Your Flowers/God’s Love - Iron & Wine's Our Endless Numbered Days at 20

Love is a crying baby Mama warned you not to shake.

Love is a dress you made long to hide your knees.

The last time I saw Colin was, like, a decade ago, and if you were to ask me then, when he and I were sitting across from one another at the Caribou Coffee on a Sunday morning before I had to go open the bookstore I was working in at the time, I would have told you, no, this won’t be the last time we see one another. 

I would have told you no, certainly, this is one of the last times I will remember that we spoke. 

Colin had gotten married around three years prior and I am sure that, by 2014, he and his wife Elizabeth maybe already had one of their children; now, they have three daughters. 

I have never met any of them.

I’ve only met Elizabeth once. It was at their wedding on Madeline Island, Wisconsin, in the summer of 2011.

But if you were to ask me now, and I have asked myself this question, in reflection, about that moment when he and I were sitting across from one another at the Caribou Coffee, as he was making his way from Minneapolis, back to Dubuque, Iowa, after visiting his older brother, I would tell you that deep down, I should have known this would be the last time we see one another.

*

The early 2000s were most certainly not the “dark ages” for the internet, or learning things about people—specifically musicians or songwriters—through the internet. But, as a whole, and I do not think this is conjecture on my part to surmise that if you were like I was, and still am as a 40-year-old, chronically online, news and information traveled a little bit slower, or was not as readily available, comparatively.

By the time that I had been properly, or more formally, introduced to Sam Beam’s output as Iron & Wine (the ampersand is important to the history of the name¹), at the beginning of 2005, it had been almost a calendar year removed from the release of his second full-length under that moniker, Our Endless Numbered Days, which was issued in March of 2004 through Sub Pop.

Like a lot of people who had maybe not quite placed their fingers all the way down to feel the pulse of independent music that was growing in popularity during this era, my introduction to Iron & Wine, by name recognition, would have been from his placement on the soundtrack to the film Garden State, with his slowed-down, sparse cover of “Such Great Heights,” a song from his label mates, The Postal Service.

I tell you all of that to tell you this—that even in the days when information about an artist traveled a little slower, or was a little harder to access than it is today, Beam already, maybe thanks to the warm critical reception of his debut, 2002’s The Creek Drank The Cradle, had a mythology about him, as many sensitive, heart-on-sleeve, white men brandishing acoustic guitars had in during this time—I mean, I am thinking of the story I had heard about Ray LaMontagne, and how, long before he was a musician, he was working the graveyard shift in a shoe factory and became terribly depressed, and on the day he had intended to die by suicide, he heard the song “Treetop Flyer” by Stephen Stills on his clock radio; he changed his mind, taught himself to play guitar and to sing.

I have no idea how much truth there is in there, and Beam’s mythology is nowhere near as dramatic, or a true matter of life and death. 

But, before the release of his debut on Sub Pop, he had been a professor of film and cinematography at the University of Miami and the now-shuttered Miami International University of Art and Design. 

He had been writing songs and playing guitar for a number of years before recording a collection of demos on a borrowed four-track recorder. And he had, per the Iron & Wine Wikipedia, given one of his demo recordings to a friend—Michael Bridwell, the brother of Ben Bridwell, who would, within a few years, go on to found the group Band of Horses, but at this time, was still a part of the idiosyncratic folk outfit Carrisa’s Wierd. 

The demo, then, ended up in the hands of the editor of “Yeti” Magazine, who selected one of Beam’s tracks, “Dead Man’s Will,” to be included on one of the magazine’s complication CDs; and it is, presumably, because of this song being featured on this compilation, that he caught the attention of Sub Pop, who approached with a deal.

Beam’s mythology, in the earliest days of his career, is nowhere near as dramatic, or a true matter of life and death. The Creek Drank The Cradle was, apparently, recorded as a demo, with the intention that members of the southwestern indie rock group Calexico would contribute additional instrumentation to the songs he had recorded. 

Beam would eventually go on to officially collaborate with Calexico twice—once, just a few years later, through the release of the sweeping, lush EP In The Reins, and then again in 2019, on the full-length, Years to Burn. The proposed collaboration for the songs found on The Creek never happened, and the album was released in its demonstrative state—hushed, raw, and sparse, recorded on Beam’s four-track machine. 

*

I can look back and say that Colin, during my final year in college, when he was just easing into his first, was a music friend. Because of his older brother, he had a much more robust knowledge of genuinely interesting, independent music. We were in the same major field, and attending a small, liberal arts college in Dubuque, Iowa, we spent a lot of time around one another—the more time we did spend around one another, the more he would try to introduce me to bands, or artists, that he listened to.

I tried to look past the religious imagery of the earliest Sufjan Stevens albums Seven Swans and Michigan, but struggled to do so; I quickly warmed to parts of Broken Social Scene’s landmark You Forgot it In People; I was hypnotized by the glitchy complexities of Neon Golden, from The Notwist.

