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Iron & Wine
The Shepherd's Dog
(Sub Pop)
Douglas Heselgrave's #2 album for 2007
John Metzger's #4 album for 2007
First Appeared in The Music Box, October 2007, Volume 14, #10
Written by Douglas Heselgrave
"No one is the savior they would like to be" – Sam Beam
Sam Beam, the creative force behind Iron & Wine, has a musical philosophy
that he is trying to define. His is an insistent and troubling one with which he
must have wrestled as he struggled to bring his newest collection of songs into
the light. Arriving almost three years after the immensely popular and
critically acclaimed Our Endless Numbered Days, Iron & Wine’s follow-up
outing The Shepherd’s Dog does not follow an easy or predictable path.
Alternately frustrating and rewarding, the album is, in many ways, a logical
extension of the lyrical and melodic ideas that reached fruition and achieved
perfect expression on his previous endeavor.
Iron & Wine first emerged in 2002 with The Creek Drank the Cradle, a
very stripped-down affair that was characterized by its hushed, almost whispered
vocals and its minimalist guitar playing. Though its rudimentary instrumentation
made the album sound, at times, like the work of a talented beginner, there were
certain flourishes as well as a hint of sophistication beneath the surface of
each composition that made it clear that the simplicity was a choice rather than
a limitation imposed by a lack of skill. Beam, with his "Unibomber" beard and
log-cabin fashion-sense, may have looked like a homesteader, but his background
as an academic and visual artist contributed a certain irony and postmodern wit
to the lyrics and delivery of this deceptively obvious collection of songs.
When Our Endless Numbered Days, Iron & Wine’s second, full-length
album, was released in 2004, it represented a huge artistic leap forward for
Beam. With its swirling, Technicolor, three-dimensional arrangements and
beautiful acoustic playing, the set explored many of the themes developed on The Creek Drank the Cradle. Its gorgeous, lush instrumentation and angelic
singing perfectly supported Beam’s excellent songs, and as a result, Our
Endless Numbered Days remains one of the best acoustic albums of the new
millennium. Surely Beam realized that this would be a hard act to follow.
As an interim move, Beam released an EP entitled Woman King in 2005.
In retrospect, it — along with his subsequent mini-album In the Reins,
which was recorded with Calexico in 2006 — hinted at the direction in which he
would head on The Shepherd’s Dog. From the beginning, Beam’s singing has
never been very assertive. He treats each line of his lyrics equally and without
emphasis, delivering each in a kind of singsong deadpan that sounds as much like
Sufi or Indian Karnactic vocalizations as it does like anything from Western
tradition. Although he chose to deliver his material like Allen Ginsberg
chanting the Kaddish, both EPs worked because of the way they were mixed. The
vocals, while lacking in emphasis, were clearly discernable because they were
separated and supported as they rode on a bed of differentiated sound.
On The Shepherd’s Dog, Beam takes his approach to downplaying the
vocals even further. Perhaps, he is commenting on the way that the lyrics and
the singer are always the focus of a song. Perhaps, he consciously is trying to
make them an element of a piece of music that shares equal footing with
everything else. Indeed, all of the instruments seem to be miked and mixed
without separation, so that the vocals have no more emphasis than anything else
in the songs. While this is an interesting approach, it does not always serve
the music to its best advantage. The problem is that Beam’s lyrics are so
interesting that the listener is forced to spend an inordinate amount of
attention trying to hear and extract them from inside the mix. While
egalitarianism is a noble concept, all great art is the product of a certain
amount of decision making. Unfortunately, it initially sounds like no decisions
were made during the recording of The Shepherd’s Dog. This, of course, is
a choice in itself, and Beam effectively forces his listeners to confront it.
Often, The Shepherd’s Dog sounds like a rehearsal or a jam where no
exclusion or hierarchy of ideas is imposed. On many of its tracks, simple
percussive effects that normally would enhance the song’s rhythm are mixed on
equal ground with the vocals and guitar. The result of this approach is that
when the new songs initially are heard, they often come across like an
indistinguishable mess where the center of interest is impossible to identify.
After listening to The Shepherd’s Dog repeatedly, I came to realize
that Beam’s approach was forcing me to reconsider the role of different parts of
a song; he made me think about how conditioned my expectations were of what a
recording should sound like. While my intellect could appreciate this, the part
of me that simply wanted to be drawn into the sway of Beam’s lyrics and
beautiful playing was immensely frustrated. I wanted the lyrics and melody to
stand above the rhythm. I didn’t want the singing to be a texture that was on
par with the percussion or second guitar. After a while, Beam’s willful
egalitarianism and conscious technological naivete started to become grating.
I, then, found myself fantasizing about breaking into Beam’s house, stealing
the master tapes, and going into a studio to re-mix the album to how I wanted it
to sound. Perhaps, this is what Beam wanted his listeners to do. His choices
certainly have made me listen to The Shepherd’s Dog with an intensity
that I otherwise would not have. I kept playing the songs over and over again,
fighting with them, tumbling through the lyrics and arrangements, and cursing
the perverse percussions that attack and threaten to drown out his vocals. There
is a jewel in here, another masterpiece here, I kept telling myself. Why are you
making me work so hard to hear it?
With Our Endless Numbered Days, it was so easy. Every song delivered
an instantly satisfying hit of beautiful music. The Shepherd’s Dog is a
time-release capsule that is slow to dissolve and digest. Yet, I was determined
to stick with it, and its lyrics emerged out of the thick, primordial soup of
the faux-drunken, Appalachian noise. Beautiful lyrics. Wistful tales of lost
dogs. Innocent bones, and love songs of buzzards. They all danced and gulped for
air between the speedy, metallic, mandolin riffs. After many hours spent
listening to the music, a keyboard melody emerged that seemed to carry through
all of the songs in the middle section of the album. It was lovely and lyrical —
a dance of the spheres. Why didn’t I hear it before?
A week later, The Shepherd’s Dog’s code had been cracked. The
arrangements have ordered and aligned themselves, and Beam’s singing and lyrics
have finally shimmied through the sea of willful instrumentation to assert
themselves into my consciousness. The Shepherd’s Dog is not Our
Endless Numbered Days, and I’m starting to think that this is a good thing.
The former album was perfect. Beam had the sense to realize that it represented
the highpoint of lyrical and musical alchemy, and in making its follow-up, he
left its perfection alone and untroubled. The Shepherd’s Dog is not the
flawless, dinner-party soundtrack or the Sunday-morning-hangover music that Our Endless Numbered Days is. It is distressing, bold, and distinct, and
I’ll keep on listening to it well past the time that I would have put it aside
had it been simply a shadow or recreation of its more accessible predecessor.
In an industry that rewards those who play it safe above all else, Sam Beam
has proven himself to be an artist with integrity and vision. By breaking away
from a successful formula and following his intuition, Iron & Wine took a
huge gamble with The Shepherd’s Dog, and the result is another classic
album.  ½
The Shepherd's Dog is available from
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Ratings
1 Star: Pitiful
2 Stars: Listenable
3 Stars: Respectable
4 Stars: Excellent
5 Stars: Can't Live Without It!!
Copyright © 2007 The Music Box
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