Iron & Wine Leaves Nostalgia Off the Setlist at Stable Hall

There's a social media trend I've caught wind of lately in which people film the reactions of teachers, doctors, athletes and other professionals when unexpectedly addressed by their full government names, apparently amused by the reminder that these people have identities beyond the titles we know them by.

Iron & Wine comes from an era when indie musicians often adopted pseudonyms easily mistaken for band names, and knowing the name of the person behind the moniker was the kind of useless knowledge that spared pretentious indie kids from being called posers, even if acquiring it required little more than a visit to Wikipedia to discover that Iron & Wine was actually a guy named Sam Beam.

Someone in the audience called out “Sam Beam!” during his Thursday night performance at Stable Hall, but he didn’t react.

Throughout the evening, concertgoers shouted requests for old favorites, including “Naked as We Came,” which Beam met with an amused smirk but no intention of indulging.

“Hmm, lot of idea people here tonight,” he laughed. “We will not be playing those, though.”

Instead, Beam performed the less heartbreaking “Paper and Stone” and explored unrequited love in the cheerier tones of “In Your Ocean” and “Defiance, Ohio,” all from his latest album, Hen’s Teeth. He also reached deep into his back catalog for songs like “Why I Hate the Winter,” which he introduced as the first song he ever wrote. He joked that Texans probably wouldn’t mind hearing it, considering we don’t actually experience winter. He would know. He used to live on the outskirts of Austin.

I first heard Iron & Wine during my sophomore year of high school, when a friend added the Twilight soundtrack, which included “Flightless Bird, American Mouth,” to my MacBook’s iTunes library. (I had the good sense to wait until I was a full-grown adult before actually watching the movie, though.)

By senior year, I'd grown so fond of his music that I auditioned for my school's talent show with his cover of the Postal Service's "Such Great Heights." I made it halfway through before being struck by the harrowing realization that people were actually listening to me sing and play guitar, at which point I promptly went mute.

Songs like "Resurrection Fern" and "The Trapeze Swinger" still conjure memories of stories I'd read in The Norton Anthology of Literature during college, back when I somehow possessed the attention span to read and listen to music simultaneously.

Naturally, he played none of the songs I just mentioned.

I suppose that's the thing about growing up with an artist's music. We form attachments to songs their creators know nothing about, assigning them memories and meanings entirely our own. Then, years later, when we're no longer broke college kids and can finally afford to see them perform, we show up hoping to hear the soundtrack to our former lives. Meanwhile, the person onstage has continued living, writing and making music.

And Beam seemed perfectly content to decline to indulge anyone's nostalgia.

Opening the evening was Irish folk outfit DUG, whose between-song banter was arguably as entertaining as the music itself.

At one point, they launched into a story so absurd that no one could have predicted where the next sentence would lead. It involved playing a cowboy-themed festival aboard a boat in Sweden, getting drunk on wine from a tap, judging a mullet contest and exchanging phone numbers with an 85-year-old woman whom one of the musicians now considers the love of his life.

Their set included a song about a friend who was apparently a much better friend than a skateboarder, and they even rewarded audience members who correctly answered trivia questions with free merchandise.

That conversational ease carried into Iron & Wine's performance, though Beam's humor was drier and his relationship with the audience a little more mischievous.

Perhaps the funniest part of the evening was realizing I'd spent nearly two decades attaching profound emotional significance to someone's music, knowing his full name and even where he once lived, only to finally see him in person and discover he's just a guy who likes making jokes and has absolutely no intention, much less an obligation, to revisit my past with me.

There's probably a lesson in there somewhere about mistaking familiarity for intimacy, and another about the futility of standing still while life moves on. Nostalgia has a way of convincing us that the past is worth lingering in, but while we're busy revisiting memories attached to old songs, the people who wrote them have been busy making new ones.