All of 21, in my final year of college, facing a lot of uncertainty and often unsure of what to do with big emotions, I was attracted to the earnestness found within a majority of Iron & Wine’s second album, Our Endless Numbered Days, immediately. 

*

And I have, in the past, not a lot, but perhaps often enough, written about the ways in which music either grows with you, or does not, as we move through time. 

There are albums, or artists, that can mean a lot to us at one point in our lives—finding us at that right, or perfect moment. Those artists, or albums, can then, if they’re lucky, and if time has been kind to the material, and is still, after however many years, still genuinely interesting, or evocative in some way, be brought with us as we age. 

The hope, then, is that we remain connected to that artist, and find something to enjoy, about the albums they release throughout their career as we remain active listeners. 

However. There are myriad cases where the artist themselves is one that, despite our best efforts, can not be brought along with us through time—they continue to release albums, and we, for whatever reason, are unable to connect, or do not find them as compelling as we wish they were. 

We can, then, lose complete track of the artist, and are often surprised if and when they do resurface with something new.

And then there are albums that, even if they did mean the absolute world to us, at one point in our lives, for whatever reason, we are unable to bring with us. We drift further and further away from them, and the person we might have been, for better or worse, at the time we were first introduced.

Sam Beam, and his output as Iron & Wine, is one of those artists, at least for me. 

In the year I was given a CD-R with Our Endless Numbered Days on it, during my final semester in college, Beam released two EPs under the Iron & Wine moniker—the first, Woman King, in the spring, found him pushing his sound further and further out from its humble, home-recorded beginnings, by incorporating more instrumentation into what was quickly becoming a more complex and robust sound; the second was the aforementioned collaborative release with Calexico—In The Reigns, which arrived in the fall. 

Beam returned in 2007 with The Shepard’s Dog—an album that, even two years removed from my initial introduction and interest in Iron & Wine, I was just unable to connect to, and an album that might, at this point, now be known for the original home to the song “Flightless Bird, American Mouth,” a version of which would appear on the soundtrack to the Twilight film Breaking Dawn. 

Departing from Sub Pop in 2010, Beam signed with a major label—Warner Brothers, to release one album—Kiss Each Other Clean, which arrived near the beginning of 2011, and was preceded by a Black Friday Record Store Day exclusive EP featuring the first single off the album, the swaying, bombastic “Walking Far From Home.”

And it would be easy, really, if I wanted, to listen to Kiss Each Other Clean, to see if there had been anything I enjoyed about it, or songs that I remember listening to when the album had arrived. But that’s the thing. I don’t want to. The same goes for its follow-up, from 2013, Ghost on Ghost, which I wrote about when my career as a music writer on the internet was still in its infancy. 

There are artists that, no matter how strong of a connection we may have felt to them at one point in our lives, when we first discovered them—the strength of that connection is not always guaranteed to last. And as Sam Beam’s sound with Iron & Wine as a project—I recall Ghost on Ghost veering into what I had deemed to be misguided faux-“Blue Eyed Soul”—continued to move further and further away from its hushed and spectral beginnings, it was no longer music I felt compelled to spend time with.

And the truth is that regardless of how poignant songs from Our Endless Numbered Days may have been to me when I was 21, and on the cusp of graduating from college, it is an album that I ultimately distanced myself from for a very, very long time—something I had not listened to in well over a decade, with the album itself, purchased from Moondog Music in Dubuque, Iowa, still on my record shelves, filed among the few other “I”’s in my collection.

I had not listened to the album, in its entirety, until recently, upon realizing that it was, like all things eventually do, celebrating a milestone anniversary.

*

Love is a dream you enter, though I shake, and shake, and shake you.

Love to say this in your ear—“I’ll love you that way.”

Now, two decades later, I would not, and really could not, say that Our Endless Numbered Days is a perfect, or a flawless record. Because it isn’t.

And the thing is that, in 2005, when a copy of this album was handed to me, and I found myself listening to it throughout that year and well into the next, I would not have, and could don’t have, told you it was a perfect, or flawless record then either. 

It seems a little much, or just the wrong phrasing to use, if I were to say that I’ve always taken issue, or had problems, with quite a few of the songs on Our Endless Numbered Days—because that makes it sound like this album or Sam Beam himself has wronged me personally somehow. He hasn’t. It is an album that, taken as a whole, is impressive in its commitment to sound, which is thanks in part to Beam, obviously, as the singer and songwriter and Iron & Wine primarily being just him, but it’s also thanks in part to the production of Brian Deck, who was, around this time, in the early to mid-2000s, a bit of an in-demand name for independent yet buzzy bands, or artists who were trying achieve a specific kind of intimacy and rawness within their records.

And for as meticulous and earnest as Our Endless Numbered Days can sound as, like, a finished product, there are the songs themselves, some of which found Beam steering them into, for lack of a better description, entirely too rootsy, or homespun territory for me to have either connected with them in 2005 when I was all of 21, as well as now, on the cusp of 41, sitting down with the album to unpack it form a much more analytical place. 

