20 years of ironandwinetour's Woman King! Aside from the immediacy and intimacy of his recorded work, there is one thing (aside from the evidently ceaselessly noteworthy fact that he sports a beard…) clear about Iron & Wine’s Sam Beam: he is wonderfully prolific. Recorded in August 2004 with Brian Deck at his Engine Studios, Iron & Wine’s Woman King is striking both for its broadened palette (percussion, piano, violin, electric guitar) and its thematic focus on female characters both archetypal and personal. The latter is mostly coincidental, a larger batch of songs yielding recurrent imagery when pared down for this EP. The increasingly complex beauty of Iron & Wine’s albums might best be summed up by the following, from SPIN (in a review of Our Endless Numbered Days):“…Beam is a fearlessly accessible songwriter, framing his melancholy in concrete imagery and solid, inviting melodies. He writes with the self-confidence of a man at peace with his gauzy gifts. He sings like a father tal...