Song Exploder - Iron & Wine - Flightless Bird, American Mouth

Episode Date: February 18, 2026

This week, I wanted to go back and revisit the episode that I made with Iron & Wine in the fall of 2022 about the song "Flightless Bird, American Mouth." And there are a couple of reasons. One, there’s a new Iron & Wine album that’s coming out this month, called Hen’s Teeth. And secondly, I actually have a song of my own that’s coming out today, the same day as this episode, and it features Iron & Wine on the track. It’s called “Stray Dogs,” and it’s the first song from an album that I’m releasing in April, called In The Last Hour of Light. And this Iron & Wine episode of the podcast is what actually led to our collaboration on the song. I’d been a huge fan of Iron & Wine for two decades, and this live taping, which happened in Wimberly, Texas, at the Blue Rock Artist Ranch and Studio, was the first time that I got to meet Sam Beam from Iron & WineSo before we go back and listen to the episode itself, I thought it could be nice to talk to Sam about how this episode happened, and then how that led to the making of “Stray Dogs.” For more, visit songexploder.net/iron-and-wine.

You're listening to Song Exploder, where musicians take apart their songs, and piece by piece tell the story of how they were made. I'm Rishi Kesh Hirwe. This week, I wanted to go back and revisit the episode that I made with Iron and Wine in the fall of 2022. And there are a couple reasons. One, there's a new Iron and Wine album that's coming out this month, called Hens Teeth. And secondly, I actually have a song of my own that's coming out today, the same day as this episode, and it features Iron and Wine on the track. It's called Stray Dogs, and it's the first song from an album that I'm releasing in April called In The Last Hour of Light. This Iron and Wine episode of the podcast is what actually led to our collaboration on the song.

I'd been a huge fan of Iron and Wine for two decades, and this live taping, which happened in Wimberley, Texas at the Blue Rock Artist Ranch and Studio, was the first time that I got to meet Sam Beam from Iron and Wine. So before we go back and listen to the episode itself, I thought it could be nice to talk to Sam about how this episode happened and then how that led to the making of stray dogs. Sam, do you remember what your thoughts were leading up to the day when we met?

Oh, well, I'd heard some of your podcast, some of the song expletors, and so I would try to keep up when you're very familiar with someone's voice but have never seen their face. You know, it's always interesting to put the voice back into the mouth, the real mouth. And your voice fit right back into your face.

It was cool. Yeah, we were talking about bands that we liked, and it was interesting to hear how familiar, and having never met you, how familiar you were with my writing. It was a nice surprise. One of the things that was really special for me that day was to tell you the story about my mom in 2003 when she'd come to visit me for the first time in L.A., and I'd been listening to your first album so much. and my mom, you know, she enjoyed some of the music that I listened to.

Yeah, she's a huge post-punk fan, I'm sure. She's like, Fugazi only in the car. I get it, Risha, yeah, love it. But I said to my mom, I just, I love this album. You got to hear this song. And I played her upward over the mountain, just thinking that she would, you know, really enjoy it. But then to my surprise, she started crying. And I'd never seen her have that kind of reaction to music before.

And when we met, it'd been a couple of years since she'd passed away, but that's just a really precious memory to me. And it was very special for me just to be able to tell you that you had been responsible for this moment of connection between my mom and myself. So it was really, really special to get to do that taping. Right back at you, buddy. That was fun. And then something happened, which doesn't happen too often on the podcast, which is that we stayed in touch.

Yeah, that's right. I came into town with my daughter that time, and we all went to lunch. And, you know, I just find it better to have more friends than fewer. Yeah. And then a few months later, I texted you, and I said, Okay. I'm currently panicking a little. In a couple weeks, I'm going back to Blue Rock in Texas, where we did our live taping.

They have a program where they let four songwriters come stay for a week and work on music. And I've never done something like that. I'm very nervous about not writing anything at all and squandering the opportunity. I had maybe a weird idea. I was wondering if you might be willing to think of a prompt for me, a sort of assignment. I think not wanting to let someone else down might be more powerful than my own paralysis, not to burden you with my problems, but if it would be fun slash interesting for you. I love giving other people work, man.

It was great. And so you wrote back right away. You said, sure thing, try one of these, or all of them. write a confession and defend yourself for something you've never done pick a line from an obituary and use it as the first line of your song and the last one was describe a street you grew up on from the point of view of a stray dog oh yeah honestly it was pretty rare you imagine you're a dog yeah but for some reason it spoke to you and gave you know inspiration you need it as a starting point to go somewhere else

it made me immediately think of when i was eight years old I went to my mom's hometown in India, and there were just dogs running around on the street. And I was kind of scared of dogs growing up, and the idea of stray dogs was pretty scary. Yeah. But these dogs were just having fun. It was like we weren't even there.

