999,983: Iron and Wine — Resurrection Fern

The careful listener to this or any track by Iron and Wine may notice something gentle yet persistent lurking amongst the delicately strummed guitars. It is a quiet sound, like that which a woman's soft hands might make as they brush against the sides of her linen skirt, or the final sigh of a single dying bee as it lies prone and motionless within the grass on the far side of an evergreen glen. Many believe that this noise is some ambient artifact of the recording process, or that it is entirely imagined and doesn't exist at all. In fact, this sound is Samuel Beam's singing voice.

Now I have a thing or two to say about singing voices, particularly about the male singing voice. A man's voice must be a full throated manly sound, a thick muscular thing that requires a manful abundance of power and will to control. This goes back for our distant forefathers, naked and screaming, who first used the human voice as our most highly developed weapon against a savage world. Whether they were howling in rage to put the fear of armageddon into the the heart of their enemy, or mewling in fevered lust to attract the choicest mate over to their filthy patch of weed, the tool in question never changed. It was the voice of a man.

By this reasoning I should find the barely there vocals of Iron and Wine to be annoying beyond compare. Instead I find them only kind of annoying. And on the song Resurrection Fern I find them annoying not at all. How is this possible? Well for starters, I'm sure that this song has gotten more than a couple dudes laid. What's more manly than that? Today's modern indie ingenue is only going to find Barry White playing softly in a dimly-lit dorm room to be either campy or creepy. So even if the ladies have gotten it all wrong, it's a good idea to learn to like this shit. Furthermore, double, triple and quadruple tracked enough times and Samuel Beam's breathy little voice gets to sounding pretty cool. I particularly like the way the layered vocals build over the course of this song until, by the final chorus, they become something you might notice. Finally, there are times when the pressure to be a man just gets to be too much. You want out. You want to put your dick on the shelf and take a break from it all. At times like those I have two words for you: Iron...and Wine.

Resurrection Fern - Iron & Win...