Elliott Smith - Elegy of Solitude

Rock is full of exquisitely sensitive, fragile souls, fallen angels from who knows where, come to bestow their sensitivity translated into music. Fragile people, incapable of facing life, too shy and introverted to be understood, yet always able to create sublime music. From Syd Barrett to Nick Drake to Gram Parsons, all share serious psychological troubles that destabilize their existence, but which also allow them to approach music in a different way, and precisely for this reason, in a more sincere way, just like Elliott Smith.

Steven Paul Smith (Elliott to everyone) was born on August 6, 1969 in Omaha, Nebraska. The following year his parents divorced and his mother took him to Dallas, Texas. In his mother's family, music was in the air all day long: his grandfather was a virtuoso jazz drummer and his grandmother dabbled as a blues standards singer in the local clubs. However, no one in the family had turned that inherited passion into a career. One thing is certain: living with his mother's family brought Elliott close to music from an early age, especially the country of Hank Williams, the pop-rock of Simon & Garfunkel and the Beatles, as well as jazz and vocal blues. Clearly shaped by the environment he grew up in, he began playing piano at age nine. From the very start, his natural gift for music was evident, and by age 10 he was already composing music and instrumental pieces on piano, taking part in recitals and music competitions, which he naturally won. Alongside piano, he also took up the clarinet, which he played in a kind of school ensemble. Meanwhile his mother remarried, and Elliott found himself living in a new family, though he would occasionally visit his father in Portland. It was during one of these visits to his father, at the age of 12, that he was given his first guitar. He immediately set out to learn how to play it, practicing the guitar arpeggios so beloved by American country and folk singers, before eventually learning the solos of Ac/Dc or Led Zeppelin. At 14 he decided it was time for a change in his life and went to live in Portland with his father, attending high school there. This choice was perhaps also due to his terrible relationship with his mother's new husband, who often beat him. His real father, on the other hand, was a psychiatrist, and the young Elliott began taking an interest, reading and studying anything that dealt with the "psyche".

His high school years were the time of his first groups, his first bands with friends, afternoons spent playing and recording on amateur equipment. At 16 he wrote his first song, "Condor Avenue" (in which he describes, through a sort of collage of images, the life of high schoolers at that time), which later appeared on his solo debut Roman Candle. After finishing high school he enrolled in the Faculty of Philosophy of Political Doctrines; his parents were pleased because they already pictured him as a lawyer, and he too was happy, since he genuinely loved what he was studying. It was during those university years that he met Neil Gust (who would later appear on the cover of Roman Candle); the two quickly became inseparable, sharing not only the same passion for music but also the same political views and the same interests. Their friendship soon led them to form a band: Heatmiser. This was certainly a crucial moment for Elliott Smith's artistic life, and not only that; it was his first truly serious approach to music, and it pushed him to improve both as a songwriter and as a musician. After graduating, the two returned to Portland and recruited a bassist (a friend of Neil's) and a drummer to complete the band's line-up.

After a series of successful shows, they managed to release their first LP, Dead Air (Frontier, 1993). In it, Elliott already shows his qualities as a songwriter, managing to describe the dreams and nightmares he was living through at the time; the record moves from the catchy electric riff of "Still" to moments reminiscent of Fugazi. Heatmiser's sonic approach, arriving at a moment when grunge was in full bloom, was to claim the other side of American alternative music, managing to combine Fugazi-esque fury with the melodic sensibility of Dinosaur Jr., especially in their use of guitar. There's no shortage of moments closer to the Seattle sound, and "Bottle Rocket" is, in its own way, a rather stereotypical grunge track, somewhere between Pearl Jam and Nirvana. "Can't Be Touched" slavishly follows in the sonic footsteps of R.E.M., to the point that Elliott Smith finds himself imitating Stipe's very voice, while in "Stray" the shadows of Cobain and Vedder return.

