Full circle

Beam returns to the label that birthed him

NEW YORK — Songwriter Sam Beam prefers to think of his career direction less as looking back and more as going full circle.

Whatever terminology is employed, Beam — who records under the name Iron & Wine — has returned both to the Sub Pop label where his career started and the warm, acoustic sound of his early material. His sixth album,

is out now. “You can’t really listen to this record and say it sounds like the old records,” Beam says. “There’s a lot more going on. But at the same time, the approach felt familiar again. I was writing more introspective songs and approached the making of this record in a more intuitive way. It felt similar, but it felt like it took me doing all of the other records to get to this one.”

The North Carolina-born Beam was a film professor who painted and wrote songs on the side before he caught the attention of Sub Pop, which released the first Iron & Wine disc in 2002.

He describes much of his subsequent work as trying on different sounds and styles to see what fits.

“I was just sort of doing music for a hobby and won the lottery, basically, and had a music career,” he says. “So I had to figure out what I wanted to be, because I hadn’t thought about it.”

Beam makes some of the loveliest music in the indie rock world. He dates his melodic sense to the hymns he heard while going to church as a boy, and his parents’ Motown records. He enjoys listening to harder stuff, to punk and metal, but he recognizes his strengths and what fits his voice.