Iron & Wine - Flightless Bird, American Mouth

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 Hrishikesh Hirway. This episode of Song Exploder is brought to you by Booking.com. My wife and I have been thinking about visiting some of our friends in Philadelphia this summer. And so while we've been daydreaming, I've been looking on Booking.com to check out places where we might stay in Philly. I put in our dates, and there are over 100 options listed. So I'm gonna start narrowing things down. I'm gonna choose places that have an eight or higher rating and a king bed available. And then I'm gonna focus on hotels in one of my favorite neighborhoods, the Rittenhouse Square neighborhood. And look, there's a hotel here with a 9.0 rating, and there's a note on the site that says, "Couples in particular like this hotel. They rated it a 9.5 for a two-person trip." All right, so look at that. That sounds pretty awesome. You can find exactly what you're booking for. Booking.com, booking.yeah. Book today on the site or in the app. Summer, it's when we share more time, more memories, and more photos. And at AT&T, the iPhone 17 Pro is your summer essential. Its center stage front camera auto-adjusts the frame to fit everyone into group selfies. You don't even have to turn your phone. And AT&T makes sharing those pics with everyone easy. Right now at AT&T, ask how you can get the iPhone 17 Pro on them with eligible iPhone trade-in, any condition. Requires trade-in of iPhone 15 Plus or higher, excluding iPhone 16E and 17E. Requires eligible plan. Terms and restrictions apply. Subject to change. Visit att.com/iphone or visit an AT&T store for details. [musical transition] This week, I wanted to go back and revisit the episode that I made with Iron & Wine in the fall of 2022, and there are a couple 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 [singing]. 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 & 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 Wimberley, Texas, at the Blue Rock Artist Ranch and Studio, was the first time that I got to meet Sam Beam from Iron & 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 podcasts, you know, some of the Song Exploders, and so I would, I would try to keep up. And when, you know, 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 [chuckles]. And your voice fit right back into your face. It was cool.

[laughs]

Yeah, we were