Iron and Wine
Around the Well (Sub Pop)

This two-disc set of rarities and previously unreleased Iron and Wine tracks is a beautiful thing, but the package is lacking in one significant respect. It’s nice to have Sam Beam’s lyrics in full, but what’s missing is information on the provenance of the recordings. Perhaps not everyone cares about such things, but I’d like to know where each track fits into the big picture, which ones are outtakes from various Iron and Wine albums, and which ones are B-sides.

I can figure certain things out from their contexts, however. Around the Well seems to be organized in chronological order, and many of Disc 1’s solo acoustic selections bear the lo-fi hallmarks of Iron and Wine’s home-recorded debut, The Creek Drank the Cradle, from which we can infer that they date from around 2002. Included here are covers of Stereolab (“Peng! 33”) and the Postal Service (“Such Great Heights”, which became a staple of YouTube cover artists after it was included in the film Garden State, and which unfathomably ended up on an M&M’s commercial). These songs are definitely worth rescuing from obscurity. “Call Your Boys”, in particular, is a moving meditation on family and forgiveness. In its tender but unflinching look at fathering sons, it feels like a companion piece to The Creek Drank the Cradle’s “Upward Over the Mountain”, which enumerates just a few of the many ways that male children break their mother’s hearts.

Disc 2 documents the evolution of Iron and Wine from a whispery solo act to a band of considerable powers, tracing a line from the crisp and precise fingerstyle acoustic-guitar accompaniment of “Communion Cups & Someone’s Coat” to the lush, ambient weirdness of “Carried Home” and the piano-fortified country-rock gospel of “Kingdom of the Animals”, which sounds a little like the Band on a diazepam bender.

The constants are Beam’s sing-me-to-sleep vocals—often backed by his sister Sarah’s clear-as-a-glacier-stream harmonies—and his words, which are sometimes spiked with obfuscating metaphors, but which never fail to shine at least a sliver of light on some easily overlooked detail of the human condition.

Download This: “Call Your Boys”