A Broken Heart and Your Name on My Cast: Remember Elliott Smith

Elliott Smith was kind of a genius, wasn't he?

This is something my friend Scott says to me on Facebook, in response to a link I shared with him—the recently unearthed Heatmiser arrangement of the Smith song “Christian Brothers.” This version, the louder and angrier cousin to what eventually appeared on the 1995 self-titled Elliott Smith album, adds an extra layer of depth and seriousness within the context of a full band.

Elliott Smith WAS kind of a genius, wasn't he?

Chances are, it was cold, and probably raining, on October 21^st, 2003.

I was walking across the campus of Clarke College, when in passing, a very stout, troll-like freshman I didn't know very well, and liked even less, stopped me and said, “Hey Kevin. Did you hear Elliott Smith died? Can you fucking believe that shit?”

I had just read that online shortly before our exchange occurred. And I could not, in fact, fucking believe that shit.

Full disclosure—at the time of his death, I was not really into Elliott Smith. It’s unfortunate that the best career move someone can make is dying, because you are exposed to an entirely new fan base of Johnny-Come-lately’s, hopping on the bandwagon. In October of 2003, I was 20, in my third year in college, and I was well aware of who Elliott Smith was—for some reason, I had just never given him a chance.

Full disclosure—shortly after his death, I tried to get really into Elliott Smith because of a girl. A girl I was mad crushin on really liked his music, and so I thought if I liked his music too, I figured that I could be like, “Hey girl, I really identify with this music, AND with you.” I remembered borrowing XO, Figure 8, and Roman Candle from one of my theatre professors, and burning copies of them. And I remember purchasing Either/Or and the self-titled album from the Sam Goody that popped up for about two years in my hometown, when I was home for either Thanksgiving or Christmas break that year.

Almost a full calendar year after his death, his former label, Kill Rock Stars, posthumously released the unfinished From a Basement on a Hill—the album Smith had been constructing, off and on, in the years leading up to his death. My friend Liz drove us to Best Buy the day it came out—we each bought a copy. I also bought a copy of the new Jimmy Eat World album released that day, Futures, which coincidentally features an Elliott Smith reference in one of the songs.

Just like your favorite Heatmiser song goes: “It’s just like being alone…”

After college, and for the next five years, give or take, my interest in Smith’s music waned. I just found that I wasn't listening to him, and even after my effort to do so, I wasn't identifying with it at the time. It was in 2010, when I started doing the daily radio show I used to have, and I was always endlessly looking new things to play, that I began to rediscover his music. It was also through hearing songs that I thought sounded kind of like Elliott Smith—“Strangelight” by Fugazi and “Spots” by Autolux both comes to mind—the wispy vocals were so similar that when I thought, “Hey, these kind of sounds like Elliott Smith,” my next thought was, “I should probably be listening to more Elliott Smith.”

By the winter of 2010, heading into 2011, I had immersed myself completely into his canon, referring to it as the period of time in my life where I “just get really into Elliott Smith, okay?”

Elliott Smith’s music as a solo artist is pretty distinctly divided into two parts—the early 90’s, sparse, acoustic albums—Roman Candle, self-titled, and Either/Or, and then the major label funded, Beatle-esq baroque pop of XO and Figure 8. The interesting thing is that only a little over a year passed in between the 1997 release of Either/Or, and then the move to Dreamworks Records with 1998’s XO. But the drastic shift in sound comes across like it was years in the making. You'd think you could hear the leanings towards an expanded sound—but you really can’t. It’s only until “Miss Misery,” written for the Good Will Hunting soundtrack, can you begin to tell that Smith had bigger plans than just lo-fi production in basements and acoustic guitars.

Aside from his trademark double-tracked vocals, and his voice that barely rose above a whisper at times, Smith’s songs are, you know, mostly about heroin addiction. “Needle in The Hay,” being the most obvious. But then there’s also “Last Call,” and “Pretty (Ugly Before.)” Certainly there are more, but they are not as thinly veiled. Smith’s descent into addiction makes for a horribly depressing read—his Wikipedia page claims that after finishing the tour in support of 2000’s Figure 8, while attempting to work on a follow up, he instead opted to smoke $1,500 worth of heroin and crack daily. How that’s possible, I have no idea.

At the time of his death, Smith had actually cleaned himself up—sober, steadily working on a new album, starting to learn methods of digital recording and experimenting with noise. Ruled a suicide because of a hastily written Post-It note found by his body, Smith was found dead with stab wounds after a fight with his girlfriend—a woman who has spent the last decade as a bit of a suspect to the people that think Smith’s death was not a suicide. Less than a year before he died, he was unable to make it through any of his songs in their entirety when he would perform live—a review of a 2002 show opening for Wilco stated that no one should be surprised if Smith was dead within a year. It’s heartbreaking to read that, because he was dead within a year, but not from what everyone expected.

