Samuel Ervin Beam

“I have a certain amount of creative energy, and it used to go painting. Now most of it goes to music. I like to make things. I treat the songs more like poems than prose, so in that sense, I...”

“I don't necessarily enjoy playing concerts, although that has gotten more fun with a band. But the one thing I always have enjoyed is making records and being in that creative environment. A...”

“I like writing in an illustrative, descriptive way. I prefer describing to rather than explaining. One, I rarely have anything to say. It's much more interesting for me to discover some mean...”

“I recognized that a lot in my writing I'm trying to show both sides of the coin - the sour and sweet. Iron & Wine seemed to fit with that duality and I thought it would be more interesting t...”

“I don't want to single anyone out. I'll just say that there are a lot of not good band names out there.”

“I try to write humanistic songs.”

“A lot of the big-budget movies, craft-wise, are amazing, but have a boring story. And the indies have their idiosyncrasies.”

“My wife is a midwife, and there's only so many states where you can do that. Texas is a place where she can work.”

“Back in '98 or so when I was in film school I was working on lighting for a movie in Georgia, out in the middle of nowhere at a gas station. Inside the gas station they had a bunch of old ho...”

“I liked 'The Omen.'”

“I was raised in the suburbs. I wasn't on a plantation or anything.”

“I like ones that pertain to the music they make. Talking Heads does that somehow. More often than not band names are just a quirky joke that doesn't really stay funny for very long. It's lik...”

“I remember 'The Shepherd's Dog' record being not necessarily a political record, but a reaction to socio-political situations in America. And it didn't manifest itself as protest or propagan...”

“I like Wallace Stevens, Robert Frost, but some of the older ones it's hard for me to sit down with - when I sit down to read some poetry, I usually read more contemporary stuff.”

“I have a short attention span.”

“The things that have been most popular with people have always been a total surprise, and so I've never felt like I could really truthfully predict public taste, so why bother?”

“Well, for me, I grew up in the Carolinas, and it's our mythology. Those are the characters that we learn about how to live life and moral lessons. It wasn't Zeus and Athena. It was Job and J...”