Iron & Wine – Passing Afternoon (Demo)

In the Quietus, Luke Turner wrote that seeing Suede recently wasn’t an exercise in nostalgia but ‘everything they did for me a quarter of a century ago’. I mention this because I recently bought the 15 anniversary vinyl edition of Iron & Wine’s Our Endless Numbered Days and, to paraphrase Turner, listening to it hasn’t been an exercise in nostalgia; the record is everything it was to me when I first heard it fourteen, maybe fifteen years ago.

But the experience of listening to the album today is different, because as the sleeve notes to the anniversary edition say: it’s ‘a record about the passage of time, and how little any of us can do to stop it’. In those intervening fourteen/fifteen years the songs have acquired a different quality, my reaction to them has altered slightly as I’ve aged; and that’s a sign of a great album – it keeps pace with you.