“I’ve always wanted to use that title,” Sam Beam says of Hen’s
Teeth, his eighth full-length album and his sixth for Sub Pop
Records. “I just love it. To me it suggests the impossible. Hen’s
teeth do not exist. And that’s what this record felt like: a gift that
shouldn’t be there but it is.”
Hen’s Teeth and his previous album, Light Verse, are siblings of a
sort. They were recorded during the same sessions after a
year-long dry spell, with the same band, at Waystation studio in
Laurel Canyon. “I’m at a point in my life where spontaneity is a lot
more important to me. I’m a lot freer and I love making music more
than ever. There are no right or wrong answers. You just pray for
your luck and try your best.”
In this case prayers were answered and luck struck hard. The
musicians cohered so quickly that they were often getting songs
recorded in just a few takes, sometimes at the rate of two or three
per day. The two albums might therefore be thought of as fraternal
twins: they share DNA and complement each other, but are
defined as much by their dierences as their similarities.
Light Verse (2024) took its name from a form of poetry that makes
heavy use of wordplay, humor, and nonsense. It’s a sweet and airy
album, impressionistic, at times even flirting with abstraction, a
hearty shaking o of the doom and gloom of the Covid era. The
world of Hen’s Teeth is earthier, darker, more robust and more
tactile than that of Light Verse. The songs have titles like “Roses,”
“Robin’s Egg,” “Dates and Dead People,” “Singing Saw.” The cover
is a portrait of Beam surrounded on all sides by flourishing ferns and other tropical plant life - a surreal scene that contrasts starkly with the cool
blue-white palette of Light Verse.
As for the music, Beam says: “The experiments in this one were more with genre
than with form. For the last couple years one of my go-to’s has been Van Morrisson’s
Astral Weeks, that style where jazz musicians play folk music and it blossoms in
dierent ways than folk musicians are normally interested in doing.” The results nod
to everything from Dock Boggs to Simon & Garfunkel to Tropicalia. And Beam
continues to incorporate collaborations: “It’s exciting, making it more of a family
aair. Interacting with a bunch of friends and being blown away by what they can
bring, musically and emotionally. I get to play all day with these people I love and
they respond by giving me their most vulnerable, expressive self. It’s the weirdest,
best job ever.”
Hen’s Teeth features David Garza on guitar, Sebastian Steinberg on bass, and Tyler
Chester on keyboards. Grin Goldsmith, Beth Goodfellow, and Kyle Crane all play
drums. Paul Cartwright handled string arrangements, and plays violin and mandolin
among others. The indie-country trio I’m With Her appears on the ebullient lead
single, “Robin’s Egg,” and again on the tender, mournful “Wait Up.” Beam’s
daughter Arden contributes harmonies and backing vocals on three tracks. Born
two months before the release of his debut album, The Creek Drank the Cradle
(2002), she is now 23 years old and a musician herself—the first of his children to
appear on one of his records.