Iron & Wine
Who Can See Forever Soundtrack
SUB POP
Sam Beam makes the kind of music people tend to take for granted. As Iron & Wine, Beam has released six studio albums (in addition to collaborative LPs with Calexico, Jesca Hoop, and Band of Horses’ Ben Bridwell) over the last 23 years, never straying too far from the lo-fi folk stylings of his 2002 debut The Creek Drank the Cradle. It was that album, and to a larger extent his cover of The Postal Service’s “Such Great Heights,” that put Beam on the map and, for the most part, his career has progressed as one might have expected after first hearing those early recordings.
Today, you’re most likely to hear about a new Iron & Wine song either by noticing a recent addition to Spotify’s “Your Favorite Coffeehouse” playlist or by hearing a single from it at your actual favorite coffeehouse. And yes, his music certainly does promote this kind of engagement, its calm, reserved, homespun nature making for a brand of music you might enjoy as a form of ambiance, something you put on but will rarely listen to. If anything, his latest collection, a career-spanning live performance titled Who Can See Forever Soundtrack, serves as an antidote to that kind of engagement and has a way of putting into focus just how much we’ve been overlooking Sam Beam’s genius.
Iron & Wine is a project defined by ease. It’s incredible to consider the facts surrounding his arrival on the early-2000s indie-folk scene: A four-track recorder, some influential friends, a well-timed cover (memorably gracing the Garden State soundtrack), and a deal with Sub Pop quickly led Beam from a life as a film professor to a full-time touring musician. Countless songwriters work under the assumption that if only their songs could get in the right hands they’d be able to make it—if not big, then at least big enough to quit their day job. Only, that was actually true for Beam, who didn’t have to fumble around in obscurity quite like your typical songwriter with an acoustic guitar. If there’s a clear and obvious objective for Who Can See Forever—a companion to a full-length documentary coming in 2024—it seems to be to illustrate just why his songs, simple as they might appear, remain so immediately endearing.
Who Can See Forever pulls from all over Iron & Wine’s catalog: Hits like “The Trapeze Swinger” and “Naked as We Came” sit next to deeper cuts like “Woman King” and “Monkeys Uptown” (the collection notably features only one song from his breakout debut, “Muddy Hymnal,” which closes both records). Like many live albums, the structure of the songs are fiddled with just enough to make them feel if not essential then at least fully worthy of being put to tape. Beam takes a song like “Boy with a Coin,” with its sputtering percussion and whispered vocals, and ups the ante significantly, fleshing it out until it becomes as massive as anything he’s ever written. Similarly, “Sodom, South Georgia,” one of Iron & Wine’s most delicate and brilliant songs, is made grander and perhaps even more striking thanks to the addition of an expansive backing band.
The only hint we get at what it will look like when these songs are presented as part of the documentary feature is the video for “Thomas County Law,” a song off the project’s 2017 record Beast Epic. It’s largely what you might expect, blending behind-the-scenes moments of the biblically bearded Beam with a wonderfully rendered live performance film at the Haw River Ballroom in Saxapahaw, North Carolina. Who Can See Forever Soundtrack may be, by its very nature, only a piece of a larger project, but it more than justifies its existence throughout, if only to put into focus a songwriter who still deserves your attention.