And there is, of course, a kind of homespun, rootsyness that is inherent to “folk” music or Americana, which was a sub-genre that gathered momentum around this time, certainly. But for me, now, yes, but also apparently when I was also in my 20s, there is a fine line with how much of that I had an interest in listening to, and how much patience I might have with it. 

There are moments of emotional brilliance on Our Endless Numbered Days—perhaps a little saccharine, sure, but the gravity of specific songs is still impressive in just how stirring and impactful it can be, two decades removed. But for those moments of emotional brilliance, or places where Beam turns things inward just enough, there are the spots on the album that are, like, okay. They are fine. They are maybe the songs that you, as a listener, might still have an affinity for. And there are the moments that are much less effective.

Musically, though, these are the songs where there is something complex and compelling happening—I am thinking, of course, of the album’s shuffling, nervy opening track, “On Your Wings,” and then the dense, creeping “Cinder and Smoke.”

And the thing about “On Your Wings” is that in its nervy shuffle, it is not an accurate depiction of the 11 songs that follow—it does not set a tone for the record, exactly, but what it is does reveal, almost immediately is that Beam is working with a much larger budget this time, and with that, he wishes to create a much larger sound. And, I mean, the sound would grow even larger within the next year, with the release of the back-to-back EPs from 2005, but here, he is just starting to test the waters of including additional instruments. 

“On Your Wings,” like a lot of the songs that favor this kind of roots-oriented sound, has a little bit of a twang hanging over it—the inclusion of the slide guitar really punctuates that, as well as the ramshackle, quickly-paced melody that is played. 

And in the jitter, and in the twang, if “On Your Wings” is ultimately not indicative of the album’s overall sound, it is fascinating, at least in the context of being the opening track, in the way it serves the purpose and does, like, kind of welcome you in with a surprise, because of the way Beam and his assemblage of musicians find the natural balance of tension and release. The song doesn’t really “take off” exactly (nothing on this album does, really, because it is so hushed and restrained), but you get the impression that they are working toward something, and then that something arrives when there is a subtle, driving rhythm that comes in underneath the layers of guitar along with the low, plodding bass line. 

Later, “Cinder and Smoke,” even after 20 years, is still rather impressive in how hypnotic it is, and with how complex it ultimately becomes, it does so in such a seemingly effortless way.

I stop short of saying there is something sinister happening in “Cinder and Smoke,” but there is a very palpable darkness that Beam taps into, in both his writing, and in the dizzying arranging, which continues to grow just slightly more complicated, little by little, the further along he pulls you into the song.

Based around a kind of playful, or jaunty, but eerie progression that swirls around with at least two acoustic guitars and a banjo bouncing off of them, Beam’s lyricism, here, is moody and evocative—vivid, powerful, yet written with enough ambiguity to imply that the imagery of a house on fire, regardless of how descriptive he does become through its use, serves as a metaphor.

And I have written—not at length, but just enough, in the past, about how hard it is for me to return to albums released within a certain period of time, and are of a specific genre, or style—i.e., the “sensitive” male singer/songwriter—because the thing that has aged so poorly about so many of them is the depictions of fragile, toxic masculinity you find throughout.

Sam Beam, and Our Endless Numbered Days, is not the worst offender of records released within the early 2000s, but that doesn’t mean that revisiting this album, now, and listening with an intersectional ear and analytical intentions, didn’t unearth some of those elements within these songs. And for as large of a metaphor as “Cinder and Smoke” hangs everything on, it is suggested that Beam is really writing about the end of a relationship.

Regardless, of the songs on Our Endless Numbered Days that are not distinctly designed to be emotional (and perhaps emotionally manipulative in how they arrive), Beam does make something compelling with “Cinder and Smoke.” He begins every verse with the phrase, “Give me your hand,” and while the lines within the first verse are much more literal (he does state, “The farmhouse is burning down”), the second verse is where he becomes much more vague. 

“Give me your hand, and take what you will tonight,” he states, with the next line having a surprising though honestly relatable kind of desperation to it. “I’ll give it as fast and as high as the flame will rise.”

There is no chorus, structurally, within “Cinder and Smoke,” and the narrative of the song—both the literal and the figurative, really converge within its final verse which is its most eerie, or unsettling. “Cinder and smoke—you asked me to pray for rain,” Beam reflects in the last few lines. “With ash in your mouth, you’ll ask it to burn again.”

There is an urgency within the song that I, certainly, did not recognize when I was in my 20s, but I can hear it now, within the way he begins each verse with the command of, “Give me your hand,” though what is unclear is if this off-stage character he’s speaking to does what he asks. And within the urgency, both in the way the music swirls and slinks, and with the depictions of a house on fire that may, or may not, stand for something much larger, there is subtle disorienting feeling to it all.

