How I learned to Fall in Love and Inevitably Lose that Love in about 3 minutes: Or Iron & Wine

Call me a pessimist but when I think of first love I think entirely of a love that was lost. This may, in fact, be because I lost my first love relatively recently. Directly after the break up absolutely everything would devastate me. And I mean everything….I seem to recall a particularly proud moment of mine while at work when checking out someone buying an Animal Collective CD. The mere sight of the record (Feels) had me running teary eyed from the registers, leaving behind a thoroughly confused and abandoned customer. The days of such easy sense memory triggers are over now though. Nowadays it takes just the right cue to get me going; and more times than not that trigger is musical. Furthermore to really hit that especially exquisite feeling of overwhelming love mixed with overwhelming loss I have to listen to Iron and Wine.

Sam Beam’s music is not just deeply immersed in my relationship with my first love (i.e. a first kiss tracked against “Each Coming Night”). For me, it is first love itself. I fall deeply in love with Beam’s voice every time I hear it. Disregarding his poetic lyrics for a moment, his voice alone washes over the listener like warm milk nd honey (to borrow Kerouac’s description of being high atop a mountain in Dharma Bums). Yet, inevitably, one cannot disentangle the beauty of Beam’s voice from his profoundly moving lyrics. “Naked as We Came,” for instance, is able to evoke, in the mind’s eye, a breath taking scene of a couple lying in bed (after making love, of course) covertly discussing how they will be together forever. Beam softly sings, “She says if I leave before you darling don’t you waste me in the ground/ I lay smiling like 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 is able to do what countless other musicians and filmmakers fail to do (and continue to fail to do when they attempt to combine Beam’s music with sappy love scenes…I’m looking in your direction Twilight Franchise). He is able to reproduce a moment where true love lies- in the seemingly unimportant moments, in love infused tête-à-têtes.

My ex-boyfriend once said that Beam could write such romantically awe-inspiring music because he must be living in some type of familial bliss. For all my failed relationships, I’d like to believe that Beam lives what he preaches. It would be more appropriate, though, for Beam to be suffering with the rest of us who have loved and lost. The eventuality of loosing love appears to be a reoccurring theme in Beam’s songs. For, as “Naked as we Came” plainly states “one of us will die…” The end of love is inevitable. That appears to be the true and honest beauty of his music. Even in Beam’s ability to evoke the breathtaking and heart swelling beauty of love, he simultaneously presents the inevitable end of that love. Whether the death of that love is of natural causes or of irregular (and devastating) complications, it will, in fact, end. And thus, there lies the essence of the concept of first love- it’s overpoweringly wonderful but unfortunately it must end; for it is merely the first and not the only.

Oedipa Wheeler

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