Sam Beam, that liminial kid, has a hot new joint coming out this fall which I’m pretty excited about. It took a while for Iron and Wine’s charms to really become apparent for me, but repeat listens to Our Endless Numbered Days sold Beam’s one-man project on me, including the phenomenal song “Sodom, South Georgia”, which may rank as one of Beam’s best songs to date. The lyrics are phenomenal:

Papa died smiling
Wide as the ring of a bell
Gone all star white
Small as a wish in a well
And Sodom, South Georgia
Woke like a tree full of bees
Buried in Christmas
Bows and a blanket of weeds

Papa died Sunday and I understood
All dead white boys say, “God is good”
White tongues hang out, “God is good”

“A Boy With A Coin”, the one song I’ve heard from the new album, The Shepherd’s Dog, is very promising. There’s absolutely progress here — Beam’s fingerpicking is faster, tighter and more intricate than in the past, distortion and pedal steel veers in and out of the arrangement, and the whole thing has a ramshackle tension that seems at odds with both Beam’s previous work and his keen melodicism — yet it all works brilliantly. The presence of full-bore arrangements may alienate some fans of Beam’s earlier acoustic solo material, but I think he benefits from the junkyard instrumentation, which really puts his melodic gifts in nice relief. If this is indicative of what’s to come on the album, The Shepherd’s Dog may end up being one of the best of the year.