KEY POINTS:
Sam Beam is the sort of chap you could sit next to in a bar and he'd happily have a chat. The singer-songwriter, known as Iron and Wine, is laidback, quietly spoken and, once you get him going, a teller of great yarns.
Though if his new album The Shepherd's Dog is anything to go by the stories may not always be pretty.
In a style reminiscent of Nick Cave there are images of "milky-eyed mules", dogs barking up a fierce storm behind barbed wire fences, and a plainclothes cop ranting to everyone from the Holy Ghost to a beauty queen.
There's also a bullets-and-bodies mood to The Shepherd's Dog, and while Beam admits it is a political album, with songs like Peace Beneath the City and Pagan Angel and a Borrowed Car, he says his songs don't make statements.
"Because I rarely have a point to make," he sniggers down the phone from his home in Austin, Texas. Instead he describes and presents beautiful, sometimes sinister, images - on Wolves (Song of the Shepherd's Dog) he sneers: "She'll wring out her coloured hair, like a butterfly beaten in a summer rainfall, and then roll on the kitchen floor of some f***** with a pocketful of foreign change" - and people can make of them what they want.
"You know, some of my favourite songs are propaganda songs but I never felt I was very successful at writing them. I find more interest as a writer in describing than explaining. Or suggesting more than arguing a point.
"I like that quality in other people's work because it has a kind of rejuvenative entertainment quality where you can read something and then look at it later and get something else from it."
Before Iron and Wine, Beam earned a crust as a lecturer in cinematography at Florida State University. He went to art school because he wanted to be a painter and ended up getting into photography and film.
He only ever "dabbled" in music but had recorded many of his songs on tape.
Not being the pushy sort, it's no surprise Beam has his friends to thank for finally getting his lo-fi music out to the world in the early 2000s. These friends started handing out his homemade recordings and Sub Pop records boss Jonathan Poneman got his hands on them.
"So eventually, when I got a call from the label [Sub Pop] I thought, 'Okay, I don't have a whole lot to lose so let's put it out'. Eventually it just took over."
That first Sub Pop release was 2002's The Creek Drank the Cradle, a collection of Beam's early minimalist tunes. In 2004 came the more professional-sounding yet no less lo-fi Our Endless Numbered Days.
He's also released a number of EPs and a mini-album, In the Reins, with Arizona alt-country rockers Calexico.
The Shepherd's Dog is his most ornate and complex album. The African-influenced Wolves is the poppiest and funkiest song Beam has written and is in stark contrast to his sparse early music.
"Now it's more about discovery, chance, happy accidents and reacting off of that. And I don't want to put out the same record ever, that wouldn't be fun for anybody, so that's the easiest way to put it.
"But I react intuitively to the songs, as to what I think is right for the songs, and this one's the same thing. I thought the songs were a bit more complex, they had a bit more underlined tension to them and so I tried to reflect it with the instrumentation and arrangements."
Which means he is backed by a full band on the album, some of whom, like his singer sister Sarah and Calexico's Paul Niehaus, are coming to New Zealand with him.
"I'm really blessed with this band. I just met 'em along the way and some of them are friends of friends and it just kind of worked out," he says.
"It's a lot of fun having that calibre of people in the sense that we can do anything on stage, because we have a habit of changing the songs around and we can do it at the drop of a hat. I do have a tendency to give too much direction sometimes but we just go back to whatever they were doing," he laughs.
LOWDOWN
Who: Iron and Wine (real name Sam Beam)
What: Texas-based folk rocker
Where & when: Kings Arms, March 14
Latest album: The Shepherd's Dog, out now
Past albums: The Creek Drank the Cradle (2002); Our Endless Numbered Days (2004)
