Iron & Wine Hen's Teeth LP (Transparent White Vinyl)

"I've always wanted to use that title," Sam Beam says of Hen's Teeth, his eighth full-length album and his sixth for Sub Pop Records. "I just love it. To me it suggests the impossible. Hen's teeth do not exist. And that's what this record felt like: a gift that shouldn't be there but it is."

Hen's Teeth and his previous album, Light Verse, are siblings of a sort. They were recorded during the same sessions after a year-long dry spell, with the same band, at Waystation studio in Laurel Canyon. "I'm at a point in my life where spontaneity is a lot more important to me. I'm a lot freer and I love making music more than ever. There are no right or wrong answers. You just pray for your luck and try your best."

In this case prayers were answered and luck struck hard. The musicians cohered so quickly that they were often getting songs recorded in just a few takes, sometimes at the rate of two or three per day. The two albums might therefore be thought of as fraternal twins: they share DNA and complement each other, but are defined as much by their differences as their similarities.

Light Verse (2024) took its name from a form of poetry that makes heavy use of wordplay, humor, and nonsense. It's a sweet and airy album, impressionistic, at times even flirting with abstraction, a hearty shaking off of the doom and gloom of the Covid era. The world of Hen's Teeth is earthier, darker, more robust and more tactile than that of Light Verse. The songs have titles like "Roses," "Robin's Egg," "Dates and Dead People," "Singing Saw." The cover is a portrait of Beam surrounded on all sides by flourishing ferns and other tropical plant life — a surreal scene that contrasts starkly with the cool blue-white palette of Light Verse.

As for the music, Beam says: "The experiments in this one were more with genre than with form. For the last couple years one of my go-to's has been Van Morrisson's Astral Weeks, that style where jazz musicians play folk music and it blossoms in different ways than folk musicians are normally interested in doing." The results nod to everything from Dock Boggs to Simon & Garfunkel to Tropicalia. And Beam continues to incorporate collaborations: "It's exciting, making it more of a family affair. Interacting with a bunch of friends and being blown away by what they can bring, musically and emotionally. I get to play all day with these people I love and they respond by giving me their most vulnerable, expressive self. It's the weirdest, best job ever."

Hen's Teeth features David Garza on guitar, Sebastian Steinberg on bass, and Tyler Chester on keyboards. Griffin Goldsmith, Beth Goodfellow, and Kyle Crane all play drums. Paul Cartwright handled string arrangements, and plays violin and mandolin among others. The indie-country trio I'm With Her appears on the ebullient lead single, "Robin's Egg," and again on the tender, mournful "Wait Up." Beam's daughter Arden contributes harmonies and backing vocals on three tracks. Born two months before the release of his debut album, The Creek Drank the Cradle (2002), she is now 23 years old and a musician herself — the first of his children to appear on one of his records.