The most impressive thing about “Cinder and Smoke” is how it ends, though. And I can recall finding it fascinating in 2005, when I heard this album for the first time, and it is still rather impressive to me now, in the way Beam layers his voice, wordlessly singing in different ranges, all of them gently weaving themselves around one another, until all the other instruments drop out and it is just the haunting, captivating sounds of his voice, carrying us to the end. 

*

I am remiss to describe Our Endless Numbered Days as a romantic album—because I don’t think it is. Maybe there was a time when I would have, and maybe Beam, himself, when writing these songs, considered himself a romantic of sorts. It is sentimental—or there are sentiments. And it is capable of being earnest. 

Its sentiments are well meant, I think—both then, and now, and at times there is a sincerity to them that works, and other times, there is a cloying nature to them. 

And in that cloying, one could, perhaps, mistake it for romance. Or that Beam is a romantic. 

I have written so often, in the past, about the difference between a “love song” and songs that are about love, and the space where those things overlap. I don’t know if at any point Beam thought he was writing “love songs” when penning the material for Our Endless Numbered Days, but they are not. They are, at times, or at least some of them, are certainly songs about love.

They are, at times, songs about the way people feel connected—and many of them, regardless of how romantic one might have thought them to be at any point, are meditations on mortality.

“Naked as We Came” is one of those songs—arriving second in the album’s sequencing, it picks up the pacing, slightly, from the slither and slink of how the album begins, and finds Beam returning to the kind of aesthetic of The Creek Drake The Cradle—just his raspy, soulful voice, accompanied by the impressive work on the acoustic guitar, along with some subtle harmony vocals from his sister, Sarah, during the chorus.

Often, when white men pick up an acoustic guitar, and make a record, regardless of if there is merit within the comparison, other white men who have picked up an acoustic guitar are mentioned as a point of reference—Nick Drake, for example, would be one, and at least with Drake’s final full-length, Pink Moon, it makes sense. As much as it can. Mostly within the command and concentration you can hear within how the acoustic guitar sounds.

“Naked as We Came” moves quickly—the work on the guitar almost glistens, but still has a very in-the-moment kind of intimacy to it, as if Beam is not trying to show off his abilities on the instrument, and is trying to focus, as he plays, on not getting too ahead of himself with the tempo of the song.

Beam’s vocals are delivered as quickly as the brisk pacing of the guitar melody underneath him, and he deliberately measures the way his words tumble out and then float along gently. It is, inherently, not a love song, but a song about love, or a song about the kind of commitment one person makes to another, and the awareness of mortality that comes with that.

Even though it can be seen as a “sweet” song, or one that is saccharine in its sentimentality, the topic of life, and death, within the space of love, is also dark, and he tries his best to balance that out with fast the song moves, and perhaps in its speed, offers a little bit of a distraction from the heaviness of his writing. 

“She says, ‘If I leave before you, darling, don’t you waste me in the ground,’” Beam sings tenderly, and earnestly in the second verse. “I lay smiling like our sleeping children. One of us will die inside these arms.”

“Eyes wide open. Naked as we came. One will spread our ashes ‘round the yard.”

Beam revisits the sentiments, in a sense, lyrically and musically, in the second half of the album, on “Each Coming Night,” but he does so with more of a tenderness, or at least a noticeable kind of warmth, both in how he approaches the arrangement, and the vocal melody. 

Not even 30 when Our Endless Numbered Days was recorded, it is genuinely interesting to me that Beam was so preoccupied with his mortality at this point in his life—though, there was certainly a time where I, also, was in certainly a less constructive or romantic way. 

“Will you say when I’m gone away,” he begins in the opening line of “Each Coming Night.” “‘My lover came to me, and we’d lay in rooms unfamiliar until now,’” he continues, following a similar pattern of asking a question of what will be said, about him, in death, with the song, structurally, consisting of only verses and no chorus as it, much like “Naked As We Came,” moves along quickly in a kind of Nick Drake-adjacent, gentle, acoustic folk-oriented sound.

“Will you say to me when I’m gone, ‘Your face has faded but lingers on?,’” Beam implores in the final verse, which is where he uses the titular expression. “Light strikes a deal with each coming night,” creating an image that is poignant, yes, as is the rest of the lyricism in “Each Passing Night,” though it is perhaps a little less heavy-handed in how it depicts and reflects on the intersection of life, love, and death, in comparison to “Naked as We Came.”

And there is, of course, a difference, or at least, I believe to be a difference between “love songs” and then songs that are about love. And there is, of course, a place where those things overlap as much as they are able to.

I cannot say that I have been fascinated for upwards of two decades by the way that Sam Beam writes about love within his lyrics, but he writes about it often, and in a number of different ways. It is something that he references within the first song on The Creek Drank The Cradle, “Lion’s Mane,” where he crafts some surprising juxtapositions for love, comparing to both a dream one is to be shaken out of, as well as a crying infant that you were warned not to shake. 

