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When the pandemic began, and the world shut down, so did the process of creating for Iron & Wine’s Sam Beam. In its place was a domesticity that the singer hadn’t felt in a long time, and although it was filled with many rewards, making music was not one of them. Reflecting on that time, Beam notes:
“I feel blessed and grateful that I and most of my friends and family made it through the pandemic relatively unscathed compared to so many others, but it completely paralyzed the songwriter in me. While so many artists, fortunately, found inspiration in the chaos, I was the opposite and withered with the constant background noise of uncertainty and fear. The last thing I wanted to write about was COVID, and yet every moment I sat with my pen, it lingered around the edges and wouldn’t leave. I struggled to focus until I gave up, and this lasted for over two years.”
The journey back began with a recording session in Memphis to record a handful of Lori McKenna tracks for the EP Lori with friend and producer Matt Ross-Spang.
“Recording has always been my favorite, and that session was an attempt to reconnect with what I love most about making music. I could finally feel the blood coming back into the body and the creative muscles beginning to relax and move again.”
Soon a series of short tours were booked entitled “Back to Basics,” which, out of necessity, were solo acoustic shows in smaller venues. They had an unspoken weight to them for Beam and the audiences alike, and also an incredible sense of relief for finally sharing art together and being back to work! A larger tour with Andrew Bird followed in the summer of ’22, and Beam was inspired even more by the excitement of collaborating with Andrew and his band and the warmth of musical friends.
“By the time I got home, the paralysis had officially passed, and I was finishing lyrics and booking studio time for what would become Light Verse!”
As Beam began to assemble the musicians he wanted for his record, one common thread arose- they all lived in Los Angeles! Outside of his own pedigree, the decision to work with engineer and mixer Dave Way at his studio Waystation high up in Laurel Canyon was a logical step based on recommendations from two of the joining players on the record. An additional session would also take place at Silent Zoo Studio, where a 24-piece orchestra would lay claim to a handful of songs, helping prepare them for lift-off.
“I’ve met and played with so many talented musicians from Los Angeles over the years but never recorded there, and this felt like the perfect time to try. Tyler Chester plays all the keyboards, Sebastian Steinberg plays the bass, David Garza guitar and slide and stuff, Griffin Goldsmith, Beth Goodfellow, and Kyle Crane all play drums here and there, and Paul Cartwright plays many various sizes of violin and mandolin and wrote some wonderful string arrangements for the orchestra! Even Fiona Apple was kind and generous enough to lend us her voice (that miracle that sounds like both a sacrifice and a weapon at the same time) to a duet called “All In Good Time.”
Beam lyrically once again takes focus on a series of both fictional and personal insights, filled with desperate characters and wide-eyed optimists, offering promise and a dose of heartache, tears and laughter, life and love. Taking stock in the album’s title, he jokes, “Light verse is a form of poetry about playful themes that often uses nonsense and wordplay, and it’s my first official Iron & Wine comedy album!…. Just kidding….”
While true this may be Iron & Wine’s most playful record, Beam says the title mostly reflects the way the songs were born with joy after the heaviness and anxiety of the pandemic. Where recent records like Beast Epic or Weed Garden gave air to the disquiet of middle-aged frailty and brokenness, these songs trade that for the focus acceptance can bring. Moment by moment, they delight in being pointed or silly (or both) and attempt beauty over prettiness.
Light Verse arrives April 26th, and it’s Iron & Wine’s seventh full-length overall and fifth for Sub Pop Records. Fashioned as an album that should be taken as a whole, it sounds lovingly handmade and self-assured as a secret handshake. Track by track, its equal parts elegy, kaleidoscope, truth, and dare.
With the 2014 formation of I’m With Her, singer/songwriters Sarah Jarosz, Aoife O’Donovan, and Sara Watkins introduced an essential new force into the world of folk music: a close-knit alliance of highly esteemed musicians, each graced with a deep understanding of folk tradition and unbridled passion for expanding its possibilities. Since delivering their critically lauded debut See You Around and standalone singles like “Call My Name” (winner of the 2020 Grammy for Best American Roots Song), the trio have routinely taken time out from their individual careers to dream up songs together—eventually arriving at a new album exploring themes of ancestry, lineage, and the collective human experience. On their long-awaited sophomore LP Wild and Clear and Blue, I’m With Her now bring their luminous harmonies to a soul-searching body of work about reaching into the past, navigating a chaotic present, and bravely moving forward into the unknown.
In a departure from the stripped-back intimacy of See You Around—a 2018 release that turned up on best-of-the-year lists from the likes of the New York Times—Wild and Clear and Blue centers on a far more elaborate sound informed by the band’s extensive touring and acclaimed performances at festivals around the globe. “Because we’ve played together so much at this point, we have a much stronger sense of what we’re capable of creating together,” says Jarosz. “We wanted to be open to anything on this record, and give ourselves more space for the solo sections to really breathe.”
Produced by Josh Kaufman—a member of Bonny Light Horseman and multi-instrumentalist/songwriter/arranger/producer who’s worked with Bob Weir and The National the album finds each member handling a variety of instruments (mandolin, octave mandolin, guitar, and banjo for Jarosz; guitar and piano for O’Donovan; fiddle, cello, and organ for Watkins), instilling a potent vitality into every track. “Sometimes in the studio songs end up losing a bit of their sparkle, but with this record everything kept tumbling forward in a very natural, positive way,” says Watkins. Also featuring drummer JT Bates (Andrew Bird, Taylor Swift) as well as Kaufman’s contributions on everything from lap steel to Wurlitzer, Wild and Clear and Blue ultimately adds a bold new urgency to I’m With Her’s delicate entangling of lived-in narrative and fable-like storytelling.
