I sometimes wonder if musicians like Samuel Beam (aka Iron & Wine), envy contemporary "artists" such as Britney Spears or Linkin Park-- and not for reasons of fame or money. Spears and Linkin Park, after all, make decidedly contemporary music that, while tangentially owing debt to earlier music periods, puts little pressure on them to legitimize their backgrounds. Spears was once a teen who liked Madonna; Linkin Park were once teens who liked angst. That's about all anyone asks of them.
Not so for Sam "Jim" Beam. He makes bare-bones music that constantly nods to musical periods long since passed, perhaps the earliest being the 1920s of Blind Lemon Jefferson. In short, Beam makes roots music with southern themes, though to end there would do him a disservice. But now knowing this, you may be wondering: What are his qualifications? Is this guy authentic?
Where you come from, of course, can automatically grant you authenticity. Perhaps the best current example of this is Detroit; if The White Stripes and Eminem grew up in the most miserable city in the States, they must be for real! Beam, however, hails from the Miami area, which is not exactly backwoods Mississippi. Moreover, he teaches cinematography at a local college (an academic!) and was recently signed to Sub Pop, of all labels.
Of course, issues of authenticity plagued Bob Dylan at first. Plus, isn't Neil Young a Canadian? In other words, if you exhibit enough talent, then the critics will look past whatever your background may be, and time-- the greatest critic of all-- will erase any petty misgivings. While Beam has a long way to go before joining these visionaries, The Creek Drank the Cradle is a good enough start to make you forget anything you ever knew about the man. The music speaks for itself, and for Beam's talent.
The gentle acoustic plucking that ushers in the opener, "Lion's Mane", may not grab your attention, but Beam's delicate, hushed vocals sure will. His lyrics, meanwhile, tread familiar territory without sounding too familiar. He even tackles love through metaphor without seeming like a high school poet: "Love is a tired symphony you hum when you're awake/ Love is a crying baby mama warned you not to shake."
As with the rest of the album, slide guitar and banjo appear throughout the first track. The folksy sound sometimes recalls Nick Drake-- that is, if the British troubadour were from the bayou instead. In the lolling "Bird Stealing Bread", Beam's voice then takes on a Drake-ian resemblance, as he sings, "Did his hand in your hair feel a lot like a thing you believed in?/ Or a bit like a bird stealing bread out from under your nose?"
By the time "Faded from the Winter" arrives, the album has its hooks in you. Beam's overdubbed harmonies, delivered in a repetitive cadence, are spooky without being forbidding, bringing Low's early work to mind, if only in pace and tone. On songs like this one, Beam feels like an artist working in different hues of the same color-- blue, perhaps, or brown.
But the changes keep coming, subtle though they are. "The Rooster Moans", with its layered banjos and talk of riding a rusty train to the Devil, could sit firmly in the middle of the O Brother, Where Art Thou? soundtrack and no one would blink an eye. The southern themes continue on "Upward Over the Mountain", in which the narrator kills a snake in a creekbed, but Beam's vocal harmonies are nearer to Simon and Garfunkel than Ralph Stanley. "Southern Anthem", meanwhile, brings to mind Crosby, Stills and Nash.
But any potential writhing or wincing is soon dissolved by "Weary Memory", the album's simplest and perhaps strongest track. Here, Beam's voice is all his, as he stretches out his vocal cords and displays a greater range than he had led the listener to believe he possessed. As the song peaks, all guitars but one drop out for a brief respite. "Found a photo of when we were married," Beam sings, breaking the last word into two. "Leaning back on a broken willow tree/ That's one memory I choose to carry/ Weary memory I can always see," and he takes that "see" soaring skyward.
The Creek Drank the Cradle is made of small epiphanies such as this. There are few guitar solos, if they can even be called that. Beam rarely gets adventurous with his voice, and the songs, for the most part, are of the same pace, tone, lyrical content. Written and performed to tape by Beam alone, the album could easily be lumped in with other home-recording talents such as John Darnielle of the Mountain Goats. But the music here has such deeps roots in a vast swath of Americana that the bedroom image just wouldn't suit Beam.
And please don't be fooled by the label. Sub Pop may not be the foremost purveyors of roots music, but they've proven before-- in the case of former Screaming Trees frontman Mark Lanegan-- that they at least know good old-time country and blues music when they hear it. If indeed The Creek Drank the Cradle is only half of the material Beam submitted to the label, then hopefully there's some more Iron & Wine on the way. It sure beats more mud and honey.
