Your average Iron & Wine record starts with the precision and subtlety Sam Beam has perfected during the course of a very prolific three years.
Seminal Iron & Wine songs such as “Bird Stealing Bread,” “Naked as We Came” and “The Trapeze Swinger” are known and loved for their almost unfathomable lyrical and compositional simplicity. Rudimentary chords and hushed, whispered harmonies play off each other in a way unlike most guitar- and-voice combos. In Beam’s music, they are one and the same, working together to create a sound so calming, it’s easy to forget the voice and guitar are completely different instruments.
But then came February’s EP “The Woman King,” a six-song meditation on volume, percussion and the electric guitar. The CD made obvious Beam’s penchant for experimentation, and while the Florida- and Texas-born music was still simple, it wasn’t that simple anymore.
Beam continues on that path with “In the Reigns,” Iron & Wine’s most ambitious project to date. It is a seven-song collaboration with Arizona’s beloved desert rockers Calexico that has Beam’s compositions filled in with the instrumentation and attitude of Joey Burns & Co. The collaboration is the focus of a tour stopping at the Fillmore Auditorium on Wednesday.
“They were friends of mine, but we hadn’t hung out all that much,” Beam said recently from his home outside Austin. “It was a group of friendly strangers, and I showed them the basic progressions of the songs, and the rest of it was a real collaborative process.”
Although the typical Iron & Wine record sounds like it was recorded alone in a basement, it is always the result of collaboration. It’s a process that works for Beam, and “In The Reigns” was an opportunity to take it to another level.
“Anything to shake you out of the normal habits is good,” Beam said. And while this new CD is billed as Iron & Wine/Calexico, it’s Beam’s record. He wrote everything on the record, and it’s his voice that fronts it.
But as Calexico shades in Beam’s vision – with its ghostly steel guitars and nuanced percussion – it is clear that they are integral to this project, and that this collaboration is one that will work live on the stage as well as it does on record.
“It was new,” Beam said, “but it was a lot of fun. That was the whole idea of the project.”
Not only has Beam released three full-lengths and two EPs since September 2002, he’s also found great success on the festival circuit and on movie soundtracks. He played an already legendary 19-song set at this year’s Bonnaroo festival in Tennessee, available for download at livebonnaroo.com.
“I thought I understood about the culture they nurture there,” said Beam, who covered Neil Young’s “Mr. Soul” and encored with his own 8-minute “Trapeze Swinger” at Bonnaroo, “but I was mistaken. I thought it was gonna be a bunch of Deadheads and stuff, but it wasn’t at all. It was a lot of people who were just really into music.”
And after his Postal Service cover of “Such Great Heights” rocked the smash, coming-of- age “Garden State” soundtrack, his music became the emotional embodiment of “In Good Company,” the Scarlett Johansson/ Topher Grace/Dennis Quaid coming-of-age film earlier this year.
“Sub Pop usually runs everything on that end,” Beam said of his label, ” but with (‘In Good Company’) I worked quite a bit more with the director. Paul (Weitz) had heard my record and was a fan, and he maybe thought he wanted to use some songs (from ‘Endless Numbered Days’). But we ended up using a couple of those and one original.”
Beam’s work in film makes him sympathetic to directors approaching him about using his music.
“My film background makes me really generous with that kind of stuff,” Beam said. “I’ve been on the other side of the coin trying to get licenses for material you want to use, and it’s not that difficult, but it can be a headache. I try to make the job easier.”
Pop music critic Ricardo Baca can be reached at 303-820-1394 or rbaca@denverpost.com.
Iron & Wine
INDIE ROCK|Fillmore Auditorium; 7:30 p.m., Wednesday playing with Calexico|$20-$22|through Ticketmaster, 303-830-8497 or ticketmas ter.com.
