Pagan Angel and a Borrowed Car + Boy With A Coin;
I have a major love
for Iron & Wine's music - it's brilliant. Sam Beam is
such a diverse artist and you can see how his music has evolved and developed
over the many albums he has released. The Shepherd's Dog is
quite an old release now, in 2007, considering how much he has released since
then (and that I only just realised it's been nearly 10 years). But this album
has two of my go to Iron & Wine songs that I am still
listening to constantly - Pagan Angel and a Borrowed Car and Boy
With A Coin.
Sam Beam always
manages to evolve his style with each album whether it's only a little bit or a
lot - like the major change between Morning Becomes Eclectic and Ghost
on Ghost. The album of these two tracks itself, The Shepherd's
Dog, feels like a little change where it's still littered with the
familiarities of his previous works, but Boy With A Coin and Pagan
Angel and a Borrowed Car consist of more new than old. The tracks
are more fleshed out that his previous work with larger arrangements than his
first two albums that consisted of his effortless guitar picking and vocals.
Also, further experimenting with his vocal parts by heavily layering them with
his own and others voices.
These two
tracks are among a very diverse album, but demonstrate how he was slowly developing his musical style. Pagan Angel and a Borrowed Car has
the incorporation of lush piano lines and chordal accompaniments, a larger
percussion section, and the experimentation with strings creating these strong
passages driving the piece forward. The structure of his tracks is slightly
different to standard pop songs, he never seems to opt for choruses but rather
transitions perfectly between verses continuing the story of the song: “love was a promise made of smoke / in a
frozen corpse of trees / a bone cold and older than our bodies / slowly
floating in the sea”.
Boy With A
Coin was one of the first tracks I listened to from the album and soon
became one of my favourite songs by Iron
& Wine. He exploits his voice in a different way to any other of the
songs of his that I’ve heard, layering and editing it – making it sound much
more lo-fi than it usually does – while he again explores the use of percussion
with a sample of clapping to accompany as a section of the main percussion
part. The structure is the same, gliding through the verses with no chorus in
sight and you don’t even notice as he sings. There’s something that is quite
often always evident in his lyrics – the religious imagery, and this time
talking about how God disappears from the lives of the two characters in the
song: “when God left the ground to circle
the world”.
If you haven’t
listened to Iron & Wine before,
but also have no idea where to begin amongst the amount of music he’s released,
these tracks are a great place to start.
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