Iron and Wine, Sholi at Bimbo’s (10/06/08)

At its best, the music of Iron and Wine has an spare, intimate feeling, and it’s a peculiar irony that due to hs popularity it’s difficult to catch songwriter Sam Beam at a small venue any longer. The last time I saw him was at his show at the Paramount Theater in Oakland, which is a beautiful old building with comfortable seats, but is still a large theater (seating 3,476, according to Wikipedia), and it was difficult to feel a connection to the band there. Earlier on Sunday he’d played a set at Hardly Strictly Bluegrass, which I didn’t check out but which was reportedly incredibly crowded. So when I saw that Beam was playing an acoustic solo show at Bimbo’s 365 Club, I jumped at the chance to see him in a small room, and this show did not disappoint.

Opening band Sholi was pretty good; they didn’t quite knock my socks off, but they had pleasant dual vocals and some interesting twists in their song structures. The highlight was an Iranian song, about which the lead singer told us some of the history of but I didn’t quite catch it; the song was by an Iranian singer who had been exiled following the revolution there. It was an interesting mix between musical elements that sounded somewhat traditional and other elements that sounded more rock/poppy, and I wondered how much of that distinction was there in the original song versus Sholi’s interpretation of it.

After their set Sam Beam come out to a very warm reception from the audience. He was extremely affable and seemed to be in a good mood despite having had very little sleep; he spent a lot of time joking around with the audience and making various wry asides. At one point he talked about the show at the Paramount last year, and an audience member yelled out “you’re better alone!” Beam responded with “wow, that’s a very dark statement, man…” and talked about how his band was going to beat the shit out of the dude after the show (all in jest, of course). All in all he came across as a very down-to-earth, friendly dude, and I could almost imagine him as a talented friend who was showing me some songs he’d written. (Partly this was due to managing to stand way up front by the stage; Beam could easily have spit on me from where he was standing, not that he seems like an especially spitty kind of guy.)

He proceeded to play a laid-back, informal set. He got off to a bit of a rough start, and messed up in his guitar playing several times throughout the evening. For the very first song he had his capo on the wrong fret and it took him a few measures to realize what was wrong. For the most part he was able to shrug and laugh it off when he made a mistake, and the audience was so enraptured by his playing that nobody seemed to be put out, and as the set progressed he became more sure of himself.

I didn’t keep a set list per se, but the songs he played ranged widely from among LP’s, EP’s, and a few unreleased songs, and included some of my favorites. I’m not a huge fan of The Shepherd’s Dog, which replaces the spare, minimal sounds of the earlier records with overly baroque and complex instrumentation, and I actually found I liked the songs from it a lot better with only Beam’s voice and an acoustic guitar. The songs I recognized from this album included “Carousel” and “Resurrection Fern;” he also played “Woman King,” “She Lays in the Reins,” and “Sodom, South Georgia.”

Probably he highlight of the entire set was when he got the audience to sing along for “Naked As We Came.” I often feel ambivalent towards audience sing-alongs, especially when they drown out the actual band, but in this case everybody was singing incredibly softly, and Beam let them take over for a few choruses, and seemed to be somewhat moved himself by the performance. It sounded quite lovely and reminded me a bit of the chorus of voices from the Langley Schools Music Project.

He ended the set with “The Trapeze Swinger,” a long and melancholy song which has not been released on an album to my knowledge, but which is available online in the usual gray areas. (Incidentally, Beam said that the next album Iron and Wine puts out is likely to be a collection of B-Sides and so on in order to buy himself time to make a new album. He certainly has enough material in the various leaked songs that are findable online that he could put out another really solid album in the vein of the first two LP’s today, simply by collecting it in one place.)

Overall I felt like this was one of the best shows I’ve seen all year, just because of that real sense of a connection between the singer and the crowd. I really hope he continues to play small venues in the future, they work incredibly well for his musical style.