Maybe it’s because I went into it with the wrong reasons when I was in my very early 20’s,  but in the winter of 2010, when I was “just really into” Elliott Smith, I realized that at 27, his music was music that I was finally ready for—like, this was the time when it was going to happen. I've found that if something doesn't click with you right away, writing it off is an option, sure, but revisiting it down the line, when you may be ready for it is better.

And with everything going on at the time for me personally, and all of the heartbreak to come, this was that time.

Saying that Smith’s music “helped me” isn't the right thing to say, obviously, but his music was certainly was a large part of the soundtrack to an incredibly dark portion of my adult life—and since starting this piece, months and months ago, I've realized that’s something I share others—“…It means the world,” my friend Michael tells me when I was reaching out for personal stories from people and their connection to Elliott Smith. “It's the soundtrack to some of the best moments of my life and the company to some of the worst of my life.”

“…He was a window through which I looked and saw my own darkness,” my friend Liz told me. “He never told me why it hurt, or how it could ever get better, but he told me that this darkness I had was his darkness, too, and the darkness of so many other people.”

For me, things reached a point (not necessarily my “lowest,” not yet) where I was playing at least one of his songs, once a week (usually a Thursday) on my old radio show—usually either the very last song of the hour, or close to it, because I wanted to leave people feeling a fraction of how empty and hopeless I felt.

Some artists, or even just specific songs, you equate with a certain seasonal feeling. Smith’s music isn't like that, per se, but it does take me back to cold winters, and even colder springs. Sometimes it’s just entirely too much for me to listen—it reminds me too much of unfathomable loss and an unshakable, radiant darkness.

The songs that have stuck with me the most, aside from the ones that are about crippling depression, are painful reminders—songs that make me think of my best friend, when he passed away, and then everything that followed. The “You think you mean well; you don't know what you mean. Fucking ought to stay the hell away from things you know nothing about,” from “Everybody Cares, Everybody Understands,” and from “Everything Reminds Me Of Her”: “And I got hear the same sermon all the time now, from you people. ‘Why are you staring into outer space, crying? Just because you came across it and lost it,’” both assured me that it was okay to be as angry as I was with everyone around me.

Liz received a mix CD from her younger sister, and the opening track on was “Everything Reminds Me Of Her.” “I remember listening to that first track over and over trying to understand how a seemingly bullshit song about a girl could make me feel so sad . . . and so alone.

“Yet somehow,” she continued, “though I felt sadder and more alone with each listen, I never felt lonely.  Elliott Smith knew sadness.  Love sadness, life sadness, REAL sadness. A sadness I had only begun to feel, a sadness I still cannot understand.”

In one of the final episodes of the awful final season of the show “Six Feet Under,” there’s a moment that flashes back to 1994 on the day that Kurt Cobain committed suicide, where Peter Krause’s character, Nate, is sobbing in his room, listening to “All Apologies.” A younger version of his sister asks what’s wrong—in telling her, he says that Cobain was “too pure for this world.”

One could argue the same of Elliott Smith—a damaged troubadour, his life, his death, the legacy left behind, and more importantly, his words, meaning so much to so many.  “He was a reflection or just a good example of what a lot of people were going through— what life in the late '90s/mid 2000's was like for sensitive, thoughtful people. Uplifting, inspired, but depressing as fucking hell,” Forest Punk’s Jason Simpson conveyed to me.

When you are so heavily invested in the legacy of someone who has passed on through dubious means, it tends to raise a few eyebrows and earn you a few serious looks from others.  Just as the lengthy David Foster Wallace quote about anhedonia and ennui that ends all my emails has been brought into question more than once over the last five years, the period of time where I was just “really into” Elliott Smith has given pause.

Does Elliott Smith warm me up, and make me feel like I could conquer the world with a little determination, or at the very least, that everything’s going to be all right? No. So I don't even really know why I listen to him. I’m just an emotional masochist.

This is something a friend of mine tells me via text message, after I asked her if she had any specific connection or memory she wanted to share about Smith’s music. It reminds of a Tweet from a long time ago from comedian Paul Scheer—it was something about a workout mix made up entirely of Elliott Smith’s music—a joke I've borrowed on more than one occasion.

This also, and more importantly, recalls a lengthy piece I had started writing and partially finished, but eventually scrapped, for this blog, about the relationship between music and misery (like in High Fidelity) as well as how that pertains to “the depressed person.”

Towards the end of “I Didn't Understand,” Smith sings, “…My feelings never change a bit, I always feel like shit, I don't know why, I just do.” And while it’s a song clearly about heroin, there’s a lyric in “Pretty (Ugly Before)” that has really stuck with me over the last two years—“Sometimes is all I feel up to now.” The song is certainly not his most somber, nor is it from a song his most heartbreaking—but that line alone simply states so many complicated things that I often struggle putting into words.

Similarly to what I wondered in March when I was writing about the sixteenth anniversary of the passing of The Notorious B.I.G, I started to think about what things would have been like had Elliott Smith not died. He would have more than likely completed From a Basement on A Hill. It’s widely accepted that the record that was released a year later is not the album he would have put out—it was left in the hands of others to finish.

