Iron & Wine
Hen’s Teeth
SUB POP
I’m sitting in the idling cab of my truck, listening to the rain hammering down on the roof. Sam Beam’s voice drifts from the speakers—a beautiful transmission as rich as red clay. The album is Hen’s Teeth, Iron & Wine’s eighth, and it feels exactly like the weather in February: earthy, slick with nostalgia, and a surprise gift to parched land. Beam once remarked that hen’s teeth do not exist, that this surprise of a record—a heavier fraternal twin to 2024’s Light Verse—was a happy accident. He told me two years ago that he battled with writer’s block for a long time after 2017’s return to Sub Pop. Hen’s Teeth is a gift that shouldn’t be here, yet it hums through the speakers like a quiet, sudden revelation.
The symphonic folk-rocker “Roses” starts the album off with confidence as it builds up with a series of lyrical truisms: “Beauty lasts as long as lighting”; “Honesty is an 8-ball in the dark.” The lovely acoustic “Paper and Stone” is all winks and charm as Beam compares a failing codependent relationship to a game of rock, paper, scissors. A fiddle melody wafts in and out, proving that Beam still has an ability to stop time for a moment with a subtle blend of instruments. I watch a pair of headlights drift by in the rearview mirror as lead single “In Your Ocean” plays. The track wraps around the cabin, a sonically poignant plea about lovers so deeply entwined that they physically merge (a playful version of the recent romantic horror movie Together, perhaps?). Backed by the lush, intricate composition of longtime collaborators David Garza, Tyler Chester, and Sebastian Steinberg, Beam drops idioms and turns of phrase while his bold baritone sings of praying for dry ground, but settling for drowning in a shared existence.
Most of Beam’s records are thematic anthologies about love and life that read like short stories of love, loss, grief, and the quirks of life. The focused Hen’s Teeth is basically a variety of boxed folk-rock moods within a single grocery store aisle. As the album rolls into “Robin’s Egg,” the atmosphere shifts to the loose, spring-like side of his folk discography as former lovers reflect on the beautiful and fragile relationship they once watched over. Americana trio I’m with Her steps into the mix, their harmonies cutting through the gloom like a pinprick of moonlight over a forest canopy. Later, on the achingly tender “Wait Up,” the trio make a devastating meal out of even less. They spin a mournful song that pulls at the center of my chest as I shift the truck into drive, the vehicle jolting forward along the gravel road.
Hen’s Teeth is a real family affair, rooted in blood and bone, although set in a completely different recording environment than artifacts of Iron & Wine’s home-recorded past. Beam’s daughter, Arden, makes her recording debut, lending a fragile backing vocal to several songs, her voice adding a personal poignancy that makes the record ache with a familiar warmth. The knocking percussion of acoustic guitar body, mixed with Beam and his daughter’s voices, for “Singing Saw” is a prime example of how well the vocals and instruments mesh together. The surreal and dark “Dates and Dead People” continues Light Verse’s preoccupation with death and memory against a surprise tropicália setting—a recent genre influence for Beam that also shows up on “Defiance, Ohio.”
Final track “Half Measures” strolls along in that old Iron & Wine style. Beam (or his song’s characters) don’t want to say goodbye or take half measures in life. Hen’s Teeth keeps playing as I pull out onto the wet asphalt and the cabin heater fights the chill—an impossible thing made real, a phantom limb that somehow still holds your hand through the dark periods of life. Like Van Morrison’s Astral Weeks era, Beam seems to just be getting started with his folk music as heard through jazz and classical filters. Reinvention through new collaborations is the current all-encompassing goal. Just another somber lullaby soundtrack to any weekend drive, rain or shine.
