Iron & Wine, Calexico, Glen Hansard, Kathleen Edwards and friends played 'Fallon' and WFUV holiday show (pics & video)

December 16, 2013

Iron & Wine, Nick Lowe and more @ Beacon Theatre
WFUV
WFUV

[Sam] Beam sang, in his gentle high tenor, about memories and connections, families and lovers. His songs, at their core, are folky ballads that mingle storytelling with more abstruse thoughts. But he has embellished them in various ways through the years: with folk-rock, country, jazz, even a little R&B. The “In the Reins” EP was his first experiment with horns — Calexico‘s pair of mariachi trumpets — but not his last; two horn players from his current Iron and Wine band, Curtis Fowlkes on trombone and Stuart Bogie on saxophone and flute, were also on hand, giving some songs a nudge toward jazz.

Calexico carried [Kathleen] Edwards‘s “Soft Place to Land” from a pensive hush into sorrowful peaks, and it stoked the rhythm just enough behind two incantatory songs from [Beth] Orton, the chugging “Call Me the Breeze” and the enveloping “Mystery.” It was just retro enough for [Nick] Lowe‘s wry, elegantly turned novelty song “Christmas at the Airport” and straightforwardly pop for his “Cruel to Be Kind.”

For [Glen] Hansard, the Irish songwriter behind the musical “Once,” Calexico was attentive to the songs’ dramatic arcs of loss and redemption. [NY Times]

The WFUV Holiday Cheer benefit went down at Beacon Theatre last week (12/10) with Iron and Wine and Calexico (who collaborated on 2005’s In the Reins EP) plus Kathleen Edwards, Beth Orton, Nick Lowe, Glen Hansard and Amos Lee. The show saw the artists doing different collaborations throughout the night, and there were parts where the entire bill shared the stage at once. In addition to teaming up for each other’s original songs, the artists did some covers, including Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah.” Pictures of the show are in this post.

One of the other songs covered at the show was The Pogues’ holiday classic, “Fairytale of New York” which Iron & Wine, Calexico, Glen Hansard, and Kathleen Edwards also covered later in the week on Late Night with Jimmy Fallon. You can watch a video of that performance, along with more pictures of the Beacon Theatre show, below.

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Iron & Wine, Calexico, Glen Hansard, Kathleen Edwards – “Fairytale of New York”

Iron & Wine & Calexico

WFUV