But what then? He'd be well into his 40’s now. Would he still be writing and performing? Would he have relapsed into addiction? Would this have eventually happened anyway?

Within Smith’s major label output, sometimes it seems like there were messages in the way the tracks were ordered—not even hidden messages, really. On XO, moving from “Everybody Cares, Everybody Understands” to “I Didn’t Understand”; and on Figure 8, the final three tracks—“I Better Be Quiet Now,” “Can’t Make a Sound,” and finally, “Bye.”

It’s not hard to see the cry for help.

On October 21^st, 2011, I went to see Christopher O'Riley play in a suburb outside of Minneapolis. A classical pianist and a radio personality; he may be best known to people 35 and under because of his dabbling into rearranging contemporary popular music for the piano—his collections of Radiohead arrangements are the most well known, but in 2006, he put together a collection of Elliott Smith songs.

After the show was over, I waited around to talk to him and have him sign the liner notes to album I had just picked up. We had met before, around seven years prior, when he did an all Radiohead recital at my college, and he remembered me when I came up to the merch table, and we chatted for a bit.

At the beginning of his set, he played his version of Smith’s “Waltz #1,” probably one of the most devastating Elliott Smith songs that I can name. I was already fanboying out, and I had wanted to tell him that I really appreciated him playing that, and that it was the 8^th anniversary of Smith’s passing—but I didn’t.


Christopher O'Riley- Waltz #1

There was a day at work, at some point during the dark period of my life, where I listened to nothing but “Waltz #1” all day on repeat—the only song brought up in a small Windows Media Player window. There’s something so comforting about the interplay between the guitar and piano, but everything else about it is just so god damn shattering. It’s not the song of Smith’s that I find identify with the most, but whenever the flood gates lift and I’m drowning in painful memories that I try to forget, I think of this line—“Silent and clichéd are the things we did and didn't say, covered up by what we did and didn’t do.”

I didn’t think writing this would be an easy task, but I didn’t expect it would turn out to be as difficult or as emotional as it did. Friends of mine, and in some cases, total strangers, were willing to share their own personal and often devastating connections to Smith’s music. When Jason Molina passed away earlier this year, I struggled with articulating my feelings about his music into words because I had really only discovered his canon a few months prior to that. And even though a decade has passed, and that I arrived incredibly late to the party, I’ve spent the last three years nursing my sadness with Elliott Smith. There is some kind of odd reassurance in knowing that there are so many others out there who have a similar feeling.

In D.T. Max’s Every Love Story is A Ghost Story, the underwhelming biography of David Foster Wallace, he chooses to abruptly end the book—a literary trick of sorts, seeing as how Wallace chose to abruptly end his own life. He details how Wallace tried to organize the pieces, both finished and incomplete, of the novel he had been working on for nearly a decade—the posthumously released The Pale King.

Borrowing heavily from a Wallace quote where he defines fiction, Max writes: “This was his effort to show the world what it was to be a fucking human being. He had never completed it to his satisfaction. This was not the ending anyone would have wanted for him, but it was the one he had chosen.”

When I originally read Every Love Story is A Ghost Story, that didn't resonate as much with me as it does now. After spending so much time listening to Smith, talking with friends about what his music means, and writing then re-writing bits and pieces of this essay over the last couple of months, those words above seem to mean a little more. The ending to the life of Elliott Smith is not what anyone wanted, but it was what he chose. And in his absence, as it has for the last decade, his music continues on, connecting friends and strangers, taking on sadness and depression, reminding us all of what it is like to be a fucking human being.

Couldn't figure out what made you so unhappy

Shook your head to say no, no, no

And stopped for a spell

And stayed that way

Oh well, okay…

…If you get a feeling the next time you see me

Do me a favor and let me know

Because it's hard to tell

It's hard to say

Oh well, okay

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

It wouldn't be a lengthy retrospective on this blog if I didn't include a bunch of mp3s. XO may be a little over represented but when I was putting this together, I was trying to include songs that I mentioned directly, at least one thing from each album, and tracks that kept a somewhat cohesive mood. The order in which they appear is a suggested tracklist for a "feel good" mixtape. Please feel free to shuffle them around to your satisfaction. 

Pretty (Ugly Before) from From a Basement on a Hill

Everything Reminds Me of Her from Figure 8

Miss Misery from Good Will Hunting

New Disaster from New Moon

No Name #5 from Either/Or

Everybody Cares, Everybody Understands from XO

The Biggest Lie from Elliott Smith

Going Nowhere from New Moon

Oh Well, Okay from XO

Last Call from Roman Candle

Between The Bars from Either/Or

Waltz #1 from XO

I Didn't Understand from XO

Special thanks to the people that were willing to share their own personal experiences and memories of Elliott and his music- L.J, A.B, M.M, J.S.