Iron & Wine Music Videos, Pictures and Photos including Boy With A Coin, Southern Anthem, Naked As We Came Music Videos on Roxwel

Iron & Wine

Few people can make compelling music alone in their apartment with an acoustic guitar, recording home-brewed folk ballads on a dusty old four-track audio recorder. Samuel Beam - better known by his stage name, Iron & Wine - can. A country boy at heart, Bean was raised in a rural community on the outskirts of Columbia, South Carolina, often working on his grandfather’s farm during weekends. Though Beam eventually left for Florida to attend Florida State University’s Film School in Tallahassee he never strayed far from his rustic roots, messing around with his guitar whenever he found the time.

In 2002 - while working as a professor of film at the University of Miami - some home recordings Samuel made in his free time on an old tape recorder came to the attention of Jonathan Poneman, the owner of Seattle independent label Sub Pop Records (The Shins, The Postal Service). Jonathan was impressed by the bootlegged recording, and quickly signed Beam to his label under them name Iron & Wine, a name Samuel chose based on a vintage dietary supplement he once saw for sale in a rural drugstore. Sub Pop released Beam’s early recordings as a standalone album in 2002, under the title The Creek Drank The Cradle. The Creek Drank the Cradle was a successful debut for Beam, with critics praising the sincerity of his hoarse, solo folk - despite the album’s barebones production values, evident in tracks like "Southern Anthem" and "Bird Stealing Bread".

After releasing the five song EP The Sea & The Rhythm in 2003, Beam released his second full-length album Our Endless Numbered Days in 2004. This time around, things were a bit different; Beam enlisted the help of a backing band and a modern recording studio. Produced by Chicago-based music engineer Brian Deck (Modest Mouse, Counting Crows), Our Endless Numbered Days’ fuller and more fleshed-out sound was something of a departure from The Creek Drank The Cradle’s hushed low-fi aesthetic, though with Beam’s soft vocals clear and present it was still noticeably an Iron & Wine record. Standout tracks from Our Endless Numbered Days include "Sodom, South Georgia" and "Naked As We Come".