Iron & Wine Adds Four Unreleased Songs to Hen’s Teeth
Hen’s Teeth (Deluxe Edition) is out now on Sub Pop. Iron & Wine released it digitally worldwide on 22 September, and it adds six new recordings to the album Sam Beam put out in February: four songs nobody had heard, and acoustic versions of two that listeners already know.
The four new songs are “Three Strangers”, “California Sober”, “Pilgrim’s Highway” and “Say What”. They come from the Los Angeles sessions that produced two albums, 2024’s Light Verse and this year’s Hen’s Teeth, according to Sub Pop’s release notes.
What Is on Hen’s Teeth (Deluxe Edition)
The deluxe edition runs to 16 tracks. The first ten are the February album, from “Roses” to “Half Measures”. In between sit “Paper and Stone”, “Robin’s Egg”, “Singing Saw”, “In Your Ocean”, “Defiance, Ohio”, “Wait Up”, “Grace Notes” and “Dates and Dead People”.
Tracks 11 and 12 are the acoustic versions of “In Your Ocean” and “Grace Notes”. Tracks 13 to 16 are the four unreleased songs, closing on “Say What”. The full list is on the release’s Bandcamp page.
Two of the album cuts are duets with I’m With Her, the multi-Grammy-winning trio: “Robin’s Egg” and “Wait Up”. Sub Pop has released the edition digitally, on all streaming platforms.
Four Songs From the Los Angeles Sessions
The sessions have a history of their own. KLOF Mag reported that the record was born out of a series of spontaneous sessions in the Los Angeles foothills with the engineer Dave Way. Way is also credited with mixing and engineering Light Verse.
“California Sober” was the last song written and recorded in those sessions. It came out on 27 August, in the announcement of the deluxe edition, as the first taste of it. Sub Pop called it a playful song and said its title gives that away. The label pitched it as a way to wind down the summer.
The other three new songs, “Three Strangers”, “Pilgrim’s Highway” and “Say What”, arrived with the full release on 22 September. Sub Pop’s notes do not describe them beyond where they were made.
Beam has explained the album’s title in terms that fit a set of extras well. “To me it suggests the impossible. Hen’s teeth do not exist,” he said, as quoted by KLOF Mag. “And that’s what this record felt like: a gift that shouldn’t be there but it is. An impossible thing but it’s real.”
Two Records From One Set of Sessions
Light Verse came out on 26 April 2024, on Sub Pop. It was Iron & Wine’s seventh studio album and Beam’s first solo album since Beast Epic in 2017, and he produced it himself, according to Wikipedia’s entry on the album. Fiona Apple added vocals to one cut, “All in Good Time”.
Hen’s Teeth followed in February 2026. It is Beam’s eighth full-length album, KLOF Mag noted. The band barely changed. Sub Pop lists Griffin Goldsmith, Sebastian Steinberg, David Garza, Beth Goodfellow, Paul Cartwright, Tyler Chester and Kyle Crane on Hen’s Teeth, the same seven players credited on Light Verse.
KLOF Mag’s Thomas Blake set out the relationship in his review in February. Songs for both albums were recorded at the same time and with the same band, he wrote, but “Hen’s Teeth is no offcuts album, no forgotten sibling.” In his reading, Light Verse was full of space and playfulness, while Hen’s Teeth is darker, with more melancholy in it.
That makes the deluxe edition a third view of the same period. The four new songs sat outside both albums. Now they sit at the end of the second one, where anyone who knows both records can place them.
Where Hen’s Teeth Sits in the Iron & Wine Catalogue
Iron & Wine is the stage name of Sam Beam. His first two Sub Pop albums were The Creek Drank the Cradle in 2002 and Our Endless Numbered Days in 2004, and Blake places him at the start of the freak folk boom of the early 2000s.
The catalogue since then has been consistent in tone, in Blake’s account, with the odd curveball. The clearest was 2011’s Kiss Each Other Clean, a lurch towards electronic pop. Between Beast Epic in 2017 and Light Verse, Beam also made Years to Burn, a 2019 collaboration with Calexico, according to Wikipedia. Hen’s Teeth sits far from that detour. Blake hears it leaning further into the musical traditions of the American South.
The deeper cuts show the range. Blake describes “Dates and Dead People” as a six-minute mini-suite that moves through several stages before ending in handclaps, and “Defiance, Ohio” as opening on an offhand whistle and a gentle, tropicalia-inspired shuffle. “Robin’s Egg”, one of the I’m With Her duets, is the brightest thing on the record in his view, a slice of 1970s-inspired Laurel Canyon prog-country. “Half Measures”, the slow-strummed closer, is “as open-hearted as anything you’re likely to hear”, he wrote.
Those are the songs the four new ones now follow. On the deluxe edition, the album no longer ends on “Half Measures”. It runs on through the two acoustic takes and into the session songs.
The Acoustic Takes of In Your Ocean and Grace Notes
“In Your Ocean” is the natural pick for an acoustic version. Sub Pop said the song found an audience at radio when it came out earlier this year, and it released the acoustic take alongside “California Sober” on 27 August. The label presents the new version as a more intimate take on it.
Critics heard the full-band original in different ways. Blake called it a blustery strum with an undertone of stark loneliness. MOJO, in a review excerpt Sub Pop published, singled out the song’s rollicking folk rock.
“Grace Notes” carries a family connection. On the album, Beam’s daughter Arden sings on it, and Blake credited her voice with turning a gentle folk song into something more fluid. She has a prominent part across the record, according to his review, including backing vocals on “Singing Saw”.
Revisiting two songs from the same album is a small choice with a clear logic. Both were already the cuts listeners returned to, and a stripped version gives them a second life on the same release.
How Hen’s Teeth Was Received
The February album was well reviewed. Sub Pop’s release notes list four stars from MOJO and 8/10 from Uncut, alongside a New York Times note on “Wait Up”, one of the I’m With Her duets. Pitchfork called Hen’s Teeth “a gentle companion album to Light Verse”, according to the same page.
Blake’s review closed on Beam’s standing rather than on the record alone. “He has been very good for a very long time,” he wrote, “and Hen’s Teeth keeps that impressive streak going.”
The deluxe edition does not change that verdict. It adds to the record without replacing anything on it, and it lands a little over two weeks before Iron & Wine go back on the road.
Iron & Wine on Tour in October
Iron & Wine start a North American headline run of shows on 8 October at the Ogden Theatre in Denver. The tour ends on 29 October at the Senate in Columbia, South Carolina.
In between, the band play two nights at the Ford in Los Angeles on 17 and 18 October, the 5th Avenue Theatre in Seattle on 13 October, the Majestic Theatre in Dallas on 24 October and Satellite Music Hall in Memphis on 27 October. Three dates are already sold out: the Liberty Theatre in Astoria, Oregon, on 15 October, the Castro in San Francisco on 16 October and La Rosa in Tucson on 21 October.
Ken Pomeroy opens the first half of the run and DUG the second, with both on the bill at Guthrie Green in Tulsa on 25 October, according to Sub Pop’s listing. mxdwn also reported the deluxe edition when it was announced in August.
IndieMusic.News’s curator team:
A deluxe edition is often a victory lap. This one reads more like a missing chapter. Our tip: play the four new songs straight after Light Verse, not after Hen’s Teeth. They come from the same sessions as both records, and hearing them beside the earlier one makes those sessions easier to follow as one body of work.
For another singer-songwriter record shaped by the place it was made, read how Julia Jacklin made The Gem upstairs from a Melbourne dive bar. Hen’s Teeth (Deluxe Edition) is streaming now.
