For the Record: "Our Endless Numbered Days"

Finality is a difficult concept to grasp when you’re young. Every piece of time felt like an eternity, and “forever” was a word tossed around like a plaything.  And at the same time, everyone was changing so quickly, spreading out and growing up—which meant that no matter how tight our hands could hold, things ended and we had to keep on growing.

For a long time, I didn’t understand the title of Iron & Wine’s  “Our Endless Numbered Days.” I dismissed it as a pretty string of words and moved into the album itself. I was greeted by Sam Beam’s lovely, but troubled vignettes. Again, I didn’t understand the truth of the album right away. The songs were pretty, beautiful even, and that was enough. I wrote the line, “She says if I leave before you darling / Don’t you waste me in the ground,” in my notebooks without really comprehending what Beam was saying.

I found this album when I was falling in love.  I learned “Love and Some Verses” and I sang it for another, and I meant it. I understood this song before I understood the rest, and when I sang, “Love and some verses you hear / Say what you can say / Love to say this in your ear / I’ll love you that way,” I imagined that every waver in my voice was matching one of Sam Beam’s own. Beam’s most powerful lines are often his most gentle, with heavy ideas tied to light imagery. I was 15, but when I sang, “Love is a dress that you made long / To hide your knees,” and ended the song with “May I be weaved in your hair?” I felt truly shaken. Beam often associates love with simplicity and youth, and I found in those sunlit lyrics a shape for my own feelings.

Most of the songs on “Our Endless Numbered Days” are not so pure in their descriptions of love, however. Much of the album centers around a narrator’s struggle to reconcile continuing feelings of love with a disappearance. It would take some experience with endings before I could see that. I rediscovered this album when I was crashing out of love. I would revisit “Naked as We Came” and find the other half of the line I loved so much, “I lay smiling like our sleeping children”—“one of us will die inside these arms.”  I began to see that what this album accomplishes so beautifully is a portrait of love and death as inseparable partners. It does not set up death or endings as barriers to love; rather it uses them as backdrops. Sam Beam ends the song by singing, “One will spread our ashes round the yard”—the lovers in the song speak of death in light of love, and the peace with which they discuss so final an end illuminates the fullness of their devotion.

The second half of the album is breathtaking, both musically and lyrically, to the point that it is easy to miss the melancholy between the notes. Heartrending lyrics rest lightly upon Beam’s delicate and dazzling finger-picked rhythms, and for a long while, I let their beauty obscure their meaning. “Radio War” is an angelic song about a war widow’s grief, and there is pain in every word when Beam whispers, “And the beast, never seen / Licks its red talons clean / Sara curses the cold / ‘No more snow, no more snow, no more snow.’” Directly following this song is “Each Coming Night,” in which the narrator is asking his lover what he or she will say after he has passed. Beam sings, “Will you say to them when I’m gone / ‘I loved your son for his sturdy arms / We both learned to cradle then live without.’” Again and again, Beam uses death as a relief in order to show the depths of love. He paints lovers in moments of grief and contemplation, separated by death but still much bound by love. As I listened, I started to feel more and more at peace with endings as a piece of a complete story—a piece as important as any other.

Sam Beam’s quiet depictions of romantic love are powerful in their reserve. He sings passionately about love colored by rain and by bougainvillea blooms, saying everything that needs to be said with honesty, without an ounce of melodrama. In the grippingly tender “Fever Dream,” he sings, “Some days, like rain on the doorstep / she’ll cover me with grace in all she offers.” His romances are not painted in bold strokes of scarlet adjectives, but rather shaded with careful imagery, and this makes every rise and fall of his narratives feel as real as his voice murmuring in your ear. Every tale that he slowly spins, then unravels stings fresher for its simplicity, its genuineness. In “Sodom, South Georgia,” when Beam murmurs the lines, “Papa died smiling / Wide as the ring of a bell / Gone all star white / Small as a wish in a well,” he whispers because he has no need to shout.

Growing up felt like a series of endings that I was never quite ready for. I would leave one school for another, I would leave some friends for others, or I would leave one identity for another. I remember when I finally understood what the phrase “Our Endless Numbered Days” meant. I had reached the last song of the album, “Passing Afternoon,” in which Beam carries us through four seasons of a romance, deftly weaving in many of the ideas he establishes throughout the record. I thought of each song, each with its own romance and its own bittersweet ending, and I thought of all the ends I had felt, one after the other. I thought of how many goodbyes I had had, and how many of those had actually been good. I thought of how many I must have already forgotten and how many there were to come. I thought about growing up and growing apart from the people I knew. I thought that I finally understood what Beam was trying to tell me: that there are things that drift away, like our endless numbered days.

—Staff writer Alexander Tang can be reached at tang@college.harvard.edu.