Rock, Pop & Hip-Hop
We are, increasingly, a mashed-potato society. The concept applies not to our citizenry's pillow-soft stomachs but culture and technology's renegade meldings. Like a horse and donkey's loving creating a mule, such couplings birth unexpected and, occasionally, ingenious offspring.
Hip-hop has made collaboration, theft and mash-ups its business model. Seventies funk tracks become '90s beats. Pharrell lends vocals to Snoop Dogg like a library. Canal Street mix-tape vendors sell CDs of dubious copyright. Yet let's not grow old and ear-hairy discussing hip-hop. Instead, hop to indie and rock. In this realm, bands hone a singular sound and, too often, ride that horse into the sunset. For every Green Day reinvented as an American Idiot, we find the Rolling Stones, powered by Ensure and a sound unchanged since Stonehenge.
Short of genre-hopping rebirth, like Elliot Smith moving from hard-core frontman to tender heartbreak salesman, artists are drastically mashing up their sound and stepping outside the sonic box. Several years ago, Ben Gibbard, lead singer for heart-on-their-sleevers Death Cab for Cutie, and electronica artist Dntel (Jimmy Tamborello) partnered musically via mail. Tamborello sent beats, Gibbard vocals and lyrics. The alchemic-and excellent-outcome was the Postal Service: Gibbard's wistful singing tempered Dntel's gumdrop instrumentals. Two great tastes tasted great together.
In this vein we find the progeny of Iron and Wine and Calexico, He Lays in Reins. Iron and Wine is the moniker of Sam Beam, a bushy-bearded singer-songwriter with a voice as gentle as a ladybug watching a sunset. Arizona-based Calexico, conversely, mimics their dusty, mariachi-flavored Southwestern locale.
Three years ago, Beam asked Calexico to help re-record his homebrewed four-track debut, The Creek Drank the Cradle. Yet a curious thing happened on the way to the recording studio: nothing. Time constraints and scheduling snafus nixed the session. That failure bred success: The minimalist Creek was a hit. Beam's star then zoomed into the stratosphere after his cover of, ironically enough, Postal Service's "Such Great Heights."
Leap ahead to last December. The collaboration scheme still ping-ponged between Beam and Joey Burns', a founder of the rotating Calexico constellation. Beam had some orphan tunes. And time. So he flew to Calexico's Tucson, Arizona, home. Burns greeted Beam's arrival with trepidation: How would their musical grooves mesh? The night before holing up to record, Burns, pedal steel player Paul Niehaus and Beam convened for a jam session, and "we immediately started changing the songs in dynamics, tempo and interpretation," Burns says. "I knew there would be a room for the collaboration to accommodate both styles."
When Burns and Co. were mixing the He Lays sessions, they emailed Beam rough cuts. Burns felt the tracks reeked of overwhelming Calexico, but Beam would listen to them and say, "'No, no. Put more stuff in there,'" Burns has said. "[Beam] liked the idea of this being something different that what he would do with an Iron and Wine record, where the arrangements might be a little more minimal."
Their result is a new classification. Call it Southwestern bedroom pop. Beam's lazy, porch-swing voice is loosely, yet expertly tethered to Calexico's desert-road soundscapes. Like on opener "He Lays in the Reins," a hushed, tender waltz with grand flourishes like Spanish vocals by flamenco veteran Salvador Duran. Country and western is taken for a spin on "16, Maybe Less," backed by Natalie Wyants' angelic singing. Perhaps no song is quite a departure from Calexico and Iron and Wine's catalogue as "History of Lovers." On it we find Mississippi-style steel guitars, big horns, ivory tickling and harmonies sweeter than pecan pie. What is this, a Grand Ole Opry hootenanny?
Reins' greatest accomplishment is stretching Beam's bedroom tunes like snug sweatpants, giving them space to breathe and explore new terrain. This concept is enhanced and revised on the live tour, which sees Calexico and Beam trading solo sets ("We arm-wrestle [to see who opens], and I always win," Beam jokes, "because they're pussies") before assembling onstage for new surprises.
"Sam loves to change versions of his tunes on tour, and so do we," Burns says. "There's always this search for a sense of discovery in the songs, whether they are old or newly penned."
Changing songs, Beam adds, "makes life surprising."
As for future musical curveballs and mash-ups, Beam is enamored by the idea, and Calexico is already entering new terrain. "On our new album, we asked our friends in Barcelona's Amparanoia to add vocals en español and piano to a new song. A few days later, we were sent back these amazing tracks," Burns says. "Maybe there is a bright future for similar types of collaborations. I should hope so." Iron and Wine and Calexico will share the stage December 4?6 at Webster Hall, 125 E.11th St. (betw. 3rd & 4th Aves.), 212-353-1600; 7, $25.