All in Good Time

Where earlier Iron & Wine albums felt like recordings made in candlelight, this song arrives fully lit, the production opening outward into something almost orchestral in its generosity. Horns breathe warmly beneath Beam's voice, and there is a looseness in the rhythm section that borrows from soul and late-night jazz without announcing the debt. The effect is of a man who has been through enough seasons to stop bracing for the next one — not resignation, but a hard-earned patience that has cured into something close to grace. Beam's delivery here is warmer and more direct than his early whisper-quiet recordings; the voice has filled out, the ornaments stripped away, leaving something plainspoken and unhurried. The song carries a deep confidence in the idea that things arrive when they are ready, that forcing the rhythm of life produces nothing worth keeping. It belongs to a lineage of Southern American songwriting that finds theology in the domestic and the seasonal — in the slow turning of things rather than in rupture. You would put this on during a long drive home after something difficult has finally resolved itself, when the relief is too quiet to celebrate but too real to ignore.