And it is fitting, then, I suppose that Beam turns one of the most memorable and sentimental phrases on the album in a song called “Love and Some Verses.”

“Love and Some Verses” is less preoccupied with the notion of mortality, and more with an affection, and a fondness that is, yes, a little saccharine, but the gentle nature with which Beam does write does make it more palatable than it would be in the hands of a less capable, and less earnest songwriter. 

The opening line is, at least for me, one of the most affecting, overall, from Our Endless Numbered Days, with a hush in his voice, Beam sings quietly, “Love is a dress that you made long to hide your knees,” which does, unintentionally, I believe, call to mind a lyric from an equally earnest, albeit a different kind, songwriter from the same time—Ben Gibbard of Death Cab for Cutie, and the line, “There’s a tear in the fabric of your favorite dress and I’m sneaking glances.” 

“Love to say this to your face—‘I’ll love you only,’” he continues in the first verse before asking, as he asks a similarly structured question at the end of the second verse as well. “For your days and excitement, what will you keep for to wear?”

“Love and Some Verses,” is precisely that. It is the sentiment, of course, which is at the forefront, a two-line chorus that implores a tenderness in what it asks—“Someday drawing you different—may I be weaved in your hair?” and then the titular “some verses.” Two of them, to be exact, with the second where Beam uses the song’s title in his phrasing. “Love and some verses you hear—say what you can say,” he begins. “Love to say this in your ear—‘I’ll love you that way.’”

It is not the shortest song on the album, but it is a song that structurally does manage to focus more on an instrumental arrangement that the verses, and the short chorus, just happen to find their way in. Musically, it is gentle, and begins with Beam and the guitar, before he welcomes loose and quickly brushed percussion, as well an additional, moderately twangy guitar melody over the top of it all. 

There is the adage of, like, too much of a good thing, and so there is a part of me that, even though I might like another verse within the song, understand you can say what you need to, or wish to say, with less rather than more.

*

A phrase I overuse in writing about music—I’m not sure when I adopted it, but it would have been, maybe, five or six years ago when it became something I was aware of, and then very self-aware of, is describing imagery, within a song, as “evocative.”

And I think it is because I read so much, and write so much—and used to write about things that did not involve pop music, and because I am a “lyrics person,” I really appreciate when the narrative within a story is crafted in a way that paints an intense portrait of the world within the song. 

Not every song on Our Endless Numbered Days is evocative—and, I mean, not all of them have to be. But I find that, in revisiting this album, the two songs on it that were the most important to me when I was originally introduced to it so long ago are the most evocative in the way Beam plays with imagery, and storytelling, and setting a scene.

And this is something that I have discovered somewhat recently, but there is a kind of stillness, or a quiet that I long for—a kind of moment that hangs in time, and that I find myself returning to often. The memory itself is not impossible—challenging, not impossible—to recreate, but it is a kind of perfect, quiet, beautiful, moment that, in experiencing it, I knew it would be something that would, ultimately, provide such a source of comfort.

In her review of the album for Pitchfork in 2004, Amanda Petusich does fire a shot at Beam for one of the album’s more everlasting lines—yes, it is saccharine, and a kind of romantic that does inspire an eye-roll or a heavy sigh, but it is in the album’s 10th track, “Fever Dream,” where Beam uses that romance, or his more romantic inclinations, to tap into a kind of wistful longing, creating a space that is among the album’s most evocative for specifically capturing a feeling, and then a feeling within a moment.

When I was introduced to Our Endless Numbered Days, I can recall that “Fever Dream” was among my early favorites—at times, on the CD-R in my dorm room stereo or, the following year, the CD player in my car, heading right to tracks 10 and 12. And I think what attracted it to me then, and what did easily draw me back into it now, is the gentle kind of melancholy it floats along on, with the song itself unfolding through Beam’s delicate acoustic guitar playing—here, slower and more deliberate in where the notes fall and kind of reverberate out into a very fleeting moment of silence before they begin again, with only an additional melody coming in, serving as brief, instrumental bridge, from the first verse and chorus into the second.

“Fever Dream,” musically, is delicate and contemplative. There are places throughout Our Endless Numbered Days where you can hear Beam’s confidence on the guitar, even if there are times where it might seem like he gets just a little ahead of himself, or allows there to be a bit of a human nature to his playing, the melody and rhythm here does truly gently tumble with a kind of restrained, beautiful, wistful somberness. It’s simple, and unassuming, and it does inevitably become something that stays in your head—I could truthfully listen to an instrumental version of “Fever Dream” all day.

Lyrically, and why I think a song like “Fever Dream” works so well, still, even if it is more cloying than you might wish it to ultimately be, is because Beam does so much not with so little, but using only a few phrases that are so very meticulously thought out in what they convey, and the picture—yes, and evocative one, that he creates. 

A kind of quiet, or stillness, that hangs and that you wish to last for much longer than the song’s running time.

