Iron & Wine: Light Verse

The arc of Sam Beam’s career as a musician has always bent toward finding beauty in the simple act of being a living, breathing human being. It hasn’t ever mattered what the music around him sounds like — every Iron & Wine album, EP, and collaboration with Calexico allows the veteran songwriter to gently alter his approach, going from the muddy whirr of the tape deck on The Creek Drank the Cradle, the AM-radio vibes of The Shepherd’s Dog or the jazz meanderings of Kiss Each Other Clean. Beam, on the other hand, has changed like the rest of us: slowly if you take it album by album, but seismic and impressive if you chart out the last 20+ years of recording, transformation by transformation.

Some things never change, though. If you’re the kind of person who finds Iron & Wine to be sleepy, you’re not going to have your opinion flipped by Light Verse. Does Beam have the ability to sing above a whisper? It’s impossible to say. This is not a purely quiet album, or at least not a perfectly peaceful one. If you’re expecting Beam to start screaming and shredding, you’re in for the softest rude awakening you can ask for, but while “Cutting it Close,” “Taken by Surprise” and “Bag of Cats” lean into the softness, it’s just as frequent that the band threatens to swallow you whole. Opening “You Never Know” or the multilayered “Sweet Talk,” proudly wear the mark of Beam’s most recent Calexico collaboration, 2019’s Years to Burn. Then there’s the remarkable “Tears that Don’t Matter,” which steadily builds and evokes both Elbow and Animal Collective, if you hear it in the right moment.

Those who jump at every opportunity to listen to whatever slowly morphing kind of indie-folk Beam has decided to tackle are in for a treat. The current version of Iron & Wine isn’t too far away from where we last left the project, but this is an asset: now with a consistent band helping form the sound, you can almost feel Beam settling into himself even more, and Light Verse shows the signs of a leader and his group learning their capabilities, rather than moving on to the next thing. These songs are often complex, but they’re never ostentatious. Even on “All in Good Time,” in which Beam and Fiona fucking Apple sing about the birth and death of a long and winding romance (“I told my future by reading your lips/ You wore my ring until it didn’t fit”), they avoid using the duet as an excuse to ascend to the kinds of complicated compositions Apple is known for, instead settling for something… well, “Waltz”-like.

Of course, the greatest constant, outside of Beam’s voice, is the words he sings with it. To winnow down the stanzas, couplets and fragments of Light Verse that feel worthy of highlighting is a fool’s errand, and the end result can change depending on your mood. One day, you’ll be enamored with “Kissing this, kissing that/ I’m kissing anybody kissing me back/ Time likes pulling my teeth/ I never knew how many teeth I would need,” and the next, it could be the simple sting of “What a cold world for such a long life.” He still has the power to break your heart, though; the haunting, almost glacial “Taken by Surprise” (one of the only songs that to look back at Our Endless Numbered Days) practically feels like Beam is using his slow, gentle delivery to soften the blow. “I knew someone long ago/ Whether I wanted to or not/ We never said goodbye that I remember/ She never knew how much she gave/ How much she made and left behind/ I never knew how much I had to surrender.” His lyrics are never what one might call “direct,” but they don’t need to be to cut deep.

Even though Years to Burn came out only five years ago, it’s by far the largest gap between Iron & Wine records since the time between The Shepherd’s Dog and Kiss Each Other Clean (four years). Though the band continued to perform (outside of that pesky pandemic, of course) and release archival works and a concert film/live album, it started to seem as though the band had begun to slowly retire, at least from recording. Thank goodness they didn’t. Is Light Verse innovative? Absolutely not. Is it flawless? Nowhere near! Are Sam Beam and company going to win over the old fans who moved on since Our Endless Numbered Days? It’s unlikely. It doesn’t matter when an album is this ridiculously easy to fall in love with.