IRON & WINE – LIVE: REVIEW
- 7 hours ago
- 3 min read
IRON & WINE
City Recital Hall, Sydney, March 4
SAM BEAM AND INCONGRUITY are hardly strangers. If not his secret weapon as Iron & Wine, it is definitely a potent one.
He looks like a stern 19th century cult leader who loves whole grains and hates sex: long beard pointing to hell, high hair reaching for God, and deepish-set eyes evaluating your frailties. But he smiles and jokes like a backwoodsman who hasn’t bothered with shoes in three years or a bath in almost as long, because life is to be enjoyed, right?
Several times through the night he would break down in giggles at a comment from the room, a private joke, or the seemingly unexpected fervour of the audience. (An audience weirdly standing – the floor cleared of seats – for one of those gigs and one of those artists you’d think were made for this room’s cloistered mode. Another incongruity?)
As he starts playing, seated with his acoustic guitar, he comes on like a mid ‘40s mountain folk singer: surely gruff and wizened, about to sing of death and God and woe betide any of us who can’t grasp that both are inevitable and imminent. But he leaves us like a mid ‘70s Hollywood Hills troubadour: rolling out intimate charm and delicacy in tales of personal failings not yet fatal, small lives not overly complicated but still entangled.
That voice knows how to ride a bike but chooses to walk; the guitar has played the blues but chooses a wider road. The man knows his Jackson Browne; we may know he is our Jackson Browne.
Beam’s songs work on the same basis of incongruity: slowly excavating a heart like a crushed mineshaft in one, singing jauntily about “a wonderful life” of cows in the pasture and hope rising in another, telling us that “Songbirds only end up where they are going/Some get hard and some go home/Some want flesh and some want bone”, but having perused the autumn leaves, serpents and mice, declaring “I just want to see you in the morning/Yeah I just want to see you in the morning”.
As might be told from those lines, and others like “I told my future by reading your lips”, from the night’s closer, All In Good Time, lyrically he paints but does not run to abstractions; it’s all real. In Grace Notes, one of the hitherto unheard songs (“Unfortunately I have some new songs,” he joshed early on), he sang of those elements that bring “extra emotional velocity”, and the song insinuated itself so easily you would swear the “meat on the bones” he mentioned were always yours, just not noticed ‘til he pointed them out.
In a three-song bracket at the end of the set, Beams was joined by Leah Senior (whose opening 40 minutes had wandered through appealing folkish territory, led by a voice part innocent and part sceptical) and her guitarist Jesse Williams. With Williams’ translucent electric guitar providing washes of colour, the trio made the bucolic Naked As We Came, the buoyant Robin’s Egg and the verdant In Your Ocean feel homespun and sophisticated in equal measure.
If a solo show climaxing with almost a band moment that still stayed close to the skin might strike some as incongruous, well, yes, of course it did.
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Iron & Wine plays:
Womadelaide, March 6
Port Fairy Folk Festival, March 7-8
Northcote Theatre, March 10
Odeon, Hobart, March 12