The people did not matter to them at all. And they just had their own little community, and they were just running around having fun. And so that is the image that immediately came to mind. A pack of stray dogs by my uncles. house, tearing down the street, a streak of wild legs and open mouths in love with their lives and their being. Remembering that and remembering the feeling that I got from those dogs also reminded me

of the feeling that I had when I was younger and with my friends who I used to play in a band with. I thought about how much I missed them and how much I missed the way that, like, used to feel back then. We used to be that phrase. So before I even got to Texas, I wrote a draft of this song and I sent it to you. Yeah, it's cool. I thought it was fun that you jumped in.

It's a very meditative style that you have, and I thought it was really fun to hear where you went with it. You just happened to say the right combination of words to me. And that's a song that I would have never thought of without that phrase to bounce off of. So then when it came time to record it. time to record the album, I wrote to you and took another big swing and I asked if you would sing on it since it was already tied to you. And so much of the albums about my family and my mom and I had bonded over your music. Yeah. And you wrote back right away and you said, of course, no sweat, which is amazing. I can't believe the joy that poured out of them, mangy and lean.

What was the process like for you when you were recording the vocals for the song? I kind of I listened through a couple of times and see if it's something that I should sing over a bunch of stuff or just sort of duck in and out and just try to make an arrangement thing. So I was just trying to give weight to certain sections. Find a photograph of the four of us. New York 2 a.m. Yeah, I love digging into other people's melodies and seeing how I can participate. And then another person on this song is Billy Crockett,

owns Blue Rock where we did our episode and where I did that songwriting residency. And he's an amazing musician and he kind of brought us together. So I asked him to play the guitar solo on this song. I found like collaborations are the most exciting, to me anyway, because you never know. You got to be game and you got to sort of be vulnerable. But I find that that's the way to surprise yourself. When you get to a point like you write a lot of songs, it gets harder and harder to surprise yourself, but you start involving other people in it.

it's pretty easy. Well, I really can't thank you enough for being a part of it. It really, oh man. It's really incredible for me. That's amazing. You're so kind. It was a treat to participate. You know, making music is fun. Making music with friends is the best. Thank you so much for listening to this extended intro, and I hope you'll check out Stray Dogs, which is out now. You can go to songexploder.net slash stray dogs to listen. And if you want to stay in touch with me about my own music and the album that's coming up, please sign up for my newsletter. You can also find that on the Song Exploder website. The new Iron and Wine album is out February 27th. It's called Hens Teeth. But right now, here's the episode from November 2022 about the Iron and Wine classic, Flightless

Bird, American Mouth. In 2002, Sam Beam's first album as Iron and Wine was released on subpop records. He'd given them a bunch of demos, and rather than have him re-record those songs, they just released the demos themselves. Since then, he's put out five more full-length albums, and he's been nominated for multiple Grammys. For this episode, Sam looked back at the making of his song, Flightless Bird American Mouth, from his 2007 album, The Shepherd's Dog. A year after that album came out,

the song was used prominently in a scene in the movie Twilight, and it's been one of the most popular iron and wine songs ever since. I talked to Sam at Blue Rock Artist Ranch in studio in Wimberley, Texas, in front of a small audience. Coming up, you'll hear the original demo he recorded and how that transformed into the final version of the song. I'm Sam Beam, and I have a musical project called Iron and Wine. My family was growing, and I was traveling the world more,

traveling the country and the world and seeing more of the universe. We had been living in Florida for a while, and we were getting ready to move to Texas. That was also in a time right after 9-11, It was still pretty fresh. And the way that made us all feel differently about the world, or just the way the world was changing in that time. And I was also a young man coming to terms with histories that I had learned,

and I was reacting to this difference between the myth and the reality. That demo was a quick, went boy diving. That demo. was recorded in 2004, and it sounds like those early iron and wine records because I use the same process. I got the sense pretty early that it was like a rite of passage kind of story. It's me talking to America and describing our relationship. I used to multi-track the drums one head at a time, and so my kids and my wife at the time, they always complain about, you know, hearing this boom, boom, boom, you know, or a bang, bring,

You know, I was going to sit in the back room. At that point, I was definitely learning about demoitis as well, because if you develop a demo too well and you try to chase the thing, it's impossible. More with iron and wine after this. I was building my own studio, so I brought in Brian Deck, who had recorded the record before that, our endless number days. We did that in Chicago.

That was my first experience in a studio, and it was frustrating and illuminating everything. And so I got the bug, bought a bunch of gear, and he came to Texas and helped me set it up, and we got to work. I also had a bunch of kids, and I had to take them to school or change a diaper or whatever.

It was a mess. But it was also, you know, it was part of the adventure, setting up this mad factory at your house and trying to, you know, make a life out of it. And so, Brian would make a loop like some interesting loop and I would play a guitar and then go back and we would record everything else track by track.

I changed one of the lyrics from that demo that you played because I decided diving too deep for coins was better than my candy coins. I like the idea of reflecting on yourself as someone diving too deep for things that you were after and the other stuff was me just reminiscing about my neighborhood as a kid you know running around on the street lights. Then when the cops close the fit... I was also really into Allen Ginsberg at the time and some of the other beat poets just their way of describing America. A lot of incongruous images thrown up against each other. I think the beginning of it

but the imagery is innocent, and then it gets more complex and more frustrated as a thing goes on. Have I found you, flightless bird, the innocent part of America, or have I lost you, the American mouth, with a big pill stuck going down? Have I found you?

