when it comes to describing Sam Beam’s music. But the singer-songwriter, who records and performs under the name Iron & Wine, does have his moments.
Take, for instance, “Sweet Talk,” a standout track from his 2024 album Light Verse. One of the most beguiling songs from across his seven studio albums, it stays in your head long after hearing it on record, and even more so after hearing it live.
“It’s definitely one of the more upbeat ones,” the five-time Grammy nominee said in an early March interview. “It’s fun to have a song like that in your pocket. I’ll be in front of a bunch of people playing more quiet gentle music, and then I’ve got ones like that to pull out.”
Still, there’s more going on in the song, whose lilting folk-pop choruses include lines like these: “Let’s bow, bow and scrape / Sucker punching straight into the face / Of a wonderful life, of a wonderful life.” Beam’s lyrical approach can be, well, complicated. Kind of like life itself.
“You want to make something that feels accessible, but is also complicated, like we are,” he said. “I like elements that give you a reason to listen to it twice. You feel like you want to hone in on whether there’s a clear, concise message or not. It just makes you want to hear or think about it again.”
This month, Beam and Ben Bridwell of Band of Horses released a new covers EP, “Making Good Time.” And on Sept. 22, Iron & Wine and Band of Horses share a bill at the Mountain Winery in Saratoga.
There was a five-year gap between Light Verse and Years to Burn, Iron & Wine’s 2019 collaboration with the desert-rock band Calexico. A big reason for that was the COVID pandemic and its aftermath, during which Beam was grappling with what he describes as “songwriting paralysis.”
“There was so much anxiety and fear of the disease and the political aspect of it all,” said the South Carolina native. “I would start a lot of songs, but I had a hard time finding the focus to wrap them up. So I just put it away for a while, accepted where I was at, and did other things. I made some artwork and hung out with my kids for a change.”
But for Beam’s loyal legion of fans, it was well worth the wait. Light Verse pairs his poetic, often poignant songs with understated string arrangements that bring to mind early Nick Drake. “My friend Paul Cartwright plays violin and mandolin, which are strung the same way,” said Beam. “He would overdub his own instruments, and then he would stack strings on top of that. So there’s three or four songs he wrote charts for that we recorded with a 24-piece orchestra.”
Beam also credits the influence of the Brazilian singer Gal Costa, whom he once described as this album’s “spirit animal.”
“Actually, she’s the spirit animal for my entire life,” Beam said. “Her albums’ strings and acoustic instruments, and the way the band interacts with the melody, it’s like folk instrumentation meets contemporary chamber music.”
A central figure in Brazil’s tropicalia movement of the 1960s, Costa and her contemporaries—a number of whom went into self-exile—were part of the resistance to their country’s authoritarian dictatorship.
“That’s definitely their most well-known music, because it was so controversial,” said Beam, who feels that, in some cases, their subsequent work was just as good or better. “When it comes to my own songs, even though I’m obsessed with politics, I’m also bored to death with them. They don’t make me want to write a song, they make me want to beat my head against the wall.”
Iron & Wine and Band of Horses play at 7:30pm on Sept 22 at the Mountain Winery, Saratoga. $67-$294. mountainwinery.com
