Iron & Wine or Samuel Beam is an American singer-songwriter with a rather big band, Tift Merritt is an American singer-songwriter with a guitar. They played a concert together at the WUK in Vienna.

I hadn’t heard anything by Tift Merritt before the show and I have to say that the concert didn’t convert me to fandom, either. Her music is nice and she’s obviously very talented and has no problems filling the stage only with herself and her voice and her guitar. But the whole concert long I felt like I was listening to (good) muzak: it wasn’t annoying, but nothing stood out and today, there is not a single tune I can remember.

Tift Merritt herself seemed very nice and really made me want to like her. And I don’t know what she was expecting (hurled beer bottles or booing or something) but she seemed so grateful that there was clapping and a good atmosphere.

Unfortunately, in the end I wanted to like her more than I actually did.

It’s the second time I saw Iron & Wine [first was at the Frequency Festival 2008] and, in short, it was a glorious concert. It helped that it was inside and warm and dry (contrary to the one in 2008), but that’s far from the only thing that made it good.

Sam Beam – as much as Tift Merritt – seems to be such a nice person, it’s hard not to like him. He got on stage and unfortunately played a couple of wrong notes in the first few minutes [which, tone-deaf as I am, I probably wouldn’t have noticed had it not been for his mortified face] and there was not one negative reaction from the audience, just a bit of good-natured laughter and encouragement.

The whole atmosphere was like that – the WUK is pretty small (I’m guessing there’s room for about 250, 300 people), which automatically makes it easier for this kind of familiarity to crop up, but there were also a couple of people who kept shouting song titles at the stage and Beam had a very charming interaction with them, but also with the rest of the audience in general.

The music was great. He played songs from all albums (I think. Definitely from the last three) and had a nice balance between the albums, though the focus was on Kiss Each Other Clean. Towards the end the music got a little slow, though. I mean, it’s clear that during an Iron & Wine concert you won’t dance until your feet fall off. But as it got later in the evening, I would have appreciated if the pace got picked up just the teensiest bit. Instead it got a little mellower.

But I still enjoyed the concert a lot. And though he didn’t play my favorite song from the new album (Your Fake Name Is Good Enough for Me), he played all my old favorites (Cinder and Smoke, Naked As We Came, House by the Sea) and apart from the pacing, I certainly won’t complain about the setlist.

The only real drawback was that it got really hot and stuffy. But when he ended the evening with an almost completely acapella version of  Flightless Bird, American Mouth [because he and his guitar were not on good terms that night], you still didn’t want the evening to end.