“I travel a lot,” he says of his life as a musician, “and as they turn into these teenagers, unless you put in the time, they don’t really give a s— if you disappear. I mean, they’ll hold it against you. But they’re not gonna say, ‘Maybe I could try to get close to Dad.’ ” Yet due to COVID, “I was suddenly around more than I ever had been,” he adds. “It was definitely a silver lining.”
The long stint at home might be why Beam sounds preoccupied on “Light Verse” with thoughts of time, memory, manhood and the delights and obligations of love. “What goes in is never what comes out/ The hole in a yard ball, some pieces of seashell,” he sings amid a tangle of acoustic instruments in “Tears That Don’t Matter.” “You’re only empty as a lost and found/ Sounds from a house, the end of a candle.” In the tender “Taken by Surprise,” he ponders the impermanence of a goodbye; “Angels Go Home,” a stark ballad shadowed with strings, closes the album with a rhyme of “sons and daughters” and “stones in holy water.”
Beam made “Light Verse” in Los Angeles, a city he’d visited frequently if somewhat begrudgingly for various promotional duties over the course of his two decades with Iron and Wine. “Usually, the areas where you’re working kind of suck,” he says over dinner at a Hollywood restaurant. The singer, whose piercing eyes and scraggly beard give him a wizened-philosopher look at odds with his sly sense of humor, is in town rehearsing with his road band in Burbank ahead of a tour that will bring him back here for gigs at the Bellwether on Friday and Saturday nights. “It’s hectic and kind of rushed, and then you just leave.”
‘Some sort of freedom’
Yet this recording project was different: Sebastian Steinberg, who’s played bass with Beam for about 10 years (and who also plays with Fiona Apple ), recommended he set up at producer Dave Way’s studio in the relative wilds of Laurel Canyon. They assembled a band of crafty Angelenos, including guitarist David Garza, keyboardist Tyler Chester and Dawes drummer Griffin Goldsmith; Apple even contributed vocals to a waltz-time duet, “All in Good Time,” with Beam’s breathy croon against her earthy rasp. The pace was relaxed, the vibe exploratory. Says Beam: “I’ve always loved that idea of people coming to California to find some sort of freedom.”