It’s funny—sometimes I reflect on the kind of music I was drawn to when I was younger, and I wonder, within the songwriting itself, what it was that a 21-year-old version of me did ultimately appreciate from a song such as “Fever Dream.” And, like, I mean, you can appreciate something without it being a true reflection of your lived experience—that is something I do understand better now, but I think that, within the all-encompassing sense of longing Beam sings of, and the kind of moment he crafts of a gorgeous tenderness, I appreciated the feeling of the song, without having a real understanding of what he was depicting. 

“Some days, her shape in the doorway will speak to me—a bird’s wing on the window,” Beam begins his voice in a near whisper. “Sometimes, I’ll hear when she’s sleeping. Her fever dream—a language on her face.”

The second verse, just as brief, and just as tender. 

“Some days, like rain on the doorsteps, she’ll cover me with grace in all she offers. Sometimes, I’d like just to ask her what honest words she can’t afford to say.”

And yes, I will admit that the short chorus to “Fever Dream” is a little heavy-handed—but, for as cloying as it might be, it is memorable. The sentiment of it was something that, even though I did not totally understand when I first heard it, I could appreciate it, and it is something I have come to have a much greater understanding of now. The kind of small window into an existence that Beam effortlessly conjures within the song, and the kind of quiet, still moment it underscores within my memory.

“I want your flowers like babies want god’s love,” he sings in a slightly higher, tentative register. “Or maybe, as sure as tomorrow will come.”

*

My best friend and I, usually in jest but occasionally in earnest, have wondered if we had met one another at a different time within our lives, if we would have become as good of friends as we are. 

I was confident that if she had known me when I was all of 21, during my final year in college, the probability is high that she would have found me to be insufferable because, retrospectively, I can say with confidence that I was. 

But, you don’t know any better. Or at least I didn’t. At the time. That is who I was. And gratefully,  it’s something that you, or at least I, eventually grew out of—you change, or mature, or have a better understanding of both those around you, and yourself. Whatever you want to call it.

There is still, of course, a version of my insufferable self somewhere within. 

I think about that a lot. Maybe you do, too. The people that we were, at different points in our lives—like, very specific moments in time, and then I think about how great of a distance it has been between there, and now, and how I have changed, and when those changes, or that maturation, began. 

I think about the ways that I haven’t changed. For better or worse.

I think about the friends that I had, and the people I was connected to, or very close with, in 2004, and into 2005. And how it does require effort to maintain relationships over distance and time. And how that, at 21, was not something that I was aware of—the effort that was needed.

There are some relationships that make it seem easy—effortless, almost. But that isn’t, and I suppose that it simply can’t be like that for everybody that you, at one point in time, felt close to or connected with.

We do, despite our best intentions, lose one another along the way, and the last time I saw Colin was, like, a decade ago, and if you were to ask me then on that Sunday morning, when he was sitting across from me at a Caribou Coffee, meeting me before I had to go open the bookstore I was working in at the time, I would have told you no, this won’t be the last time we see one another. 

And if you asked me this question now, as I have been asking it of myself, upon reflecting, I would tell you that, deep down, I should have known that it would be the last time.

*

The difficult thing about revisiting an album like Our Endless Numbered Days, or any album, really, released in a certain era, written and recorded by a “sensitive” white man with a guitar, is that for as poetic or striking as some of the lyricism can be, still, years later, there is an underlying toxic or fragile or bruised masculinity that has not aged well.

In 2004, I certainly would not have had the vocabulary or the capacity to understand a concept like that. But, I have spent so much time listening intersectionally, that it does make listening to things like this, for example, a challenge, because regardless of how gorgeous or emotionally manipulative a song is, I can’t un-hear things that, at least for me, become ultimately troubling.

Beam, throughout Our Endless Numbered Days, is not obsessed with his own mortality, though the idea of life and death and what we make of it, in between those two things, does appear in a number of songs—and it is not exactly at the center of the album’s still stunning closing track, “Passing Afternoon,” which is where the album’s title is lifted from, the notion of time—moving slowly and quickly, and memory, and fragmented moments, swirl around gently and beautifully within the delicate, subtle, somber arranging.

“Passing Afternoon” is the kind of song that does, really, play its hand almost immediately—the hand that reveals it was most certainly intended to be the final song on the album, and with that, it is the most emotionally manipulative song on the album. It knows exactly what it is doing, in terms of how Beam has structured the song to build and build within a sense of restraint, and then never truly releases it, but loosens his grip just enough to give it a little room to breathe—specifically in the form of the swooning, gorgeous piano melody that comes in near the song’s sweeping conclusion.

Based on the title, as well as the phrase lifted from it as, the album’s title, “Passing Afternoon,” is about the passage of time—though it is a reflection of a life that Beam is simply on the outside of, gazing back into with a palpable sense of longing.

