#76, "The Trapeze Swinger," Iron & Wine (2004)

150 Favorite Songs: #76, "The Trapeze Swinger," Iron & Wine (2004)

Here’s a memory from a really good day I had once.

It was March, during SXSW, in 2013. At that point in my life, the festival was an absolute blur. I was freelancing for five different outlets at the same time that week—I think MTV, The Austin Chronicle, Spin (RIP), Details (RIP), and maybe Vanity Fair? It’s hard to remember—so my days usually involved riding my bike downtown to arrive by 10am, being out for interviews or shows or screenings until two o’clock in the morning, riding home and writing whatever I was supposed to file until four, and then grabbing a few hours of sleep before hopping onto my bike to do it all over again. There are times when my job isn’t really work in the way it was back when my job was loading moving trucks, but that stretch in my career was as enervating as any labor job I ever had. Even just thinking about it now makes me feel like I have strep throat.

But there was one afternoon when things slowed down. I wrote down all the details right afterwards, because I wanted to remember it.

It was a Friday, and because my life is sometimes just a never-ending lost verse to “It Was A Good Day,” I had two extra guest list spots to a party sponsored by Nonesuch Records, a label that puts out a lot of my favorite music, at the Hotel St. Cecilia, which is the sort of place that I only ever get to visit when I am invited to a party by a publicist. It’s a lovely space, beautiful lawns and giant trees for napping under and small, tasteful, well-designed buildings and never too many people, even during SXSW when everything is always overcrowded.

Kat had the day off, and my friend Tony was in town from Arkansas, so those two guest list spots were claimed. There were free tacos and Topo Chico. I was there to interview Devendra Banhart, but also mostly just to be in this calm space during a week that was very rarely calm, while Nonesuch artists played songs on the lawn to the fifty or so people who were there. So we ate tacos and listened to Emmylou Harris(!!) sing with Rodney Crowell while we sat under a tree. Devendra Banhart played, and then Sam Beam, from Iron & Wine, picked up his guitar and walked up to chair that served as a stage for the afternoon.

I’ve always loved his music. I found Iron & Wine early on—that first album came out at a time when I had an endless appetite for new music, and an ability to internalize songs on just a few listens—and I’ve loved the way that his growth as a songwriter has mirrored the way my tastes have evolved as a listener. His music is a regular presence in our house; Kat walks around singing his songs, and I’ve listened to Woman King and Kiss Each Other Clean and The Creek Drank the Cradle hundreds of times. So we moved right up front, Kat and Tony and I, pulling up chairs so we were maybe eight feet away from where he was playing, and he sang a song or two, then asked if anyone had any requests. I asked for “The Trapeze Swinger.”

“The Trapeze Swinger” isn’t a hit song. It’s really long—almost ten minutes, and it doesn’t have a chorus, just these endless swirling verses, with a magic trick on the recording where different instruments rise and then recede in the mix so you’re focusing on the bass and then the piano and then the guitar. It wasn’t on an album, either. Instead, it was released on the soundtrack to a 2004 Topher Grace/Scarlett Johansson rom-com called In Good Company (three and a half stars, pretty good). It was, according to an interview Beam gave once, written specifically for the movie, which is an incredible example of over-delivering on an assignment. Because it’s just so incredibly lovely. I mean, listen to it: That melody is gorgeous, and the words are delicate and sad and confessional in really beautiful ways, built around a motif of asking all of the ways the singer would like to be remembered, reflecting and reflected with nostalgia. (“please, remember me / fondly / I heard from someone you’re still pretty”? Jesus.) It’s just a wonderful song, the sort of semi-obscure thing that makes a fan feel like he’s sharing a secret with an artist.

That’s what most of the songs on this list are, really. Even the famous ones, even “Fast Car” and “Little Red Corvette” and “Forgot About Dre.” This is really just a list of songs that feel like secrets to me, that every time I hear them feel like artifacts that I’ve stored little pieces of my thoughts and feelings in that exist out in the world, but which belong to me. That hasn’t changed even as “The Trapeze Swinger” has become a little more of an Iron & Wine staple—when he put out the soundtrack to his concert film, Who Can See Forever, last year (the title of which also comes from this song), it led the live album off.

I know that the relationship between the artist and the fan isn’t exactly reciprocal; I’ve never met an artist who thinks about his or her own songs the same way I just described them, anyway. I’m sure it would be too strange. But that afternoon back in 2013, surrounded by my wife and my best friend, Sam Beam sang one of those songs, just for us, because I’d asked him to. He sang all of the “remember me” lines on that lawn that afternoon, during that busy week, and there was no chance I’d ever forget it.