It was only the following year, with the double release of the EP Yellow No.5 (Frontier, 1994) and their second album, that Heatmiser managed to draw the curiosity and interest not only of Portland but of the whole United States. The first is a collection of five previously unreleased tracks in which the band tries to make their sound even more appealing, moving ever closer to melody. "Fortune 500" is a sunny track, far removed from their previous sonic melancholy. The temptation to move toward grunge, interpreted in their own way, becomes increasingly marked, with room given to guitar and bass lines that in those years were largely neglected by Seattle bands. "The Corner Site" is an indie-punk-pop song in pure Californian style; the melodic peak, however, comes with the acoustic "Idler", which closes with a thunderous instrumental solo lasting a full minute. The band's second LP, Cop And Speeder (Frontier, 1994), stands in sharp contrast not only to the EP but to all their previous output. The expressive urgency and noisy guitar work are partly abandoned in favor of a more relaxed musical approach, following the path trodden by Greg Dulli with the Afghan Whigs. The band, however, doesn't seem entirely at ease in this mode, and indeed the best moments come when they return to their past sound with "Tempe", a track that could easily have come off "Nevermind" or "Dirt". The rest of the album is pure power chords, moving between the screaming punk of "Hitting On The Water" and the melodies of "Something To Lose"; the acoustic "Antonio Carlos Jobim", a tribute to the Brazilian jazz artist who died that very year, anticipates the more intimate, singer-songwriter music of Elliott Smith's solo career.

Within the band, things started to go downhill; Elliott Smith felt frustrated, mainly because he didn't like the music his bandmates were playing. He saw in that "noisy" rock a contradiction with the delicacy of the songs in which he described his inner self and his feelings. It was precisely this unease that led him to devote himself to a project entirely his own: he wanted the music to finally fully reflect what the lyrics were saying. Thus came his first album, Roman Candle (Cavity Search Records, 1994). The album reflects Elliott Smith's need to seek out silence and solitude: the singer-songwriter abandons Heatmiser's punk-grunge sound and embraces the acoustic guitar, giving rise to sublime singer-songwriter folk, recorded on amateur equipment using a 4-track recorder. Musically, in its melodic intent, it can't help but recall Simon & Garfunkel and Nick Drake; the melodies he crafts fit perfectly with his restlessness, portrayed through melancholy lyrics whose protagonists are lonely men, children of excess. He sings of days spent drinking, of abandonment, of suicide, all themes that have marked his life. The lyrical sincerity extends to the music too, whose directness, minimalism and straightforwardness are its defining traits. The best tracks are the beautiful "No Name #1", where the charm of an opening chord progression is joined by a melody that strikes the listener, and the title track "Roman Candle", a summation of Elliott Smith's lyrical and musical themes. "Condor Ave" sounds as though it could have come from the pen of Paul Simon, while "Last Call" marks the first appearance of electric guitar and is the most musically elaborate track. The album closes with the instrumental "Kiwi 20-20", where acoustic folk and country steeped in western openness come together in a dreamlike journey.

Following the modest success of his debut album with the underground audience, in the spring of 1995 he was contacted by the label Kill Rock Stars, who offered to release a new album for them. Elliott liked the idea, and his second solo LP Elliott Smith (Kill Rock Stars, 1995) came out within a few months. At the heart of Elliott's songwriting is drugs, heroin and the life stories of addicts, examined above all in their psychological implications. And it's precisely this exploration and analysis of depression and psychic turmoil that would remain central to his growth as a songwriter. Musically too, an evolution emerges, especially in the attention he pays to vocal melodies and to off-beat chord progressions. The heroin sung about in "Needle In The Hay" and the nights spent drinking until dawn in "Clementine" are scenes of lived experience that Elliott Smith renders with a pained, melancholy voice, playing an acoustic guitar steeped in minor chords. The songs take on a fuller shape, and the experience he'd built up gave Elliott Smith a more familiar command of his instruments, as heard in "Coming Up Roses" and "Alphabet Town".

