Iron & Wine

Fans of the dark and brooding song-poem hailed Iron & Wine's The Creek Drank the Cradleas one of the finest recordings of last year. And for once, the shoegazer crowd got it right. Sam Beam, the six-string slinger and haunted vocalist who gigs under the odd moniker, produced a riveting tapestry of love, loss, and redemption that was tied to the altar of Nick Drake, tragic saint of the latter-day singer/songwriter.

Details

With the Shins' James Mercer and Rosie Thomas

Saturday, Feb. 8, at 10 p.m.

Tickets are $10

621-4455

www.bottomofthehill.com

Bottom of the Hill, 1233 17th St. (at Missouri), S.F.

Related Content

• Light from the Pink Moon: S.F. Artists to Reinterpret Nick Drake's Classic Onstage
  January 18, 2012
• How Wallpaper. Got a Record Deal, Local Artists Tackle Nick Drake's Pink Moon, and More
  January 18, 2012
• Do You Love Nick Drake? Then Thank His Parents
  June 21, 2011
• In Which We Judge 5 Upcoming Albums Solely On Their Covers
  November 19, 2010
• Christopher O'Riley and Matt Haimovitz: Show Preview
  January 4, 2012

More About

• Sam Beam
• Iron & Wine
• Nick Drake

Like this Story?

Sign up for the Music Newsletter: Keep your thumb on the local music scene with music features, additional online music listings and show picks. We'll also send special ticket offers and music promotions available only to our Music Newsletter subscribers.

Privacy Policy Cancel Continue

Using a method common to most basement troubadours, Beam constructs his compositions using overdubbed vocal melodies and acoustic guitar parts -- often finger-picked or strummed, sometimes augmented with a woeful slide or backwoods banjo riff. But there's something special in his production that sets his sound apart. With whispered tunefulness and languid tempos, he manages to evoke both an intimacy with and a distance from the listener, as if wooing loved ones from beyond the grave.

Beam's lyrics flesh out his persona as the high-lonesome living dead. On "Promising Light," he implores, "Now I see love/ There on your side of my empty bed." On "Faded From the Winter," he solemnly invokes the father figure -- "Daddy's ghost behind you/ Sleeping dog beside you/ You're a poem of mystery/ You're the prayer inside me" -- while on "Upward Over the Mountain," he reaches out to mom: "Mother I made it up from the bruise of a floor of this prison/ Mother I lost it, all of the fear of the Lord I was given." And while a fair bit of Christ imagery graces Beam's tales, he seems to believe -- like many poets before him -- that ultimately you're on your own.