You're listening to Song Exploder, where musicians take apart their songs and piece by piece, tell the story of how they were made. I'm Rishikesh, hereway.

This episode contains explicit language.

In 2002, Sam Beam's first album, As Iron and Line, was released on Subpop Records.

He had given them a bunch of demos and rather than have him re-record those songs, they just released the demos themselves.

Since then, he's put out five more full-length albums and he's been nominated for multiple Grammys.

For this episode, Sam looked back at the making of his song, Flightless Bird, American Mouth. From his 2007 album, The Shepard's Dog.

A year after that album came out, the song was used prominently in a scene in the movie Twilight, and it's been one of the most popular Iron and Line songs ever since.

I talked to Sam at Blue Rock Artist Ranch in studio in Wimbrily, Texas in front of a small audience.

Coming up, you'll hear the original demo he recorded, and how that transformed into the final version of the song.

I'm Sam Beam, and I have a musical project called Iron and Line.

My family was growing, and I was traveling the world more, traveling the country and the world, and seeing more of the universe.

We had been living in Florida for a while, and we were getting ready to move to Texas.

That was also in a time right after 9-11. It was still pretty fresh, and the way that made us all feel differently about the world, or just the way the world was changing in that time.

I was also a young man coming to terms with histories that I had learned, and I was reacting to this difference between the myth and the reality.

I was a queen when boy diving for candy, queens all of your strength, light eyes, wide on my plastic toys.

That demo was recorded in 2004, and it sounds like those early Iron and Line records because they use the same process.

I got to sense pretty early that it was like a right of passage kind of story. It's me talking to America and describing our relationship.

I found you, fly the spring, yeah, we been almost you.

America now made it.

I used to multitrack the drums one head at a time, and so my kids and my wife at the time, they always complain about, you know, hearing this boom, boom, boom.

You know, I was on the back room.

At that point, I was definitely learning about demo-itis as well, because if you develop a demo too well, and you try to chase the thing, it's impossible.

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