Iron And Wine, "Half Moon" and "Mary Anne"

Iron and Wine guy Sam Beam played a brand new song the other night in Charlottesville, Virginia. It sounds pretty excellent. He also played another song, “Mary Anne,” that he’s apparently been playing in concert for a year or so now, but that I’ve never heard before. And that one sounds ever better!

There is reportedly a new Iron and Wine album coming soon. I hope it all sounds like this-just the guy and his acoustic guitar. His last album, The Shepherd’s Dog, got away from the style and moved into more up-tempo material with a full-band arrangement. I think it ended up sounding much more pedestrian-kind of jam-bandy, or even world-musicky-than his earlier work, which is some of my favorite music made by anyone in the past ten years.

I’m wondering whether “Half Moon” will end up being the title track to the new album, since the phrase shows up prominently in “Mary Anne,” too. And that makes me wonder whether any of this new music will end up being used in the next installment of the blockbuster moon-centric Twilight movies, since “Flightless Bird, American Mouth,” the standout last song from The Shepherd’s Dog (about as perfectly-written a song as you can find) was used so effectively to make a nation of 13-year-old girls (and the 13-year-old girls inside lots of other people) swoon at the end of the first one.