Iron & Wine - Flightless Bird, American Mouth

0:00You're listening to Song Exploder, where musicians take apart their songs and piece by piece tell the story of how they were made. I'm Rishikesh Hirway. Song Exploder is sponsored by Intuit TurboTax. I don't know if you have this feeling, but I constantly find myself daydreaming about finding an expert who can solve a very specific problem in my life. And one specific problem that comes up every year is filing taxes. but luckily finding someone who can solve that problem is easy with TurboTax. They have dedicated tax experts who are there to help you every step of the way. With TurboTax Expert full service, you can match with an expert who will handle your taxes from start to finish no matter how complex.

0:42You can even hand off all your tax stuff within the TurboTax app and then you can see updates on your expert's progress while you go about your day. You can check exactly where your tax return stands right there on your phone And then if someone ever says to you, man, I wish there were an expert who could do my taxes for me, you can say, oh, I know someone. Visit TurboTax.com to match with your expert today. It's only available with TurboTax full-service experts. The real-time updates are only in the iOS mobile app. This episode of Song Exploder is brought to you by Booking.com. And I'm going to go on there right now because I've got a bunch of tour dates coming up between April and June.

1:21So I'm putting in the dates for the first city on my tour, Austin, Texas, and there are over 300 options. There's a huge variety from hotels to vacation rentals. I'm going to narrow it down to hotels and filter the results based on my budget and my tastes. And okay, there we go. There are still over 20 options for me to choose from. I'm going to look at the ones that are closest to the venue where I'm playing, and then I'm going to check out all the reviews and pick the one that feels most like me. Besides being close to the venue, I also want to be within walking distance of great food, preferably a great dessert.

1:58And if I can find my perfect stay on Booking.com, then anyone can. Find exactly what you're booking for at Booking.com. Booking.yeah. Book today on the site or in the app. This week, I wanted to go back and revisit the episode that I made with Iron & Wine in the fall of 2022. And there are a couple reasons. One, there's a new Iron & Wine album that's coming out this month called Hen's Teeth. And secondly, I actually have a song of my own that's coming out today, the same day as this episode. And it features Iron & Wine on the track. It's called Stray Dogs. And it's the first song from an album that I'm releasing in April called In the Last Hour of Light.

2:39This Iron & Wine episode of the podcast is what actually led to our collaboration on the song. I'd been a huge fan of Iron & Wine for two decades. And this live taping, which happened in Wimberley, Texas, at the Blue Rock Artist Ranch and Studio, was the first time that I got to meet Sam Beam from Iron & Wine. So before we go back and listen to the episode itself, I thought it could be nice to talk to Sam about how this episode happened and then how that led to the making of Stray Dogs. Sam, do you remember what your thoughts were leading up to the day when we met? Oh, well, I'd heard some of your podcasts, some of the Song Exploders.

3:16And so I would try to keep up. When you're very familiar with someone's voice, but have never seen their face. It's always interesting to put the voice back into the mouth, the real mouth. And your voice fit right back into your face. It was cool. Yeah, we were talking about bands that we liked. And it was interesting to hear how familiar, and having never met you, how familiar you were with my writing. It was a nice surprise. One of the things that was really special for me that day was to tell you the story about my mom in 2003 when she'd come to visit me for the first time in LA. And I'd been listening to your first album so much.

3:57And my mom, you know, she enjoyed some of the music that I listened to. Yeah, she's a huge post-punk fan, I'm sure. She was like, Fugazi only in the car. I get it, Rishi. Yeah, I love it. But I said to my mom, I just, I love this album. You got to hear this song. And I played her Upward Over the Mountain, just thinking that she would, you know, really enjoy it.

4:32But then to my surprise, she started crying. And I'd never seen her have that kind of reaction to music before. And when we met, it had been a couple of years since she'd passed away, but that's just a really precious memory to me. And it was very special for me just to be able to tell you that you had been responsible for this moment of connection between my mom and myself. So it was really, really special to get to do that taping. Right back at you, buddy. It was fun. And then something happened, which doesn't happen too often on the podcast, which is that we stayed in touch. Yeah, that's right.

5:04I came into town with my daughter that time and we all went to lunch and, you know, I just find it like better to have more friends than fewer. Yeah. And then a few months later, I texted you and I said, I'm currently panicking a little. In a couple of weeks, I'm going back to Blue Rock in Texas where we did our live taping. They have a program where they let four songwriters come stay for a week and work on music. And I've never done something like that. I'm very nervous about not writing anything at all and squandering the opportunity. I had maybe a weird idea. I was wondering if you might be willing to think of a prompt for me, a sort of assignment.

