Iron & Wine's Sam Beam makes his long-awaited return to Australia for a solo tour in support of new album Hen's Teeth.
Iron & Wine’s Sam Beam is back on a prolific streak after a relatively quiet spell. The new Iron & Wine album, Hen’s Teeth, arrives less than two years after the project’s previous LP, Light Verse.
The release of Hen’s Teeth coincides with Iron & Wine’s first Australian tour since 2018. He’ll perform solo shows across the country, including two slots at Port Fairy Folk Festival and a sold-out show at Northcote Theatre.
Iron & Wine
- Port Fairy Folk Festival: Saturday 7 & Sunday 8 March
- Northcote Theatre: Tuesday 10 March
- Tickets here
Released in 2024, Light Verse was Beam’s seventh LP as Iron & Wine name and first since 2017’s Beast Epic. Beam didn’t totally disappear in the seven-year interim, mind you: in 2019, Iron & Wine teamed up with Calexico for the album Years to Burn, and in 2023, he released the EP Lori, featuring four of his favourite Lori McKenna tracks.
But Beam amassed so many new tunes in the years following Beast Epic that he considered combining Light Verse and Hen’s Teeth into a double album – before seeing sense.
“It’s hard enough to get people to listen to one or two songs these days,” Beam says, chatting to Beat over the phone ahead of his Australian tour. “Why punish them with a giant, long record? I like digestible things.”
View this post on Instagram
Light Verse and Hen’s Teeth were tracked at engineer Dave Way’s Waystation studio in Los Angeles. Tyler Chester played keyboards, Sebastian Steinberg played bass, David Garza played guitar, and Paul Cartwright played violin. Drummers Griffin Goldsmith, Beth Goodfellow and Kyle Crane chipped in on various tracks.
“I met some buddies there that I just love making music with,” Beam says. “They’re not strictly jazz players, but they definitely do play a lot of jazz, but they are just well versed in a lot of different types of music. They catch things quick and they’re expressive players. And I just I have a ball with them.”
Both records centre on a melodic and rhythmically perky strain of folk rock that salutes the 1960s Laurel Canyon music scene. Beam was so energised by his new backing ensemble that he also took a few stylistic leaps.
“There’s two songs on [Hen’s Teeth] that borrow from Brazilian, Tropicália-type of music, samba,” he says. “And I hadn’t really thought about doing that. I mean, I love that type of music, but I hadn’t really thought that these songs would end up there.”
The songs in question are Defiance, Ohio and Dates and Dead People.
“[Defiance, Ohio] I didn’t imagine would go there if I wasn’t playing with these people,” Beam says. But after it did, he suggested adding a more boldly Brazilian flavour to Dates and Dead People.
“I was almost literally ripping off Baden Powell, a guitar player from Brazil, one of my favourites,” Beam says. “That one owes a lot to him, for sure.”
Iron & Wine’s past touring companions, Americana trio I’m With Her, feature on two Hen’s Teeth tracks: the springy Robin’s Egg and the quieter Wait Up. Beam, a fan of I’m With Her since their 2018 debut album See You Around, originally wrote the songs so that they’d have something to perform together on tour.
“Instead of just covering each other’s songs or doing cover songs of other people, I thought it’d be really fun to have some original material that we put out together to play at those shows,” he says. “I sent them an idea that I had and they sent me back something similar but better, which is what you’re hoping for – because they’re pros.”
Collaboration has become an increasingly central feature of Beam’s professional life. It’s a contrast to Iron & Wine’s early days, around 2002’s The Creek Drank the Cradle and 2004’s Our Endless Numbered Days, when Beam was a much stricter band leader.
“Ask anyone in my band, the first band or two. I feel so bad for them. I was a total jerk,” he says. “I went to art school. I was accustomed to making a thing in private, polishing it and developing it until it was perfect in a way where, in my mind, it was ready to be shown. And that’s the opposite of collaborating with music.”
He sees things very differently these days.
“The whole point of collaborating with other people is not to tell them what to do. It’s to make something together that you couldn’t have made by yourself.”
Iron & Wine will be on tour around Australia from 28 February to 12 March. Details here.
