CD - Iron & Wine - Hen's Teeth

“I’ve always wanted to use that title,” Sam Beam says of Hen’s Teeth, his eighth full-length album and his sixth for Sub Pop Records. “I just love it. To me it suggests the impossible. Hen’s teeth do not exist. And that’s what this record felt like: a gift that shouldn’t be there but it is. An impossible thing but it’s real.”

Hen’s Teeth and his previous album, Light Verse, are siblings of a sort. They were recorded during the same sessions after a year’s-long dry spell, with the same band, at Waystation studio in Laurel Canyon. “When I’ve been on a writing kick, and the band can meet me where I’m at, they push me into something I hadn’t imagined. I’m at a point in my life where spontaneity is a lot more important to me. I don’t have as much to prove as I used to. I’m a lot freer and I love making music more than ever. There are no right or wrong answers. You just pray for your luck and try your best.”

In this case prayers were answered and luck struck hard. The musicians cohered so quickly and inspired each other so much that they were often getting songs recorded in just a few takes, sometimes at the rate of two or three per day. The two albums might therefore be thought of as fraternal twins: they share DNA and complement each other but have distinct identities and are defined as much by their differences as their similarities.

Light Verse (2024) took its name from a form of poetry that makes heavy use of wordplay, humor, and nonsense. Its cover depicts figures in silhouette, floating or falling through a cyanotype sky. It’s a sweet and airy album, impressionistic, at times even flirting with abstraction, a hearty shaking off of the doom and gloom of the Covid era. Many of the songs are named for ideas or feelings that gesture toward hope amidst uncertainty: “You Never Know,” “All in Good Time” (a gorgeous duet with Fiona Apple), “Cutting It Close,” “Taken by Surprise.”

The world of Hen’s Teeth is earthier, darker, more robust and more tactile than that of Light Verse. The songs have titles like “Roses,” “Robin’s Egg,” “Dates and Dead People,” “Singing Saw.” “Run into the one you love forever / Laugh into each other’s empty mouth,” Beam sings on “Roses,” the album’s first track. It’s one of several songs in which lovers are depicted as so deeply entwined they physically merge. “Paper and Stone” recalls that “But for the time we fell in two / You’d be me and I’d be you / One crust of bread could fit in our mouths / You’d breathe in and I’d let it out.” And on “In Your Ocean,” we find Beam “Praying for dry ground / Though I only want to drown / When I find myself swimming in your ocean.”

The cover is a portrait of Beam surrounded on all sides by flourishing ferns and other tropical plant life. He is wearing a pin-stripe jacket and holding a massive cluster of grapes, prodigious beard spilling down his chest. He could be a local harvest god or a gentleman outlaw holed up in a jungle cave. There are white feathers covering his eyes but these somehow do not suggest blindness. Rather they seem to literalize the poetic notion of an artist’s vision taking flight. The whole surreal scene is washed in humid, spooky red. It’s somewhere between Leonora Carrington and Frida Kahlo, and the contrast with the cool blue-white palette of Light Verse could not be starker.

“The experiments in this one were more with genre than with form. For the last couple years one of my go-to’s has been Van Morrisson’s Astral Weeks, that style where jazz musicians play folk music and it blossoms in different ways than folk musicians are normally interested in doing. ‘Singing Saw’ feels like a song that Doc Boggs and Simon & Garfunkel might have done together. ‘Roses’ and ‘In Your Ocean’ are straight forward folk rock, but they build to these apocalyptic endings. ‘Dates and Dead People’ and ‘Defiance, Ohio’ take a lot from Tropicalia, which is some of my favorite music too. I don’t see it as that much different from jazz. All these forms have been in rock music forever.”

About the players: David Garza on guitar, Sebastian Steinberg on bass, and Tyler Chester on keyboards. Griffin Goldsmith, Beth Goodfellow, and Kyle Crane all play drums. Paul Cartwright plays violin and mandolin among other stringed instruments; he also handled string arrangements for both records. The indie-country trio I’m With Her appears on the ebullient lead single, “Robin’s Egg,” and again on the tender, mournful “Wait Up.”

“I’m obsessed with duets,” Beam says. “Ever since I did Love Letter to Fire with Jesca Hoop. I just love the form. It’s inherently dramatic. And it’s so fun. I had these songs and I finished them with I’m With Her in mind.” Arden Beam—Beam’s daughter—contributes harmonies and backing vocals on the tracks, “Roses,” “Singing Saw,” “Defiance, Ohio” and “Grace Notes.” Her contributions lend a personal poignancy, as well as a wonderful sonic texture, to Hen’s Teeth. Born two months before the release of his debut album, The Creek Drank the Cradle (2002), she is now 23 years old and a musician herself—the first of his children to appear on one of his records.

“It’s exciting, making it more of a family affair. I like making Iron and Wine records, but I like the collaboration even more. Interacting with a bunch of friends and being blown away by what they can bring, musically and emotionally, to a set of three chords. I get to play all day with these people I love and they respond by giving me their most vulnerable, expressive self. It’s the weirdest, best job ever.”

By Justin Taylor