The 333 Best Pop Songs of the 2000s: #276

#276: "The Devil Never Sleeps" (2007) - Iron & Wine

Iron & Wine is a one-man band, and that man is Southener, family man, and former film professor (at the University of Miami) Samuel Beam. Beam's been playing folk/indie music for most of this decade, and he recently hit it pretty big, with a critically-acclaimed album and an appearance on Letterman. Personally, I don't get what all the fuss is about. Beam's music is a combination of folk and indie, acoustic guitar with some djembe and bongo and every now and then some eastern instrumentation. Beam's latest album (The Shepherd's Dog) contains more of the same stuff that Beam's recorded before, just with a much better production team (and much better session musicians). Nothin' new here, I thought when I first heard it. Move on.

But stuck in the middle of the album, almost as filler, is a short (barely eeking past the two-minute mark) little bluesy whatnot, and it's the best song Beam's ever done. It's unlike anything else on the album (or in his entire repetoire). His vocals are even more laid-back than normal, as his voice is filtered through some type of megaphone effect. Here, his voice sounds like a half-octave lower kin of Canned Heat's Bob "The Bear" Hite's falsetto stylings. In fact, the entire record sounds like some type of Canned Heat outtake, though it's a bit slower than the Sterno the Heat cooked up, and the background vocals here are more pop (think post-Blue Joni Mitchell records) based than blues based.

The song's verses are cryptic and creepy (which is partially--partially--why I chose this one for the first song for October--the other reason is the song's title). Each verse sets a different nightmarish scene with no easily-discerned meaning, but with a definite feel of disturbing dysfunction, an uneasy mixture of Flannery O' Connor's Southern Gothic Catholocism and Paul Bowles's cultural disassimination themes. The scariest line, though, is the refrain (there's no true chorus): "Everybody bitchin'/'There's nothin' on the radio.'" That line's terror lies in the fact that both aspects of its dichotomy are frightening. On one hand, the line underscores society's (or maybe just Beam's friends) shallowness, as with all the atrocities in the world--and the ones presented here in this song--what concerns us most is the superficial aspects of life; on the other hand, the fact that nothing is on the radio--either literally or figuartively, it works both way--implies that there's no comfort or solace or shelter from the nightmares anymore. We don't have the music (no matter what type) that soothes our souls, nothing to keep back the madness and the horrors, nothing to keep us from the depths of Hell.

The devil never sleeps alone, true, and we don't want to be his bedmate. If we as American society don't act to stop the overreaching grasp of the greedy, slimy suits and corporate CEOs (all to the tune of 777 billion dollars), then they'll be more manufactured wars and more corporate bailouts (but we'll call them "rescues") and more corporate-controlled entertainment, and then we'll be forcefed our music and our freedom whether we like it or not, accused and tried and convicted and fined because we didn't buy all our music from retail outfits, and they won't even need evidence to prosecute and convict us (that last part sounds ludicrous doesn't it? It should--it is ludicrous--and it's already happened). I think Beam already sees this happening, and that's why he hired some seriously-talented session musicians (including one hell of a great barrelhouse piano player) for this track to counter his characters' assertions of radio nowhere; they cook up some ghost road blues hot enough to beat the devil at his own game...if they are ever allowed to play.