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Apr 17

Iron & Wine, ‘Ghost on Ghost’

I have to confess I haven’t been a huge fan of the last couple of Iron & Wine albums. Despite the occasional marvellous song (‘Flightless Bird, American Mouth’) they’ve felt caught somewhere between the hushed intensity of And the Creek Drank the Cradle and Our Endless Numbered Days (apparently the distinctive whispered vocals on the former were because Sam Beam’s baby daughter was asleep in the next room) and the more expansive arrangements he seemed to be pursuing on The Shepherd’s Dog and Kiss Each Other Clean. But right from the looselimbed, sun-warmed zig-zag of its opener, ‘Caught in the Briars’, his new album, Ghost on Ghost, is a revelation: gorgeous, warm, even a little bit funky, a combination in which the more complex musical ideas Beam has been exploring in recent years finally serve to reveal his real strength as a songwriter.

For now at least you can stream the full album on NPR’s First Listen; alternatively you can check out the video for the album’s third track, ‘Joy’, below.

Apr 2

Read my story, ‘The Flats’, for free

'West Beach Sandhills', © 2007, Barry Leadbeater

‘West Beach Sandhills’, © 2007, Barry Leadbeater

When I began this site part of my plan was to use it to publish short pieces of fiction, either drawn from works in progress or harvested from other published and unpublished sources. In the end that didn’t happen, mostly because the moment never really seemed right, but just lately I’ve been thinking I might start to post a few things here.

To that end I’ve just uploaded my story, ‘The Flats’, which was published a couple of years ago in the Get Reading! anthology, 10 Short Stories You Must Read in 2011. I’ve chosen it as the first one partly because I like it, and partly because a translation by Jorge Salavert has just been published in the Spanish-language literary magazine, Hermano Cerdo, so it seems sensible to have the English-language version available as well.

You can read ‘The Flats’ online now. If you’d like information about some of the other stories I’ve published recently you can check out my new Short Fiction page, or you can go direct to the source and grab a copy of my Aurealis Award shortlisted story, ‘Visitors’, from the Review of Australian Fiction or read ‘The Inconvenient Dead’ over at Overland or in Best Australian Stories 2012. Australian (and I think, US) readers can also grab copies of my Rapunzel novelette, ‘Beauty’s Sister’ for Kindle, iBooks, Google Play, and Kobo, while UK readers can download it for Kindle.

Meanwhile I have to get back to my novel …