Like David Byrne, Iron & Wine singer-songwriter and chief creative force Sam Beam treats the recorded versions of his tunes as moments in time and perhaps as starting points—and not as any definitive interpretation. An Iron & Wine song is a moldable, living entity, evolving as we evolve. This was evident throughout Iron & Wine’s West Palm Beach debut at the Kravis Center Monday night, in which Beam and a band of crackerjack collaborators performed a generous 21-song set, many of whose contents featured dramatic reinterpretations of back-catalog favorites. As Beam altered his familiar phrasings and his ensemble of violin/viola, keyboard, bass and drums contributed its own distinctive flourishes, austere ballads became up-tempo toe-tappers and vice versa, keeping us productively off-balance while immersing us in his vision of cosmic Americana.
“There’s a lot of people here,” Beam commented a few songs into the set, justifiably impressed at the robust Monday-night turnout at a venue as capacious as the Kravis’ Dreyfoos Hall. “Must be a subscription series.” Self-deprecating humor has always been one of Beam’s stocks in trade, and it was on display throughout the set, from his low-key call-and-responses with the audience to the stoppage of the unexpected early cut “Bird Stealing Bird” mid-song to comment on songwriting mechanics; the vibe in the room was so pin-drop silent that Beam himself was distracted by a spectator’s “shush.”
Selections from Iron & Wine’s underrated 2024 release Light Verse consumed the most real estate on the set list, flowing in and out of compositions from Beam’s impeccably rich archive, and collectively forming a veritable river of song—a pastoral tapestry of nature hymns, southern anthems and wry comments on human behavior, loss and transcendence. The show thrived on the tension between spontaneity and carefully planned production values, which added to the theatrical atmosphere—as in the breathtaking opening bars of “Flightless Bird, American Mouth,” which featured Beam’s unaccompanied tenor reaching heights of vulnerability amid smoke and crisscrossing stage lights.
Furthermore, the tour included delightfully immersive visual contributions from two members of the Chicago-based shadow puppetry collective Manual Cinema working their magic with a light box on many of the songs. Their work, created live onstage and projected behind the band, complemented Beam’s songwriting in bespoke ways, from the moving panels of cut paper in “Cutting It Close” to the atmospheric telephone wires of “On Your Wings,” a slow-burning highlight. For “Teeth in the Grass,” the puppeteers stroked a row of the titular blades in time to the drummer’s percussive coda, while a likeness of the northern lights manifested in “Yellow Jacket” just as Beam sung a lyric about aurora borealis.
The puppeteers’ finest hour came as the set list ended, dramatizing a rabbit being chased by a wolf in “Singers and the Endless Song” and then using one of the puppetmaster’s silhouetted bodies on “Call it Dreaming,” in which a car “drove” along her arm and a sun set into the crick of her neck—the visual capstone to an evening of multimedia reinventions.
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