Recorded at two separate New York studios (The Outlier Inn in the Catskills and The Clubhouse in Rhinebeck), Wild and Clear and Blue takes its title from a song written after the passing of two of their most beloved musical forebears, Nanci Griffith and John Prine. “When I was nine my mom took me to see Nanci Griffith and I sent a note backstage requesting ‘Ford Econoline,’ and she played it at the show,” says O’Donovan. “We wrote ‘Wild and Clear and Blue’ thinking about growing up so in love with music and then actually making music ourselves—it’s very specific to our own lives, but I think there’s something universal about having those childhood memories tied up in the music your parents played for you.” The first song written for Wild and Clear and Blue, the exquisitely wistful track soon catalyzed I’m With Her’s album-wide reflection on generational bonds and self-realization. “So much of this record is about connecting with your past and figuring out what you want for your future, finding yourself and finding the people you love,” says Watkins. “It’s a journey that everybody takes, and this is our way of singing through it.”
In an auspicious start to that journey, Wild and Clear and Blue opens on “Ancient Light”: a tender meditation on ancestral ties and cycles of life, adorned with a lavish instrumental section featuring Watkins’ artful layering of fiddle and cello. With Jarosz on lead vocals, “Ancient Light” embodies a spirit of subtle resolve as she calmly narrates the havoc around her (“While everything’s unraveling/I’m building a fire/Sparks and smoke rings/Fill up the night/When it catches/I’ll be swimming in the ancient light”). “I love that song being the first track and setting a tone of joyful melancholy,” says Jarosz. “There are definitely some darker, more somber moments throughout the record, but to me there’s something beautiful about addressing these heavier themes in a way that’s more of a celebration of life rather than a grieving of what’s been lost.”
A prime example of Wild and Clear and Blue’s more heavy-hearted offerings, “Standing on the Fault Line” unfolds in spectral guitar tones and a gloriously raw vocal performance from Watkins. “‘Fault Line’ came from thinking about Los Angeles as a very transient place where many people feel a tension between whether to stick it out and stay or pack up and move on,” says Watkins, co-founder of Grammy-winning bluegrass powerhouse Nickel Creek. “Even if you’ve never been to L.A., I think a lot of people have had the experience of giving up on a dream and needing to pivot to something else.” Born from a melody brought in by O’Donovan, “Standing on the Fault Line” later evolved into a slow-building epic that reaches a thrilling intensity at the bridge, when I’m With Her’s harmonies achieve a spellbinding grandeur. “Initially we considered having me sing alone on the bridge, but it made the song feel so much smaller,” says Watkins. “Once Aoife and Jarosz took that section, it created this feeling of being supported by friends or ancestors or internal voices of encouragement—it’s like we subconsciously arranged the song in a way that aligns with all the lyrical themes of the album.”
Elsewhere on Wild and Clear and Blue, I’m With Her inhabit an unshakable determination—an element in full effect on songs like “Find My Way to You.” A bluegrass-leaning number propelled by their exuberant vocal work, the breakneck-paced track was partly inspired by a rendition of Bruce Springsteen’s “Open All Night” performed by O’Donovan and Jarosz at Newport Folk Festival in 2023. “After we covered the Springsteen song, Watkins said how she wished I’m With Her had a moment like that—that same kind of forceful duet singing,” O’Donovan recalls. “Over time the chorus to ‘Find My Way to You’ became exactly that, which is a good example of how the three of us send these little psychic messages to each other and it somehow turns into a song.”
All multi-Grammy-winners with deep roots in the folk scene, Watkins, Jarosz, and O’Donovan first discovered their near-telepathic chemistry during an impromptu performance at the 2014 Telluride Bluegrass Festival and quickly co-founded I’m With Her. Over the years, their profound sense of kinship has only intensified, often allowing for a certain charmed fluidity in the creative process. “There were so many wonderful moments in the studio where we noticed commonalities between the songs that we sometimes hadn’t intended, either melodically or harmonically or even lyrically, with a line in one song almost responding to another song,” says Watkins. “It all feels very cyclical in a way that adds another dimension to the meaning of the songs, and shows the sincerity of feeling we all brought to the album.” In a particularly brilliant moment on Wild and Clear and Blue, the bridge to “Ancient Light” includes a reference to “Mother Eagle (Sing Me Alive)”—a sublimely moving track that opens the LP’s second side and ends with a lovely intertwining of the trio’s singular voices. “To me those last 30 seconds of ‘Mother Eagle’ are like a thesis statement for what this band is about,” says Jarosz. “Our voices weaving around each other and making the song feel so full without a lot of different sounds going on—that feels so quintessentially us.”
With Jarosz, O’Donovan, and Watkins sharing writing credits on all 11 songs, Wild and Clear and Blue owes much of its beauty and power to the generosity of spirit embraced by each member. “When we write together it’s almost like we’re a three-headed creature—there’s never any need to take ownership of ideas, and always an ease of letting go when something isn’t working,” says O’Donovan. And for I’m With Her, that sense of musical communion has proven endlessly rewarding on multiple levels. “One of my favorite things about being in this band is actually listening to my bandmates,” says Watkins. “I’m such a fan of these two people, and it’s a huge pleasure to listen back to this album and remember how amazing it is that I got to make it with them.”