By this point Elliot Smith had set his course as a solo artist, but he decided to make one last album with Heatmiser anyway: Mic City Sons (Caroline, 1996). It's a blend of an EP's worth of Smith's solo, intimate songs and more straightforwardly rock tracks written by Neil Gust: the differing musical approaches that caused the band's breakup find here a kind of compromise, helped also by Elliott Smith's ability to give the Heatmiser sound far more personality than before. So we move from the opening "Get Lucky", where the heavy sound of bass, guitar and drums lets us hear a howling Elliott again, to the gorgeous "Plainclothes Man", a song fully in the intimate style of solo Smith, but with a rock arrangement that makes it one of the finest moments in his whole discography. Between these two tracks plays out the delicate tug-of-war between Neil Gust and Elliott Smith: two different songwriters with different musical needs, yet producing a work born of countless compromises — and perhaps precisely for that reason, the record stands as Heatmiser's best. "See You Later" brings down the curtain on the band's stage, and does so with the verve of an indie-rock anthem, with Elliott Smith's voice tracking the electric guitar's strings; the pop chorus is sure to please just about everyone.

The album came out in the fall, and Elliott spent the time through December playing his final shows with Heatmiser. 1996 was an intense period for him: work on Heatmiser's final album, interest from a major label like Virgin, and the start of his relationship with Joanna Bolme. It was a turbulent love affair that caused deep inner turmoil; for a while he moved to New York precisely to put distance between himself and her. The emotional ups and downs, along with his self-imposed exile, allowed him to throw himself into work on his album. He had recorded more than 30 songs, still using his usual amateur method, with a 4-track home recorder, guitar and drum machine; his musical approach drew comparisons to Beck, and Elliott was well aware such comparisons were inevitable. It was precisely the sense of competing with Beck that depressed him: he felt inferior, and everything he wrote seemed like garbage to him. Yet it was exactly this inner suffering that pushed Elliott to refine himself, to improve, to give his very best.

It took him a long time, nearly a year, before he was satisfied with the music he'd written, but in the end the fruit of so much suffering took shape and was released as Either/Or (Kill Rock Stars, 1997). According to critics it's his best album; what's certain is that on this third LP Elliott Smith managed to translate emotion into music, alternating sad lyrics with brighter melodies, as if the music itself could redeem life. Alongside his passion for fingerpicking comes a growing interest in a fuller musical backing. The original rawness begins to fade, if only slightly, making way for a more mature attention to both lyrics and music. The melancholy "Alameda" is a desperate existential cry played with faint Morricone-like echoes, while "Between The Bars" is reflective and subdued, with Elliott almost spelling out the words. "Ballad Of Big Nothing" and "Pictures Of Me" are indie-pop ballads, "No Name #5" feels like a page torn from his personal diary; electric flourishes form the backdrop to "Punch And Judy", while on "Angels" Smith plays his beloved acoustic guitar as he turns accuser of plastic American culture. Elliott's music has reached full maturity, and the album gathers up everything learned from his earlier work: reflection, minor chords, fingerpicking and constant harmonic shifts become the signature trademark of America's saddest songwriter.

Right at the start of 1997, Elliott met producer Larry Grane, an important professional figure in his artistic life, with whom he opened a studio. They bought a former office and, through painstaking work, turned it into a recording studio where Elliott Smith could develop his music. Legend has it that the first song he wrote there was the ballad "Miss Misery", which was used in the soundtrack of Gus Van Sant's film "Good Will Hunting". While things were looking up for him artistically, on a personal level things were getting worse; Elliott was going through a tortured psychological period, and his near-constant low-grade depression often led him to abuse not only antidepressants but, above all, alcohol. This was a period of blackouts, in which he'd wake up in the middle of a street, not himself, and would do extremely dangerous things like jumping off cliffs into the void (his sense of his own body was almost nonexistent); it was following one such incident that he was taken for a couple of weeks to a psychiatric hospital in Florida.

