#4 Iron & Wine – The Shepherd’s Dog

As far as purely individual musicians go, Iron & Wine’s Sam Beam is probably the single most consistently great songwriter I’ve ever heard. And I owe the introduction to my old friend Josh Williams, who dropped in on me one afternoon while I was workin the music racks at Hastings to get me to use my employee discount for him on some records he was interested in. Alongside Roomsound by the also unbeknownst to me Califone, Josh giddily picked up Our Endless Numbered Days and we’ve both been hooked ever since. Without even making plans together, he and I even made the trek down to Ft. Worth, Texas, to see Beam paired up with Calexico after In The Reins and found each other in the will-call line; we smoked vanilla cloves in pin-drop silence – the only time I’ve heard a club crowd be quiet – as Beam tore it up with his sister before Calexico joined him to finish off for the Reigns set. It seems that collaboration rubbed off on Beam, who, when I caught him on “Letterman” after his third LP The Shepherd’s Dog to play “The Devil Never Sleeps,” had abruptly transfigured himself into an energetic showman, a long way from the meek bedroom artist he began as. In the same way Numbered Days was a leap forward for Beam, moving up from the rusty four-track recordings of The Creek Drank the Cradle into a professional studio, Shepherd’s Dog takes forward bounds into dense production minutiae, such as the intericately layered overdubs on opener “Pagan Angel and a Borrowed Car” and and subaqueous vocal effects on “Carousel;” still, Beam’s foundation for his music is true to his roots as ever, grounded in fingerpicked banjo, and sighed vocals amid oblique pastoral imagery and bandied Biblical allusions. For as much as Beam tills fresh ground with the whinnied guitar blushes and fabricated splices concluding single “Boy With A Coin,” though, the barebones beauty of preceding track “Ressurrection Fern” never lags far behind, literally. With some of my favorite records of the decade under his belt – the nearly flawless Woman King EP and Cradle inching their way toward the top of my ever-expanding ’00s best-of – Iron & Wine has always been one of the few entirely reliable outfits to produce unblemished, yet humble every time it shows its plain face.