Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
I would love to be able to do the pace that people used to do decades ago, where you'd make a record a year, or something was wrong with you.
I make music and hope people enjoy it - but when they do it's always a surprise. A nice surprise, but not one that I expect to always be there.
Music is definitely cheaper and more immediate. But part of the draw of film to me is the multidisciplinary aspect. I always enjoyed film writing.
I like to keep working and keep changing. It's a hopeful, optimistic thing to think and sit about what you could do next. Maybe it's blind optimism.
I was born in 1974, so I grew up listening to what was on the radio - my mom's car sounded like Fleetwood Mac, because that was what was on the radio.
I have a hard time saying I'm going to make a whole record of just rock-out songs, because that gets boring, you know? And my voice doesn't scream very well.
I learned early on that you do yourself a disservice trying to replicate the record onstage every night. As a player, and for the audience I think, it's a mistake.
Sometimes you have to be reminded where you were at the time, and songs are a good vehicle for that. It's so funny how those things are connected with your memory.
I like having a big band because it gives you more options. They can always not play and I can do the quiet stuff, but when we want to do the big arrangements, we can.
You can sand something forever. You can keep working on it. All the arts are like that: there's no magical finish line. You get sick of working on it or you walk away.
The things that have been most popular with people have always been a total surprise, and so I've never felt like I could really truthfully predict public taste, so why bother?
I like Wallace Stevens, Robert Frost, but some of the older ones it's hard for me to sit down with - when I sit down to read some poetry, I usually read more contemporary stuff.
I don't really listen to a lot of stuff that sounds real similar to me because I work on that kind of music all day. I end up listening to more jazz, stuff that I can't really play.
I listen to everything: noise, classical, jazz. I like lots of different types of food. There's no way you could get me to eat the same meal everyday, so why would I do the same with music?
Well, for me, I grew up in the Carolinas, and it's our mythology. Those are the characters that we learn about how to live life and moral lessons. It wasn't Zeus and Athena. It was Job and Jesus.
I don't sit and write records from start to finish. I write all the time, and when it's time to record you just look and see what songs you've got that could work together as a group thematically.
I went to an art school and you learn very quickly there that you're only as good as your next idea, not so much what you've got going on at the moment. And so I embraced that. It sunk in at an early point.
When I put out a record I don't really like to do covers as much, but I don't mind playing them. I do them mostly for my friends. When a friend's like, 'Man I really like that song,' I go 'hahaha' and I go home and I record it.
I like writing in an illustrative, descriptive way. I prefer describing to rather than explaining. One, I rarely have anything to say. It's much more interesting for me to discover some meaning that you didn't know that you could create.
I recognized that a lot in my writing I'm trying to show both sides of the coin - the sour and sweet. Iron & Wine seemed to fit with that duality and I thought it would be more interesting to call the project that rather than use Sam Beam.
Religion is a huge part of our consciousness. I grew up in the Bible Belt, so it's our mythology. Those are the stories we learn as little kids at Sunday school. I'm not afraid to use the metaphors, because I think the stories are beautiful.
You have high school photos and stuff, but to have a recording of your voice and your work from 20 years ago, it's a kick in the head to hear how you've changed and what you were interested in at the time and how it's either changed or stayed the same.
I have a certain amount of creative energy, and it used to go painting. Now most of it goes to music. I like to make things. I treat the songs more like poems than prose, so in that sense, I don't really have a point to make. I just try to be surprised.
I am not interested in political writing, because it's limited in its scope. I try to write general, human kinds of songs, which suggest more than they explain. You can take a lot of different meanings, but hopefully everyone feels some kind of recognition.
I don't necessarily enjoy playing concerts, although that has gotten more fun with a band. But the one thing I always have enjoyed is making records and being in that creative environment. And that has become a lot more enjoyable having other people involved.
I was just writing songs in my spare time, and recording because it's fun to do, and Sub Pop called me and said they wanted to put some stuff out. I had to weigh whether I wanted to put the time into it because it's a commitment. But, in the end, it seemed too good to pass up.
I don't advertise what I do to my kids. I don't go around waving a flag. I'm sure they are proud, in a certain way. I'm not like 'hey kids - check this out.' No matter what they do, your dad is still your dad. Nothing is going to help you out in that regard. Dad is just not cool.
All my songs usually borrow from my own life but pull from fantasy or other people's stories that you hear, or something you read. It's fun as a writer to pull from all those different places, and to connect them. But also, I don't have an interesting enough life to strictly pull from that.
Like anyone who records music or writes a song, I thought, 'Wouldn't that be cool if someday I were able to do this for a living?' But it was such a fluke, and it really all took me by surprise and I just held on for dear life. I really wasn't prepared. I really went into it naively with no experience.
I remember 'The Shepherd's Dog' record being not necessarily a political record, but a reaction to socio-political situations in America. And it didn't manifest itself as protest or propaganda songs, but there's a lot of surreal imagery that was born out of really me being surprised Bush got re-elected in '04.
I went to art school, wanting to be a painter and then I got into photography. Then it was movies, and I liked the images. One of the things that interested me in film was that I was communicating in images. That was something I did intuitively and could not even talk about until I started having to do interviews.
Back in '98 or so when I was in film school I was working on lighting for a movie in Georgia, out in the middle of nowhere at a gas station. Inside the gas station they had a bunch of old home remedies like castor oil, and one of them was a protein supplement called Beef, Iron & Wine. I just dropped the Beef part.
I like ones that pertain to the music they make. Talking Heads does that somehow. More often than not band names are just a quirky joke that doesn't really stay funny for very long. It's like Homer Simpson's barbershop quartet, the Be Sharps. At first you're like, 'That's funny!' Then you're like, 'It's not that funny.'
You can treat musicians like actors - you give them a roadmap but don't tell them what to do, and let their personal style or interpretation speak in the piece. And in both film and music, you create a space where people feel safe to do their best. You treat songs like scripts that can be interpreted a lot of different ways.