A heavy hand and a light touch is a combination that’s always worked for Sam Beam’s Iron & Wine project, and on Light Verse the weight of this lightness is felt with an unprecedented fullness. Beam declares in the presser for his seventh studio album that, “it’s my first official Iron & Wine comedy album,”—a declaration he qualifies with a “Just kidding!”─but it really is the loosest, freest, most unclasped album he’s recorded. There’s perhaps always been an element of humour in the Iron & Wine canon: from the sly smile lurking in the way his lofty lyrics hover above even the gloomiest depths of his rainy voice, to the etymology of the “Iron & Wine” moniker—borrowed from the brand name of a tonic used to treat anaemia. That sly smirk has broadened into a wide grin on Light Verse, with songs that reach earnestly for the simple joy of making music with friends in a sunbathed city that only responds to a light touch (Los Angeles). 

For Beam, the seven-year-hiatus from Iron & Wine’s last studio album, Beast Epic, has been dotted by flurries of activity and spreads of inertia. Activity in the form of a collaborative album with Calexico (Years to Burn); live recordings and archival releases; and cinematic explorations through the documentary Who Can See Forever: A Portrait of Iron & Wine—for which there’s a companion soundtrack album by the same name. The inertia imposed by the collective calamity of pandemic-era cancellations and creative paralysis was finally broken with the 2022 release of a short EP featuring songs from singer-songwriter Lori McKenna’s discography (Lori). 

Whereas a “Back to Basics” tour in 2021 allowed Beam to shake off the layer of hoarfrost that had settled on his muscle memory as a performer, and the release of Lori defrosted yet another layer, it wasn’t until the songs on Light Verse began to percolate that he was able to stretch his creative limbs on the songwriting front. The confluence of this period of atrophy, the ignition provided by McKenna’s music, and Beam’s own exploration of a playful style of poetry loosely described as “light verse”, all came together to form the lyrics that trot with a clumsy joy across the landscapes of Light Verse. 

Despite the trotting, Light Verse is also a symphonic album that boasts a chorus of multi-instrumentalists, vocalists (including Fiona Apple), and a 24-piece orchestra lending string wings to four of the album’s ten songs. Lyrically, this album encroaches on new territory for the Beam songbook. In the same fashion as Phosphorescent’s Revelator ─ also released this month — Beam seemingly strives for the final frontier in songwriting: simplicity. After two decades of Bon-Iver-level indecipherable songwriting, Light Verse reaches for plain and simple English, and manages to stick the landing most of the time. In songs like “Cutting it Close” and “Bag of Cats”, the writing is downright conversational, straining for the comical but stopping short of slapstick. Even in places where dark clouds linger ─ “Taken by Surprise” and “Tears that Don’t Matter” — there’s a frictionless glide between words and music that reveals a newfound contentment with overcast days. As a whole, the album maintains a sort of contrapposto: where the subject matter bears weight, the music around it jumps around with colourful banter, and vice versa. All throughout, there is still the same warm drizzle in Beam’s voice that has characterised Iron & Wine since The Creek Drank the Cradle, but Light Verse makes space in this rain for the gaping sluices where a sunlit gospel shines through. 

Joining Cannopy from Durham, North Carolina — a subtly musical city boasting the likes of Jenn Wasner — Beam sifts through layers of recent memory, laughter, and yes music. 

Light Verse in 3 songs:

• “All in Good Time”

All in good time our plan went to shit

I told my future by reading your lips

You wore my ring until it didn’t fit

All in good time

All in good time we suffered enough

We met our muscle when push came to shove

Swept all that broken glass under the rug

There are songs that demand a sunroof, this is certainly one of them. Opening with slowly ramping phrases on a dusty piano that perhaps hadn’t been fingered in a while, Beam’s voice unfurls like long-drawn curtains letting in the first rays of spring. Arriving in this sunny spot, Apple’s voice goes in a different direction: sunlight on a broken column, cracks in a teacup. What follows is the sort of self-content sing-a-long that we’d cringe to see in an early 2000’s TV movie, replete with symphonic sweeps and a strongly cadential phrase repeated over and over. But it works. It works so well precisely because of an indelible mix of earnest sincerity and that searching quality that characterises good songwriting: not quite finding the words, but hey, that’s alright.

• “You Never Know”

You could make gray and call it gold

Let it fool your eyes

You could make rain and let it have your life

Being green grass, any little wind

Begs you for a dance

You could say love until it lasts

This is that old school Iron & Wine pseudo-falsetto joint, rolled tight and licked twice. It has the same summertime anthem feel as “Tree by the River” (Kiss Each other Clean), or something you could sing just above the crackling of an autumnal campfire. The only thing you’d need are the backup vocals from a deeply effusive orchestra racing to a crescendo right as repetition of the song’s title is reaches comedic heights. 

• “Taken by Surprise” 

I knew someone long ago

Whether I wanted to or not

We never said goodbye that I remember

She never knew how much she gave

How much she made and left behind

I never knew how much I had to surrender

In every album of this silly-sincere sort, there’s a song that’s always tucked away, in a room within rooms, where the other songs come to lie down when the brass and laughter dies down. “Taken by Surprise '' is 100% it. Here, the gloomy ghost of songs past ─ like “Waves of Galveston '' and “Summer Clouds — are resurrected with a fresh sense of acceptance. Its first gestures are heard in the firm but steady taps against the dead wooded back of a calloused guitar, and from there a plain and tender song gathers around this rustic platform: we hear the scarecrow fingers of wire brushes scratching a snare drum, a booming double bass at a steady heartbeat (Sebastian Steinberg, frequent Apple collaborator), the steady rattle of a tambourine (or is that a bag of broken glass?). But it’s Beam’s measured exhalation of the words “I don’t get taken by surprise anymore,” repeated with the same flat persistence of a ritualistic mantra, that is most arresting. This simple phrase appears at first defiant, confident; then morose — a realisation perhaps of the loss in these words — then, finally, in acceptance.