Samuel Ervin Beam, better known by his stage name Iron & Wine, is an American singer-songwriter. He has released eight studio albums, several EPs and singles, as well as a few download-only releases, which include a live album.
He occasionally tours with a full band.
real name: Samuel Ervin Beam
members: Ej Holowicki, Patrick McKinney
labels: Sub Pop, 4AD
genres: folk music, country music
plays: guitar, voice
Facts from Wikidata and Discogs, free to use.
Beam was raised in Chapin, South Carolina, where his father worked in land management and his mother was a schoolteacher. When he was a child, his family took regular trips to the country, where his grandfather ran a farm. He attended Seven Oaks Elementary School and Chapin High School. While home from college, he was a waiter at California Dreaming restaurant in Columbia. Beam earned a bachelor's degree in art from Virginia Commonwealth University in Richmond, Virginia. He specialized in painting before graduating from the Florida State University Film School with an MFA degree. Before the release of the first Iron & Wine album, Beam's main source of income was as a professor of film and cinematography at the University of Miami and Miami...
Beam released his first Iron & Wine album, The Creek Drank the Cradle, on the Sub Pop label in 2002. Beam wrote, performed, recorded and produced the album in his home studio. Featuring acoustic guitars, banjo, and slide guitar, the album's music has been compared to that of Nick Drake, Simon and Garfunkel, Elliott Smith, Neil Young and John Fahey.
Underlined songs have their story further down.
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"Flightless Bird, American Mouth" is a song recorded by the American singer-songwriter Iron & Wine. The song was released on December 11, 2008 through Sub Pop as the third single from the project's third studio album The Shepherd's Dog.
By 2007, Sam Beam had been recording music as Iron & Wine for upwards of a decade. He had married and started a growing family, and saw it time for him to leave Florida, where he had lived since college, to move to Texas. There, he built a custom home studio, for him to record when he pleased; he would treat his compositions like paintings, to return to them when he felt ready, rather than having to book studio time or feel forced to create. At that same time, Beam likened himself to coming to terms with his own life and history, the "difference[s] between myth and reality," and how profound the 9/11 attacks were to him.
The orchestral "Wedding Version" of the song received a music video treatment, mainly black-and-white clips of Beam in the studio.
Joe Tangari at Pitchfork praised the album's sequencing, calling "Flightless Bird" as its closing track "stunning and starkly emotional."
The song became the soundtrack to a key moment during a prom scene in the original Twilight film. An acoustic version of the song, dubbed the "Wedding Version", was also used in The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn – Part 1 (2011). Beam, a former film student, was happy to license the song; he was asked by Uncut how the song came to be associated with the series: