The Trapeze Swinger

“The Trapeze Swinger” was never on a proper Iron & Wine studio album. Sam Beam recorded it sometime around 2004, and it circulated on bootlegs and file-sharing networks for years before it was officially compiled on Around the Well in 2009. By that point, it was already the song that serious Iron & Wine fans pointed to when someone asked what Sam Beam was actually capable of — a nine-and-a-half minute folk hymn that had become a landmark entirely through word of mouth.

Each of the song’s eight verses opens with the same line: “Please, remember me.” The refrain is a prayer and a plea and a kind of incantation — repeated enough times that by the final verse it has accumulated the weight of everything that has come before it. Beam uses this structure to recollect specific images from childhood and young adulthood: a school bus, a carnival, summer evenings, a trapeze act. The mundane details become luminous through the act of asking to be remembered in connection with them.

The melody is among the most beautiful Beam has written — the kind of folk melody that feels as if it predates the songwriter, that seems to have been waiting to be found rather than invented. The guitar playing is clean and unhurried, leaving space for the words and for the silence between them.

“Please remember me / As in the rose of early summer / When you could not get enough.”

This is not a song about death exactly, though death is present in it. It is a song about the particular terror of being forgotten — not after death but during life, in the accumulating distances that time and change create between people who once knew each other completely.

The people who discovered this song kept it for years before it had an official release. That’s the story of every great deep cut: found by the people who needed it, passed forward.