The winter straddling 1997 and 1998 was packed with events. First, he met director Gus Van Sant, who asked to use some of his songs from Either/Or as the soundtrack for his new film; he signed to Steven Spielberg's label Dreamworks, with whom he would release his next record; and his song "Miss Misery" was nominated for an Oscar for Best Original Song. Elliott Smith's fourth album came out in the summer of 1998 under the title XO (Dreamworks, 1998); the title, seemingly cryptic, actually has a very simple explanation. In American usage, letters between friends often end with the phrase "Kisses and hugs", but over time, and thanks to the modern habit of abbreviating everything, people started simply writing "XO", where X stands for kisses and O for hugs. His songs grow ever stronger, more intimate, bolder, more philosophical; shifting vocal tonalities become a constant feature. This is the album of full artistic and compositional maturity; Elliott Smith further refines his independent songwriting, adding a more elaborate, structured, orchestral backing. The listener is immersed in pianos, strings and horns that give the record an enveloping atmosphere, far removed from the minimalism of his early work, continuing along the path already begun on the previous album. So it happens that the Paul Simon of before morphs into Paul McCartney in the pianistic interplay of "Baby Britain", which from its very title pays homage to English pop-rock; elsewhere we find songs like "Sweet Adeline" or "Independence Day" that carry on the lo-fi thread from the past, but this time enriched with new sounds. Elliott Smith moves away from Beck and embraces Brian Wilson's approach to music, with its need to build vocal harmonies, fill them out with guitars and assorted orchestrations, and then commit them to tape. "Waltz #2" is the album's crown jewel and one of the finest compositions in this American songwriter's catalogue: its steady rhythm, joined by a deceptively simple piano melody and a vocal part in constant crescendo, gives an epic quality to a song that seems like it could go on forever. "Waltz #1" is a claustrophobic ballad of the soul sung in falsetto, while "Amity" awakens Smith's rocker side, pushing him to accelerate both sound and voice, with an electric solo taking center stage amid pompous arrangements. Elliott Smith's best album closes with Roy Poper's understated trumpet on "A Question Mark" and with "I Didn't Understand", sung as though it were a religious gospel number, yet with lyrics steeped in loneliness and gloom.

By now Elliott Smith was, to all intents and purposes, a public figure, and this media attention irritated him somewhat. The tour that followed would take him far afield for the first time, with shows in Japan, Australia and around the world; it would introduce his music to everyone, and he'd receive glowing reviews. In 2000, at the peak of his public fame, he released a new album, Figure 8 (Dreamworks, 2000): it's unquestionably his most mature work, as well as his last studio LP. The music scene of the time was flooding with lo-fi revivalism and would-be Nick Drakes: alongside excellent artists like Sparklehorse and Microphones, dozens of mediocre acts were cropping up. Elliott Smith left that sound behind for good, setting out instead to codify a new musical language of his own — one that still undeniably moves through the pop territory of Simon & Garfunkel and the Beatles (see "Everything Reminds Me Of Her" and "Everything Means Nothing To Me"), but now with the addition of sharper, more rock-driven playing ("Wouldn't Mama Be Proud?"). The gorgeous "Son Of Sam" opens the record (whose close is instead entrusted to a poignant lullaby) in explosive fashion, with a sonic and melodic charge halfway between Heatmiser and Beatles-esque pop. There's no shortage of acoustic folk moments, like "Somebody That I Used To Know", while on "Junk Bond Trader" the harp initially trades phrases with the electric guitar. "Stupidity Tries" is a little gem that starts out as a folk ballad that could have come straight off "Abbey Road", before corrupting itself with blasts of electric guitar. Melancholy is no longer the sole dominant theme in Smith's lyrics: his growing sophistication as an arranger went hand in hand with a lyrical refinement that let him go even deeper (the indictment of Hollywood's plastic aesthetic in "L.A.", or the examination of values in "Son Of Sam") and grow more elegant.

Unlike what had happened with the promotion of XO, Elliott Smith decided to appear much less, to let the music speak for itself and to keep to himself, without many interviews, without many shows. His mental health worsened: he loaded up on psychiatric drugs, sedatives, alcohol; the physical toll of the tension caused by his overexposure to the public eye, by having become famous, or more simply by his struggle to live, led him to choose a drastic way out. Right as he was finishing his final record, on the night of October 21, 2003, he decided to end his life and stabbed himself in the heart with a knife. His body was found by his friend Jennifer Chiba. By now he was a new martyr to the cause of rock, and, as legend demands, his death still seems shrouded in mystery.

Exactly a year after his death, From A Basement On The Hill was released — a portrait of a fragile, misunderstood artist, by then crushed by his struggle to live, yet still capable of delivering one of the most important testimonies of modern songwriting.

