Our Endless Numbered Days

I was sitting alone at the beach immersed in the gentle waves rushing back and forth when the sounds of this album first filled my ears. The music of Samuel Beam, otherwise known as Iron & Wine, could not have resonated more harmoniously with the drifting motion of the water as they did for me that afternoon.

This sensitively produced album, 'Our Endless Numbered Days' is a forty-minute deep reflection of life and living, love and faith; it's so deep you perhaps only really start liking it, even loving it, after having listened to it two or three times. It's a bit of folk music, acoustic ballads, and blues, highlighted with the softest vocals which Sam sings to you in that gentle, patient voice that only someone who cares for you can have.

Sam is a singer-songwriter and family man from the South who produces music in his own home in Florida where he lives with his wife and three daughters. This album, which is his first LP, is both lo-fi and hi-fi, as it's partially recorded in a studio in Chicago with his friends and his sister. Whilst I've always admired more the integrity of the musician who works on his or her passion in their own everyday informal environments, there's also something very honest and real about a person who can keep true to his personal style, even as part of a well-known label and in a more formal studio environment.

And what is this personal style? Well, it's both strong and light, it's heavy with metaphors, buried with layers of soft instrumentations, and rich with lyrical imagery which displaces you to random moments of your life, be it in childhood or adulthood (or in adult childhood).

With track titles such as 'Cinder and Smoke', 'Sunset Soon Forgotten', 'Each Coming Night' and 'Passing Afternoon', the subjects evoke the setting of an ordinary earthly existence which quietly continues over time, yet is undermined by the desire for an everlasting love, a yearning for a true escape, a longing for a greater bliss that can endure.

'Naked As We Came' is the first real beauty of a song on the LP. How he alternates those chords, and those beautiful words - there's vulnerability yet also strength, irrationality yet also a practicality. I always like to think that each of us is born in love; we enter the world with nothing but love and leave the world "naked as we came" with only that love that was first given to us and that we subsequently gave to others.

       "She says 'wake up, it's no use pretending'
           I'll keep stealing, breathing her
           Birds are leaving over autumn's ending
           One of us will die inside these arms…"

The next track, 'Sunset Soon Forgotten' has more of a folk feel to it. It's short and simple, simply wonderful, like a fading memory similar to the recurring sunsets which we don't always pay attention to day after day, but it's still present somewhere in the layers of our consciousness. "Be this sunset soon forgotten, your brothers left here shaved and crazy, we've learned to hide our bottles in the well, and what's worth keeping, sun still sinking down and down, once again, down and down, gone again."

'Radio War' is another song modest in many ways as it's simply Sam's solo voice over the strumming of one chord at a time, and yet it's also the restrictiveness and repetition of the music which gives the song its bold feel. Listen to how he expresses the story of a woman on the edge after hearing news in the winter of her loved one dying, presumably in the war (a.k.a. "the beast"): "All the while that she wept she'd a gun by her bed and a letter he wrote from a dry, foundered boat…And a beast never seen, licks its red talon clean, Sara curses the cold, 'no more snow, no more snow.'"

The following track 'Each Coming Night' is very similar to 'Naked As We Came' in sound, yet it has the addition of the sanguine banjo. It's an expression of the trembling survival of a love between two people where sometimes things are just what they are on the surface. "Will you say to me when I'm gone, 'your face has faded but lingers on because light strikes a deal with each coming night'?"

Sam's a poet. Love is obviously very sacred to him.

Now the next track is my personal favorite (yes, it is insightfully about love). 'Fever Dream' does have this dreamy quality about it; its an uplifting and expressive arrangement of music which serves to articulate the thoughts that flow through your head when you stare at someone you love, because sometimes you just can't say it in words.

"Sometimes I'll hear when she's sleeping her fever dream, a language on her face, 'I want your flowers like babies want God's love or maybe as sure as tomorrow will come.'"

The twelve-track album ends wholesomely with "Passing Afternoon," a perfect song with slow, silent moments of just Sam and his acoustic guitar, later accompanied with the most magical piano music right after the last verse, leaving you with so much honesty, the feeling of drifting away, of home.

"There are times that walk from you like some passing afternoon… there are things that drift away like our endless, numbered days…a baby sleeps in all our bones, so scared to be alone... "

The lyrics and sounds you hear in 'Our Endless Numbered Days' can soothe your spirit at the most perfect time; give it a chance to wash over you with kindness. Like the rhythmic waves on a beach when sounds and quietness are in perfect harmony, you'll feel this rare fusion of matter and spirit which Samuel Beam so gracefully creates. So go to the ocean friends, bring your headphones, and open yourself up to some harmony.

Nadia Janjua, 22 June 2005

Subpop's website, with FREE DOWNLOAD of 'naked as we came' and other tracks: http://www.subpop.com/scripts/main/multimedia.php?key=bandname&value=Iron+and+Wine

Official Iron & Wine website: http://www.ironandwine.com/