Long-time Friends Iron & Wine & Ben Bridwell Premier "No Way Out of Here" on Letterman (Black Cricket/Brown Records)
While I've never really been a humongous (read: "huge") Band of Horses fan, I can still however, respect their niche singer-songwriter aesthetic, and I can still remember the first time I heard their flawless modern day Folk-Indie Rock "power-ballad," "The Funeral:" on an episode of MTV 's ill-fated pseudo-reality series, My Life As Liz , which Kid Cudi would later go on to expertly sample and rhyme atop on his A Kid Named Cudi mixtape. Around the same time, I can also recall first hearing soft-spoken bearded singer-songwriter, Iron & Wine aka Sam Beam 's critically-acclaimed mariachi-tinged In The Reins EP (2005) recoded with Tex-Mex Indie Folk band, Calexico ; Iron & Wine would gain wide-spread notoriety with his stripped down cover of The Postal Service 's "Such Great Heights" that would go on to appear on both the Garden State soundtrack and within a kaleidoscopic M&M's commercial . "I did a r...