Smith's musical growth moves precisely in this direction, aiming for a compositional structure that is sophisticated, yes, but still easily enjoyable, open to interpretation on multiple levels. His points of reference here are Brian Wilson and Paul McCartney, with a stronger pull toward the latter, so much so that the sound Smith offers often comes across as distinctly "British".

There are three folk-rock ballads scattered here and there with the aim of winking at ears sensitive to melody, pop songs able to speak to a much wider, genuinely popular audience: "Pretty (Ugly Before)", "A Fond Farewell" and "Twilight". The first rests entirely on the piano, whose driving, repetitive sound is the melodic key to the track; with Sam Coomes's help, Elliott builds a melancholy dirge over a musical structure that is more joyful (rock-leaning) and enveloping (classical-leaning). "A Fond Farewell" is the perfect summa of early solo Smith: masterful fingerpicking, voice and acoustic guitar, melancholy verses and a chorus that lodges in your head from the first listen. It's hard to ask for more.

"Twilight" is an acoustic ballad that is as nocturnal as it is like a morning after: it opens with found sound, which persists throughout the track, and a melody for voice and acoustic guitar alone, which turns into a delicate, bucolic traditional, touched with orchestral flourishes.

Electric guitars and a rock spirit, on the other hand, form the backbone of "Don't Go Now" and "Shooting Star".

Where was Elliott Smith heading? What music did he have in mind, and in which directions would he have focused his attention? Difficult questions, far more a matter for psychoanalysis than musicology. Perhaps we can trace a hint of an answer in the opening track "Coast To Coast". The song comes in three parts: an introduction of found sound and vocal samples, a continuation built on a melody made urgent by swelling orchestration and a Rolling Stones-style use of electric guitar, and a close made up of three spoken-word vocal overdubs, punctuated by touches of piano.

The remaining tracks move within these same three coordinates, maintaining an extraordinarily high level of compositional quality. If "Strung Out Again" is a tribute to Brian Wilson, "Little One" can't help but bring the Beatles to mind. Exactly halfway through the album, "Ostriches & Chirping" pops up, a whistling detour from the program, though one that makes sense if you consider the album's original concept-album idea, where the cyclical structure is also shaped by these light-hearted breaks (here very Beatles-esque, à la "Sgt. Pepper's").

In 2006 came the release of the tribute album To: Elliott/From: Portland.

A year later, New Moon was released, collecting mostly unreleased material by the American singer-songwriter, who tragically passed away four years earlier by now, dating back to 1995/1997 – recordings from the Kill Rock Stars period between the self-titled album Elliott Smith and the following Either/Or.

What we have here are acoustic tracks pulled from sketches, recordings of songs that were meant to end up in who-knows-what, under who-knows-what title. In our hands we find two CDs, a dozen tracks apiece. Opening the first is a melancholy, acoustic "Angel In The Snow" that reconnects us with a past never forgotten, carried almost entirely by a couple of guitar overdubs and that same shy, seductive voice. "Talking To Mary" is a constant downward drift of tonalities, with a breathy, sighing voice. Then there are feelings, emotions scattered across the tracks, like the second half of "High Times" with its crescendo dampened by an implosion, or the rocking "New Monkey", entertaining too for its offbeat word pairings. "All Cleaned Up" is a pseudo-country duet played out with double vocals, folk and acoustic, simple and direct. The first disc closes with a cover of Big Star's "Thirteen" and a demo version of the single "Miss Misery".

The tracks grow increasingly sketch-like on the second disc, with the splendid delicacy of "Placeholder" and the endemic melancholy of "New Disaster" among the otherwise more fully realized episodes. "Seen How Things Are Hard" feels a bit too forced, more a project than a finished song; "Fear City" and "Almost Over" break the silence and reserve of the acoustic songwriting, delicate, cleaned-up memories of the rawer Heatmiser past. Still from the recent past of Heatmiser, we find co-written material with Neil Gust resurfacing on "See You Later" and "Half Right".

This only deepens the regret over the loss of one of the most creative musical voices of the Nineties.

Ride the wave of great music

Add OndaRock to your favorite sources on Google Discover. Don't miss our reviews, milestones and latest news straight in your feed.

Follow on Google