March 18 2003

By Lynn Rapoport

IN THE PRETTIEST song on the prettiest new album I listened to in 2002 (all told, a fairly ugly, unfortunate year), a young man sings his mother a litany of reassurances, apologies, and remembrances, spooky in lyrical tone and far from the comforts of home. A disapproved-of girlfriend crops up, and a prison floor, and the risks of the natural world that lie in wait where he lives, over the mountain, out of reach.

When I first heard "Upward over the Mountain" and the rest of the soft-spoken, utterly gorgeous songs on Iron and Wine's debut album, The Creek Drank the Cradle (Sub Pop), it was hard to find a recognizable context, the place where Sam Beam, the man behind Iron and Wine, was living, over the mountain, out of reach. There are snakes in the creek bed and roosters moaning; broken rosaries, chapel doors, and an angel "born in a bramble ditch when the doors of heaven closed." The songs come out of a haunted, mournful territory – sometimes echoed, sometimes belied by the lovely, gentle vocals – that's often so unfamiliar it sounds like Southern folktales and the long-dead past your grandparents might have spoken of if they'd lived in some desolate place and never left.

It feels silly to get caught up in the plot after reading an interview in the zine Sound Collector where Beam, who in reality lives in Miami, confesses to being a "well-trained slave to melody" and says the music most often comes first for him, that the lyrics are made sense of later, if ever. I'm sure it's true if he says so, but it's hard for me to hear on the album, given the stories and images that surface. Wherever the anxieties of mothers for their sons come from, wherever the worries of sons go to, tempered by guilt and love and the impulse to leave, they're hardly an afterthought. Elsewhere, a marriage is remembered through "weary memories" like the rosary, a photograph of someone "leaning back on a broken willow tree." Abandoned children play house, and their parent turns up mourning in a graveyard with an angel overhead. Someone who once strayed after "sidewalk girls," after the "freedom to fuck the whole world" – sung frailly, delicately, in bitterness – now sees true love in the empty side of a bed, sees it "tracked on the floor where you walked outside," the cliché of cherishing the ground she walks on turned into a minor tragedy. Could "the dictates of melody" really be the answer to the question of where in Miami you find such stories?

I often get stuck on these questions of terrain, having a compulsive tendency to imagine that my music idols live inside whatever album they've just recorded. I should be happy to hear they've evolved, but I get a little flipped out when I learn about '70s cock rockers embracing sobriety, macrobiotics, and early-morning power yoga to the tune of New Age greatest hits. When I hear Beam's songs, I don't even see much of the last century, let alone the four-track he recorded them on, or the sweaty, crowded, high-decibel rock clubs where he's performing them on tour. So it's probably not fair to blame Miami for not belonging in the picture, either. The city probably has a lot more going for it than The Real World, the ascent of Don Johnson, and loads of virulent anti-Castro sentiment. It's just that if I'm forced to imagine the creator of the songs on The Creek Drank the Cradle in the same geographic or psychological context as those spring break videos where the drunk college girls take their shirts off, my brain will melt.

Wherever the stories come from, whatever my problem is, the album has moments – "Upward over the Mountain," "Muddy Hymnal," and "Promising Light," in particular – so good they make me think of bones turning to water. If that sounds like sexual attraction or fear or maybe extreme grief, these are things that surface more than once over the course of the album. "Lion's Mane," an early moment of relative positivity on an album freighted with quiet melancholy and outright suffering on the part of the characters who inhabit it, is one of those love songs you can feel in your stomach – more fluttery than grinding; physically romantic like the warm water that runs in the song, the scented oil dripped into the bath. "The Rooster Moans" ends in a scavenger bird calling and a boy riding on "the devil's rusty train." And then the vocals are just so gorgeous and somehow hushed, almost whispered at times, you can hear the textures of the harmonies, and it's just better not to move. Watery bones make it easier to sit still and listen.

You can't sit down on the floor of Bottom of the Hill, where Iron and Wine play next Monday night, on a lineup with Carissa's Wierd and the Prom. It's against the rules of engagement, unless you're simulating sex with your bandmates. And The Creek Drank the Cradle makes it hard to imagine what Beam does when company is around – the band he's touring with, the crowd calling out requests. He should probably sing in church. Or on someone's back porch. Or in the pristine restricted areas of a national park. So it's even harder to imagine him performing in a place where Pink once molested Brown and a girl in front of me paid tribute to rock 'n' roll by placing her hand on Mike Maker's fly. Those stories are different from the ones Beam has told so far. But if his don't come from any landscape we can recognize easily from here, maybe he can sing them anywhere, and they'll sound just as true.