5:40I think not wanting to let someone else down might be more powerful than my own paralysis, not to burden you with my problems, but if it would be fun slash interesting for you. I love giving other people work, man. It was great. And so you wrote back right away. you said, sure thing, try one of these or all of them. Write a confession and defend yourself for something you've never done. Pick a line from an obituary and use it as the first line of your song. And the last one was, describe a street you grew up on from the point of view of a stray dog. Oh yeah. Honestly, it was pretty random. Imagine you're a dog.

6:19But for some reason it spoke to you and gave you inspiration. You need it as a starting point to go somewhere else. It made me immediately think of when I was eight years old, I went to my mom's hometown in India, and there were just dogs running around on the street. And I was kind of scared of dogs growing up. And the idea of like stray dogs was pretty scary. Yeah. But these dogs were just having fun. It was like we weren't even there. The people did not matter to them at all. And they just had their own little community and they were just running around having fun. And so that is the image that immediately came to mind.

6:57A pack of stray dogs by my uncle's house Tearing down the street A streak of wild legs and open mouths In love with their lives and lesbians Remembering that and remembering the feeling that I got from those dogs also reminded me of the feeling that I had when I was younger and with my friends who I used to play in a band with. I thought about how much I missed them and how much I missed the way that life used to feel back then.

7:37that phrase So before I even got to Texas, I wrote a draft of this song and I sent it to you. Yeah, it's cool. I thought it was fun that you jumped in. It's a very meditative style that you have. And I thought it was really fun to hear where you went with it. You just happened to say the right combination of words to me. And that's a song that I would have never thought of without that phrase to bounce off of. So then when it came time to record the album, I wrote to you and took another big swing. And I asked if you would sing on it since it was already tied to you. And so much of the album is about my family and my mom and I had bonded over your music.

8:17Yeah. And you wrote back right away and you said, of course, no sweat, which is amazing. I can't believe the joy that poured out of them, mangy and lean. What was the process like for you when you were recording the vocals for the song? I kind of listened through a couple of times and see if it's something that I should sing over a bunch of stuff or just sort of duck in and out and just try to make an arrangement thing. So I was just trying to give weight to certain sections.

8:59Yeah, I love digging into other people's melodies and seeing how I can participate. And then another person on this song is Billy Crockett, who owns Blue Rock, where we did our episode and where I did that songwriting residency. And he's an amazing musician and he kind of brought us together. So I asked him to play the guitar solo on this song.

9:28I've found like collaborations are the most exciting, to me anyway, because you never know. You've got to be game and you've got to sort of be vulnerable. But I find that that's the way to surprise yourself. When you get to a point like that, you write a lot of songs, it gets harder and harder to surprise yourself. But you start involving other people and it gets pretty easy. Well, I really can't thank you enough for being a part of it. It really, it's really incredible for me. That's amazing. You're so kind. It was a treat to participate. You know, making music is fun. Making music with friends is the best.

10:04Thank you so much for listening to this extended intro. And I hope you'll check out Stray Dogs, which is out now. You can go to songexploder.net slash stray dogs to listen. And if you want to stay in touch with me about my own music and the album that's coming up, please sign up for my newsletter. You can also find that on the Song Exploder website. The new Iron & Wine album is out February 27th. It's called Hen's Teeth. But right now, here's the episode from November 2022 about the Iron & Wine classic, Flightless Bird, American Mouth.

10:37In 2002, Sam Beam's first album as Iron & Wine was released on Sub Pop Records. He'd given them a bunch of demos, and rather than have him re-record those songs, they just released the demos themselves. Since then, he's put out five more full-length albums, and he's been nominated for multiple Grammys. For this episode, Sam looked back at the making of his song Flightless Bird, American Mouth, from his 2007 album The Shepherd's Dog. A year after that album came out, the song was used prominently in a scene in the movie Twilight, and it's been one of the most popular iron and wine songs ever since.

11:13I talked to Sam at Blue Rock Artist Ranch and Studio in Wimberley, Texas, in front of a small audience. Coming up, you'll hear the original demo he recorded, and how that transformed into the final version of the song.

