Top 45 Samuel Ervin Beam Quotes

I’m not a particularly macabre person.

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 to call the project that rather than use Sam Beam.

I have a short attention span.

Me, I’m a lazy bum, so I don’t shave.

I like to make things. When you make something, you work it and you work it until it’s done, and then you say ‘Look, here’s what I made.’

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 home remedies like castor oil, and one of them was a protein supplement called Beef, Iron & Wine. I just dropped the Beef part.

Making sad music, it’s not for me. I don’t find that interesting.

What’s around the corner is always more exciting than the corner that I’m on, unfortunately.

At art school you realize that in order to stay engaged you have to ignore the critics, good and bad.

I feel like anytime you write about people in an honest way, you can find connections to any issue you would like.

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 like good melodies and a great song.

I was just writing songs in my spare time, and recording because it’s fun to do, and Sub Pop called me and said they wanted to put some stuff out. I had to weigh whether I wanted to put the time into it because it’s a commitment. But, in the end, it seemed too good to pass up.

I don’t really listen to a lot of stuff that sounds real similar to me because I work on that kind of music all day. I end up listening to more jazz, stuff that I can’t really play.

Music is definitely cheaper and more immediate. But part of the draw of film to me is the multidisciplinary aspect. I always enjoyed film writing.

I’ve learned a lot from being on a major.

I was born in 1974, so I grew up listening to what was on the radio – my mom’s car sounded like Fleetwood Mac, because that was what was on the radio.

The Beatles showed with ‘Sgt. Pepper’s’ that you can make an album out of anything, just make it seem like it’s connected.

You can sand something forever. You can keep working on it. All the arts are like that: there’s no magical finish line. You get sick of working on it or you walk away.

I don’t like to be doing the same thing over and over again, so I keep trying other things.

I like to make fun records. Contrary to popular belief.

I learned early on that you do yourself a disservice trying to replicate the record onstage every night. As a player, and for the audience I think, it’s a mistake.

I don’t watch that much TV.

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 don’t really have a point to make. I just try to be surprised.

I’m a movie buff, and I’m interested in the craft of it.

I like to keep working and keep changing. It’s a hopeful, optimistic thing to think and sit about what you could do next. Maybe it’s blind optimism.

I’ve always liked string sections. I’m a sucker for melody, so it’s fun to have strings add more layer of melody in the arrangement.

I don’t sit and write records from start to finish. I write all the time, and when it’s time to record you just look and see what songs you’ve got that could work together as a group thematically.

I try to write humanistic songs.

I am not interested in political writing, because it’s limited in its scope. I try to write general, human kinds of songs, which suggest more than they explain. You can take a lot of different meanings, but hopefully everyone feels some kind of recognition.

Every musician that comes along teaches me something.

I’m very flattered the press wants to write about me.

Religion is a huge part of our consciousness. I grew up in the Bible Belt, so it’s our mythology. Those are the stories we learn as little kids at Sunday school. I’m not afraid to use the metaphors, because I think the stories are beautiful.

I went to art school, wanting to be a painter and then I got into photography. Then it was movies, and I liked the images. One of the things that interested me in film was that I was communicating in images. That was something I did intuitively and could not even talk about until I started having to do interviews.

You can’t predict what people are going to like. You have to stay true to your enthusiasm and obsessions.

All my songs usually borrow from my own life but pull from fantasy or other people’s stories that you hear, or something you read. It’s fun as a writer to pull from all those different places, and to connect them. But also, I don’t have an interesting enough life to strictly pull from that.

My day-to-day existence is, honestly, a little boring.

I would love to be able to do the pace that people used to do decades ago, where you’d make a record a year, or something was wrong with you.

I went to an art school and you learn very quickly there that you’re only as good as your next idea, not so much what you’ve got going on at the moment. And so I embraced that. It sunk in at an early point.

We all have holes inside. We need love.

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 meaning that you didn’t know that you could create.

Music is one of those things that if you play it safe, it can be incredibly boring.

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.

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?

I keep trying to make different records each time.