Here Comes The Fuzz

Stroking the largest, most terrifying beard we’ve seen since the time Mumford and Sons’ shaving gear went AWOL in baggage handling, Sam Beam tilts his head and laughs.
“Four kids? No… actually, I have five. But it’s alright that you didn’t know that. As a matter of fact, it might be a bit weird if you knew we had five. It would be kind of like you were keeping tabs on me or something. Man, that might be slightly strange!”

It’s the morning after Iron And Wine’s sell out turn at New York’s storied Radio City Music Hall. Not everyone, it will transpire, has been blown away by the performance – the chap from the New York Times, for one, reckons a sprawling backing band overwhelmed the music’s subtleties. Beam, though, is on a high. The amiable figure holding court in the lobby of his midtown Manhattan hotel is in sharp contrast to the introverted, taciturn individual Hot Press encountered at our last meeting (admittedly the atmosphere on that occasion wasn’t helped by the fact we plunged into the deep end with a question about The Beard).
His good humour is further stoked as we inform him that Iron And Wine’s new album, Kiss Each Other Clean, has fairly gate-crashed the Irish charts at No. 15, a stonking 60 places higher than their previous best performance. A few days later, it will debut at Number 2 in America’s Billboard 200). “Oh, man, that’s great. I had no idea,” he says. “Hey! Good for us.”
If you’re inclined to tag Beam as an archetypal mid-American moocher, a beardie beatnik inhabiting some grey zone between Bon Iver and Ray LaMontagne, then Kiss Each Other Clean will come as a very pleasant shock. Jettisoning the gnarly folk-isms of his previous three records, the 36-year-old detours into Fleetwood Mac-style seventies pop. Upholstered with piano, Wurlitzer and gorgeous harmonies, songs such as ‘Me And Lazarus’ feel as if they’ve been beamed directly from the era of Jaws, Jimmy Carter and unironic short-shorts.
“I told a journalist about the seventies thing and everyone seems to have picked up on it,” he chuckles. “I keep hearing it, but I suppose I can’t blame anyone. After all, I said it. Okay, it wasn’t the only thing I said. But you can’t blame people for running with it.”
What attracted him to the decade? He shrugs. Maybe he was chasing down his childhood memories.
“When I was a kid, what I remember being on the radio was Fleetwood Mac, Elton John… stuff like that. There was also my parents’ Motown collection, which I think also informs the record. It’s all in there, in the big soup of my kid brain. It’s a hodge podge.”
His music has its moments of majestic intensity. In person, though, Beam is almost a parody of slacker quietude. From South Carolina – the scruffier, more redneck of the Carolinas – he projects a chilled-out affability that is a mixture of Jeff Bridges in The Big Leboswksi and every character Owen Wilson has ever played. He certainly appears only distantly connected to the drearier side of his career. Asked whose idea it was to exclusively stream his album via-the website of talk-show host Conan O’Brien, he giggles blankly and suggests that maybe his ‘people’ cooked up the notion.
“I’m not sure how that came about. It was more of a management thing. I thought it was a good idea, though. I like the show. His comedy is more for our generation. I think it is fun. We did the show as well. It was one of those things. As soon as we found out their booker was interested, we were definitely interested.”
Beam seems confused when asked if it is freeing to be working on an independent label rather than a major. In this part of the world, he is with an indie distributor for the first time. However, in the US he has actually moved in the opposite direction, swapping Seattle’s famous Sub Pop for big, bad major Warner. If we’re confused we can only imagine how he must feel.
“We did what we always do – we made a record without a deal and worried about that afterwards. Then we waited for people to come knocking and listened to what they had to say. That’s not uncommon with me. It’s pretty much the way I do business. I never get paid in advance for records. The only time that happened was with the second one. So a couple of different labels came around. Warner, I felt, was the good one.”
Surely he’s swimming in the face of history. With the end of the music business as we know it imminent, aren’t bands with an established fanbase supposed to be ditching labels and going solo?
“You know, I’m not interested in doing that. I have enough responsibilities as it is. There are pros and cons to doing the independent thing. There are a lot of relationships that I have, which I’d like to hold onto.”
Some longtime fans have been taken aback by the upbeat tempo of the new LP. An artist whose earlier records seemed to revel in their moroseness, has Beam been through some profound life changes? Or did he just bang his head on the way into the studio?
“It’s kind of hard to explain,” he says. “First of all, I don’t sit down and write a record from start to finish. Songs come and then, when you’ve got enough, you put an album together. Some of them… you know from the start they’re going to be upbeat. With others, it’s more a question of how you put them together. You try a bunch of different ways and see which fits best. The most important thing is to avoid being repetitive. You want to be open to different ways of doing things. There are a lot of R&B influences on the album. That wasn’t there at the start. It came late in the game. In a way, I was as surprised as anybody.”

Kiss Each Other Clean gets a live airing in the Olympia, Dublin on March 14. You can listen to their track 'Walking Far From Home' on hotpress.com now.