There is both a deliberate but also breathless pacing to the way Beam walks through this narrative as he begins—another song with no real chorus, but rather, a story that continues to unfold and unfold until he lifts his voice up for the final, haunting, and emotional line.

“There are times that walk from you like some passing afternoon,” he begins, his voice both clear and bold but weighed down in the folksy rasp we have become familiar with throughout the album, before setting us into the beginning of this portrait. “Summer warmed the open window of her honeymoon. And she chose a yard to burn,” he continues. “But the ground remembers her.”

And what is unclear to me, and maybe it does’t need to be explained, is how much of what is depicted within “Passing Afternoon” is autobiographical for Beam—or if he has simply written himself in as the character a sullen protagonist to serve as our guide through a vivid world he’s built. And what I am confident that I did not really understand, or care to really comprehend, when I was introduced to this song, and this album, for the first time, was what it is heavily implied that the song is about.

She chose a yard to burn, but the ground remembers her.

There is, I think, and perhaps I am just looking too closely, grasping for something that is not there, a terribly fragile and toxic masculinity within the song—it does’t detract from the inherent beauty of it, or how stunning or moving it is, even two decades removed. Not really. But it does make it difficult to hear and attempt to unpack.

If Beam could be saccharine or cloying with his writing in other places on the album, where he is sentimental and romantic, he is simply heavy-handed with the metaphors when he is wounded, which grow increasingly more vivid in detail further along into the song, we go.

“There are things that drift away, like our endless, numbered days,” he muses in the second verse—playing with the ideas of life and time and distance that forms between the two things, in a line that, regardless of how many times I’ve heard it, is still incredibly effecting, specifically for someone, like myself, who is often too sentimental, and wistful, and nostalgic, and is often considering time and life and where I have gone, or who I have become, within that distance.

“Autumn blew the quilt right off the perfect bed she made,” Beam continues, returning to the conceit of the song. Because, you see, if you had not already figured it out, there is an idea that the “Passing Afternoon” is a reflection on the end of a relationship, or an affair, of some kind, with Beam, as the protagonist, standing on the outside, looking in, still feeling deeply wronged, or hurt, and the object of his infatuation—the “one that got away,” who has either married another, and started a family with them, or ended the implied affair, and stayed with her husband.

She chose a yard to burn, but the ground remembers her.

Autumn blew the quilt right off the perfect bed she made.

Because, you see, the yard was their relationship, or whatever was keeping them connected. 

Beam is the ground.

Because, you see, the quilt is her marriage, and her family.

Beam is the autumn.

And, like, yes it is poetic. Or well crafted. But that doesn’t mean that, 20 years later, I have to like the intent behind the lyricism. 

Though even with as fragile and entitled as Beam does come across in the larger picture of the song, at least within this interpretation, it is still objectively stunning how he continues to push the narrative forward, continuing to effortlessly create these flickers and moments of time passing. “She’s chosen to believe in the hymns her mother sings,” he reflects near the end of the second verse. “Sunday pulls its children from their piles of fallen leaves.”

Within the second half of the song, as Beam continues, unrelenting, he oscillates between a bitterness, and a wistfulness, with the final, climactic verse of the song being a collision of them both. “She’s chosen where to be, though she’s lost her wedding ring,” he observes, then just a few lines later, “My hands remember hers—rolling ‘round the shaded ferns. Naked arms, her secrets still like songs I never learned.” 

And within the exploration of time, and life, and distance, something that Beam introduces within the final verse—the final line, really, is the notion of fear. Specifically the fear of being alone, though here, he pairs with a kind of fear of being forgotten, and an assurance of sorts that isn’t the case.

“Only now I do believe sometimes, with the windows closed, she’ll sit and think of me,” he says, moments before the song reaches its emotional peak. “But she’ll mend his tattered clothes, and they’ll kiss as if they know. A baby sleeps in all our bones, so scared to be alone.”

Beam’s voice, for as much as it can, given its timbre, soars on the last line, in such a robust, layered way, and the music around him swells, with the somber, simple piano melody taking over. And I will admit that, even within the problems that I take with the depiction of male fragility and ego, and infatuation, or a tumultuous love, within “Passing Afternoon,” it is still a remarkable song—the kind of song that it is so easy to get caught up in, and the kind of song that does knock the wind out of you with the way it plays with your emotions, and creates all of these fragments—blurred a the edges but so vivid within their centers.

And it is that last line that, at least during my original introduction to Our Endless Numbered Days, that did have such an impact on me—the weight of it, perhaps, hitting me at just the right time, though I was certainly not within a place to truly comprehend the depth that, I think, it is getting to about fear, and loneliness, and a kind of terrible, desperate need for connection.

Because, the thing that I maybe knew but could not understand exactly, or articulate, during my final year of college and the year that followed, and only, I think, really found the right words to describe, just a few years ago, is that we do lose one another. We do fade away. Or we feel like there is a barrier that puts us in the position of being on the outside, looking in. And that there is this distance. This time. This life.

Our days feel numbered. Our days feel endless.

