Late Night Music with Frank- Iron and Wine

Iron and Wine (Samuel Beam) released one of the best album's in 2007, entitled "The Shepherd's Dog." The groove in this particular track is infectious and the music video does quite well in translating how it can be interpreted. Beam's song craft hit new heights on this release and it remains in heavy rotation on my Itunes.

One listen and you swear you are literally planted into parts of Beam's life, whether it be his roots in South Carolina to his time in Richmond followed by Florida and finally settling in Austin. The album is an honest look at one artist's various interpretations of life and its meaning. He is a rare bird and I personally believe we need more like him.

From his website:

In conversations with Sam while mixing The Shepherd's Dog, he confessed to finding spiritual inspiration in Tom Waits' pièce de résistance, Swordfishtrombones, an album where said artist upended his previous strategies and forged a new musical language for himself.

While sounding nothing like Waits’ 1983 release, The Shepherd's Dog succeeds in accomplishing a similar cathartic recasting of the artist's intentions. The arrangements are kaleidoscopic and rich. "White Tooth Man" rocks with a desperate, menacing intensity while "Boy with a Coin,” the album's first single, is darkly playful with a handclap hook tumbling under its cascading melody.

The whole album breathes. Its seductive rhythms percolate and undulate, from the Psych-Bhangra-redux of "Pagan Angel and a Borrowed Car" to the album's last dance—a waltz—"Flightless Bird, American Mouth.” And there's nary a trapkit on the whole album!

"Resurrection Fern,” a staple of Iron and Wine's live performances, is given a somber, elegant treatment here while my two personal favorites, "Wolves (Song of the Shepherd's Dog)" and "Carousel,” summon, in their respective ways, a vivid otherworldliness. Taken as a whole, The Shepherd's Dog is informed by a sensuality that brings a dreamscape to life.



Chow!