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 Rishikesh Hirway.
This episode contains explicit language.
In 2002, Sam Beam's first album as Iron & Wine was released on Sub Pop Records.
He had given them a bunch of demos,
and rather than have him re-record those songs, they just released the demos themselves.
Since then, he's put out five more full-length albums, and he's been nominated for multiple Grammys.
For this episode, Sam looked back at the making of his song,
Flightless Bird, American Mouth, from his 2007 album, The Shepherd's Dog.
A year after that album came out, the song was used prominently in a scene in the movie Twilight,
and it's been one of the most popular Iron and Wine songs ever since.
I talked to Sam at Blue Rock Artist Ranch and Studio in Wimberley,
Texas, in front of a small audience.
Coming up,
you'll hear the original demo he recorded and how that transformed into the final version of the song.
I'm Sam Beam, and I have a musical project called Iron and Wine.
My family was growing, and I was traveling the world more,
traveling the country and the world, and seeing more of the universe.
We had been living in Florida for a while, and we were getting ready to move to Texas.