11:55I'm Sam Beam, and I have a musical project called Iron and Wine. My family was growing, and I was traveling the world more, traveling the country and the world, and seeing more of the universe. We had been living in Florida for a while and we were getting ready to move to Texas. That was also in a time right after 9-11. It was still pretty fresh. And the way that made us all feel differently about the world or just the way the world was changing in that time. And I was also a young man coming to terms with histories histories that I had learned and I was reacting to this difference between the myth and the reality.

12:43I was a quick, wet boy, diving for candy coins. All of your street light eyes, wide on my plastic toy. That demo was recorded in 2004, and it sounds like those early Iron & Wine records because I used the same process. I got the sense pretty early that it was like a rite of passage kind of story. It's me talking to America and describing our relationship. Have I found you, flightless bird, jealous, weeping or lost you?

13:50American mouth

13:53Big girl

14:01I used to multi-track the drums one head at a time and so my kids and my wife at the time they always complain about you know hearing this boom, boom, boom you know or a bing, bing, bing you know or someone I did in the back room. At that point, I was definitely learning about demo-itis as well. Because if you develop a demo too well, and you try to chase the thing, it's impossible. More with Iron & Wine after this.

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16:55I was building my own studio so I brought in Brian Deck who had recorded the record before that our endless number days we did that in Chicago that was my first experience in a studio and it was frustrating and illuminating everything and so I got the bug bought a bunch of gear and he came to Texas and helped me set it up and we got to work I also had a bunch of kids and I had to take them to school or change a diaper or whatever. It was a mess. But it was also, you know, it was part of the adventure, setting up this mad factory at your house and trying to, you know, make a life out of it. And so Brian would make a loop, like some interesting loop, and I would play a guitar.

17:50And then go back and we would record everything else track by track. I was a quick, wet boy Diving too deep for coins I changed one of the lyrics from that demo that you played because I decided diving too deep for coins was better than my candy coins. I like the idea of reflecting on yourself as someone diving too deep for things that you were after. And the other stuff was me just reminiscing about my neighborhood as a kid, you know, running around on the streetlights. Then when the cops closed the fair, I cut my long baby hair and stole me a dog-eared map. Called for you everywhere I was also really into Allen Ginsberg at the time and some of the other beat poets, just their way of describing America.

19:00A lot of incongruous images thrown up against each other. I think the beginning of it, the imagery is innocent and then it gets more complex and more frustrated as the thing goes on. Have I found you, flightless bird, the innocent part of America? Or have I lost you, the American mouth, with a big pill stuck going down? Have I found you, flightless bird, jealous?

19:46Weeping or lost you

19:54American mouth Big Bill

20:04And then once I got to the idea of like America being a mouth the rest kind of felt like that things are going wrong

20:22This is Brian Deck Brian's a drummer It's one of the reasons I wanted to work with him because I wish I could go back in time and be part of the rhythm section but I'm not that good but that's where my heart is and so I wanted a producer who loved that as much as me what's interesting you can hear this room it's not like a treated room at all it was just this round room it was a terrible idea to record drums in there

20:58that's Rob Berger playing the piano I love bringing other musicians in I mean the demos are just me and I can flesh it out a bunch but the fun comes when you bring other people in and they expand what you're doing in a way that you would never imagine. Rob, the piano player, is also an incredible accordion player.

21:26Mostly I just wanted new voices, new sounds that I hadn't used before and I had plenty to choose from because the early records were so sparse.

21:40That's an acoustic electric guitar with a tool called the E-bow. It basically makes the string vibrate the way a violin bow would. And so it gives this long sustain.

22:02My grandma used to play piano in church. and I remember as a tiny kid, like she would sing the harmonies, you know, standing beside me, you know, like listening to her and the music in your ear just kind of starts to expand. You're like, ooh, that's fun. Listening to her woke up something in my brain or tickled it in a way that just made it really happy. At the time, I just really liked stacking harmonies. Pissing on magazine photos those fish and lures thrown in the cold and clean blood of Christ mountain stream Pissing on magazine photos those fish and lures thrown in the cold and clean blood of Christ mountain stream I had done a bunch of hiking in the Sangre de Cristo mountains in New Mexico and so just kind of like using the words.

23:04It's a roundabout, long-winded, fancy way to say there are things, sacred things, that I don't think are being treated as sacred. You know, there's something vulnerable as being exploited. Like, I think advertising is bullshit, that kind of thing. I mean, obviously it serves a purpose, but like if you get lost in those things, you miss out on some of this beautiful, cold, clean, blood of Christ water, you know? It was just sort of this American feeling.