This time. This life. 

This distance.

*

In the past, I have written about the ways in which music either grows with you, or simply does not, as we move through time. There are the artists, and albums, that can certainly mean a lot to us at one point in our lives—albums that find us in that right, perfect moment, when we need them. Those artists, or those albums, can then, if they are lucky, and if time continues to be kind to the material, and if they are still, over the years, genuinely interesting or evocative, be brought with us as we age. 

The hope then is that we remain connected to that artist, and find something to enjoy or appreciate about the albums they release throughout their career as we remain active listeners.

This doesn’t always happen. Despite our best efforts.

We lose track. We lose interest. Our tastes change. We grow. The album or artist doesn’t, or grows in such a way that is less appealing to us.

Sam Beam, and his output as Iron & Wine, is one of those artists for me.

Because the truth is that, up until sometime in the early winter, I hadn’t really thought about Beam much at all until I remembered that a number of years ago, he had recorded a short, beautiful, and devastating cover of “Time After Time.” 

And I think that—or at least that kind of sound, is where Beam thrived the most with this project. That is not to say that an artist, as they grow more comfortable, should not experiment or grow in the scope of their sound—but in the case of Iron & Wine, the growth made the music much less accessible for me, as a listener, and a lot less interesting. 

I spent a lot of time with Our Endless Numbered Days in the spring of 2005—a spring, honestly, not unlike this one. A mild winter that eventually gives way to the early arrival of warmer days and a kind of longing that comes with nice weather. And while I was certainly attracted to a lot of the album then, at 21, there were a number of songs that I did not care for as much. 

And in returning to the album now, and in listening analytically, there are still a number of songs that I do not care for as much—they aren’t unlistenable, but what I realized about a lot of them, like “Teeth in The Grass,” Free Until They Cut Me Down,” and even “On Your Wings” and “Cinder and Smoke,” are arranged both musically and vocally in a way that does bother me, or give me pause. 

I am remiss to use the word “appropriation,” however, within the rootsy, bluesy, folksy, and very southern nature of those tunes—there is also something reminiscent of African American Spirituals within their aesthetic and tone, and for as sincere as Beam can be as a writer when it comes to the spectral, sparser material on the album where he is so earnest and saccharine, there is something that does come off as insincere in these moments on the album.

There is a hope, of course, that we remain connected to an artist and find something to enjoy or appreciate about the albums they release throughout their career as we remain active listeners. 

This doesn’t always happen. Despite our best efforts. 

We lose track.

And there is a hope, of course, a blind hope, that we remain connected to people that we have met, and wish to stay close to, and that we continue to foster some kind of relationship over time, and life, and distance That we remain active in one another’s lives. 

This doesn’t always happen. Despite our best efforts.

We lose track.

Because I am a sentimentalist, there are moments when I am wistful or nostalgic for that final year in college—August of 2004 until May of 2005. A year that was truly so formative for me—not just because I was being thrown out into the world after the four years spent sheltered in a liberal arts college in the Midwest, but because of who I was as I entered into that span of time, who I found myself becoming, and then the glimpses of who I might be.

I’m not sure at what point I realized how insufferable I must have been during this portion of my life—but there is, despite the time, and the life, and the distance that has formed between me, today, and the me of 20 years ago, part of that insufferable individual somewhere within.

I am a sentimentalist. And there are moments when I am wistful or nostalgic for the people that I knew, and spent so much time with that year. Friends, yes, certainly, like Colin. Because I wonder what is life is like now. And if he still listens to the albums, or artists, that he introduced me to when we were both so much younger than we are now. 

And I find that I am wistful or nostalgic for someone who, and it would be years before I really understood this or could ever articulate it properly, showed me that there is ultimately a difference between really loving somebody, and being “in love.” 

Love is a dress you made long to hide your knees.

I never thought that Our Endless Numbered Days was a perfect or a flawless record. Because it isn’t. More than anything else, for me, now, two decades removed from when it was released and two decades removed from the person I was when I first heard it, it is representative of a moment in time. One that was truly endless and numbered. It’s an album that time has not been unkind to, but it is something that, regardless of its placement on my record shelf, I had not really taken it with me through time, life, and distance, though within this intersection of time and life, what I am both surprised by, and not, is how the moments that resonated when I was young still resonate now—even more so, and for much different and for reasons that I understand.

It is representative of a moment, and it can still represent a moment—something still, quiet, beautiful, and perfect; something fleeting that we are trying to cling to with our fists tightly wrapped around it. 

The moments and the people we love and we lose. And the desperate need for connection we still look for when we are on the outside looking in.

One’s flowers we find ourselves desiring.

The baby that does really sleep in all our bones—scared to be alone. 

 

^{1- My intent was to mention the “band” name at some point in this piece but I got to the end without talking about it—Beam, apparently, while shooting a film within a general store, saw a supplement bottle labeled “Beef, Iron & Wine.”}