And then once I got to the idea of, like, America being a mouth, the rest kind of felt like that things are going wrong. This is Brian Deck. Brian's a drummer. It's one of the reasons I wanted to work with them because I wish I could go back in time

and be part of the rhythm section. I'm not that good, but that's where my heart is. And so I wanted a producer who loved that as much as me. What's interesting, you can hear this room, it's not like a treated room at all. It was just this round room. It was a terrible idea to record drums in there.

That's Rob Berger, playing the piano. I love bringing other musicians in. I mean, the demos are, you know, just me. And, you know, I can flesh it out a bunch, but the fun comes when you bring other people in and they expand what you're doing in a way that you would never imagine. Rob, the piano player is also an incredible accordion player. Mostly, I just wanted new voices, new sounds that I hadn't used before, and I had plenty to choose from because the early records were so sparse. That's a, you know, an acoustic electric guitar with a tool called the e-bow. It basically makes the string vibrate the way a violin bow would.

And so it gives this long sustain. My grandma used to play piano in church. And I remember as a tiny kid, like she would sing the harmonies, you know, standing beside me, you know, like listen to her. And the music in your ear just kind of starts to expand. Like, oh, that's fun. listening to her woke up something in my brain or tickled it in a way that just made it really happy.

At the time, I just really like stacking harmonies. Pissing on magazine photos those fishing lures thrown in the cold of Christ's mountain stream. Pissing on magazine photos those fishing lures thrown in the cold and clean blood of Christ mountain stream. I had done a bunch of hiking in the Sangre de Christo mountains in New Mexico, and so I was just kind of like using the words.

It's a roundabout, long-winded, fancy way to say, there are things, sacred things that I don't think are being treated as sacred. You know, there's something vulnerable is being exploited. Like, I think advertising is bullshit, that kind of thing. I mean, obviously, it serves a purpose. But, like, if you get lost in those things, you miss out on some of this beautiful, cold, clean, blood of Christ water. You know, it was just sort of this American feeling. The high piano stuff is Rob.

We had a really weird filter thing called this Sherman. And anytime we had a spot where we didn't know where to go, It was like, Sherman, see what happens. It was my studio, so for better for worse, I could work on it whenever I wanted to. I was able to approach it the way that I would, a painting. You work on something, walk away, clear your head, look at a lot of other painting to work on other stuff, and come back and address it in a totally different mindset, and usually have a new idea of how to approach it.

Like in the second section of this song where you're just sort of building more and more girth, you know, just making it thicker. The drones and all the different clangs and tambourines. It kind of starts quiet, and it gets joyous and a little haywireish, and it's fun. I wrote this song, and oddly enough, that's been the most well known from this movie that it was in, Twilight.

You know, it came out around the time they were filming this movie. And as far as I've been told the story, a reputable source told me that Kristen Stewart was listening to it in her headphones while they were blocking this dance scene. And she was just watching going, oh, this kind of fits. You know, you guys want to put this on some speakers. And they listened to it so many times. it just stuck in their brain and it became a replaceable song for them.

But yeah, it changed my life. You know, we were doing better than I had ever imagined. I don't know what I'm doing. I don't know how to read music. I don't know what I'm playing. I just enjoy making songs. I never imagined that this would be my career. And so I had already felt like the luckiest person on the planet.

And then when it got on the day, the soundtrack and the audience just sort of blossomed and bloomed in this way that I never imagined. It was a huge part of the building of my career. You never know, man. Never know where they're going to land. I feel like what happens in the song is a statement. This is what it was like when I was young and this is what I'm frustrated about now. Growing up and getting older and trying to understand how things work and just feeling unsettled. I don't feel like this narrator ever reached some kind of resolution.

I think it's just more of like things are different now and I don't think they're great. I don't know who I am. The flightless bird in the American mouth, you know, he feels like somewhere in between those things. Anytime someone's griping about the state of their country is because they're frustrated and don't feel like they can change it except by saying it. And I love America. I mean, it's fine to, like, love America and criticize it at the same time. That's what we do.

But we usually criticize the things we love the most. And now here's Flightless Bird American Mouth by Iron and Wine in its entirety. Visit SongExploder.net. You'll find links to buy or stream Flightless Bird American Mouth. Song Exploder and the show's theme music were created by me. I produced this episode with Craig Ely, with artwork by Carlos Lerma, music clearance by Kathleen Smith, and production assistance from Mary Dolan. Special thanks to Billy and Doty Crockett

at Blue Rock Artist Ranch and Studio, and special thanks to the folks at PRX who put the taping together. Song Exploder is a proud member of Radiotopia from PRX, a network of independent, listener-supported, artist-owned podcasts. You can learn more about our shows at Radiotopia.fm.

You can follow me on Twitter and Instagram at Rishi Hereway, and you can follow the show at Song Exploder. You can also get a SongExploder t-shirt at Songexploader.net slash shirt. I'm Rishi K. Sherway. Thanks for listening.