Each Sunday, Pitchfork takes an in-depth look at a significant album from the past, and any record not in our archives is eligible. Today, we revisit Elliott Smith’s self-titled solo album, a darkly beautiful record whose spare arrangements conceal worlds.
In a 2000 interview with Melody Maker, Elliott Smith told a story from his childhood. He is three years old—Steven Paul Smith, born in Omaha, Nebraska, in 1969—and he is messing around with his mother’s television set. Immediately, he is transfixed by the power of the remote control: This button makes the sound burst from the speaker and this one silences it. This button makes the screen change, each time reopening to a new world, while this one shuts it off entirely. It’s a lot of power for a child. He is delighted by the collage of faces and voices and sound and possibility until the inevitable happens: the TV breaks.
He soon learned to seek the same thrill in music. Smith’s first love was the Beatles, a band whose career lasted less than 10 years, so their every move carried immense weight and meaning for those discovering it in retrospect. His favorite song was the multi-part “A Day in the Life,” which he might have heard like a television constantly changing channels, each one landing on the most beautiful thing he’d ever seen. When he started writing his own music, he followed this blueprint, accidentally stumbling upon the avant-garde. He described his earliest compositions as more like transitions than actual songs; as he reflected to Under the Radar in one of his last interviews, he didn’t understand why every part couldn’t be the best part.
From Omaha, Smith and his mother moved to Dallas. He left as a teenager, a decision he attributed to a town full of bullies and an abusive step-father. His next stops were Portland, Oregon, where he lived with his father—a preacher turned Air Force pilot turned psychiatrist—and Hampshire College in Amherst, Massachusetts. At college, Smith studied political science and philosophy and was so affected by feminist texts that he momentarily wanted to become a fireman to offset some of the damage he did to the world simply by being a straight white man. He also met like-minded artists, including classmate Neil Gust, who helped him feel useful in a different way—trading punk 7"s and collaborating on music.
After graduation, Gust and Smith returned to Portland, where they formed the grungy alt-rock band Heatmiser. The rise of Smith’s spare, self-recorded solo material and Heatmiser’s blistering rock songs are often held in contrast. But the truth is his solo work bloomed alongside their music, which had softened and matured by 1996’s extraordinary swansong Mic City Sons. So while Smiths hated straining his voice to be heard over the noise (“I’ve had enough of people yelling,” he told Rolling Stone) and the way their audience reminded him of the dudes who gave him hell back in Texas, it did bring him closer to the sound he heard in his head. Rock music was always Smith’s guiding light. When interviewers compared him to folk singers like Paul Simon or Nick Drake, you could feel his eyes roll into his head. And when it came time to flesh out his solo sets with cover songs, he turned to rock radio staples: the Beatles, Led Zeppelin, the Kinks.
He felt a particular kindred spirit with Big Star, the cult band whose 1972 ballad “Thirteen” would become a standard in his hands. The initial connection wasn’t because of their hard-luck story or the unspeakable loneliness of records like Third. Instead, Smith admired how Alex Chilton and the band rallied for a style of music that was unfashionable in their scene, following their intuition as opposed to trends. So just as Big Star performed their charging take on British Invasion power-pop to half-empty rooms through Memphis, Smith abandoned his Portland alt-rock band—their growing acclaim, their major label deal, their “next Nirvana” buzz—to strike out on his own.
Released while Heatmiser was still gaining momentum, his 1994 solo debut Roman Candle was less a complete statement than a collection of demos, compiled in the hopes that a label would pick the best songs for a 7" single. The following year’s Elliott Smith, then, can be seen as his first official solo album, issued on the buzzy indie label Kill Rock Stars. Like Roman Candle, it was recorded in the homes of friends—Heatmiser drummer Tony Lash and Leslie Uppinghouse, who toured with the band and mixed their live sound. Uppinghouse remembers setting Smith up in her basement, off in the corner with an eight-track Tascam tape recorder. Her dog, Anna, would sometimes press her nose against the door to listen in. Uppinghouse claims she can hear her in a few songs.
Smith described a preference for writing distractedly—at crowded bars, at home watching Xena: Warrior Princess, anywhere he could take his mind off the idea of being a serious songwriter doing serious work. But he was devoted to his process. He wrote and recorded constantly, in a stream of interconnected ideas. The 12 songs he selected for Elliott Smith reflect that spirit. Phrases and images reoccur. The theme of addiction is constant, and his euphemisms are abundant and clear: white lady, white brother, death in your arms, getting good marks. His tone is often resigned, the perspective of someone who sees what’s going on but knows better than to fight. In the bridge of “Alphabet Town,” he sings, “I know what you are/I just don’t mind.” The chorus of “Good to Go” distills it even further: “You can do it if you want to.”
Thematically, it’s the darkest album he’d complete in his lifetime, but it’s also one of his most beautiful. Think of how much happens in these songs before he even starts singing. The lonesome harmonica-accompanied intro of “Alphabet Town” sets the scene like blinds opening in a dim apartment, letting in the gray light from the street. The queasy blues riff that precedes “Clementine” is the sound of stumbling to your feet, realizing how late it is and how many drinks you’ve had. And of course there’s the opening “Needle in the Hay,” led by an ominous riff whose abrupt chord changes can induce a sense of paranoia: Smith’s meticulous, lo-fi rendering of two warring impulses. It makes sense his earliest supporters were fellow artists like Lou Barlow and Mary Lou Lord: If you listened closely, you could hear entire worlds in his arrangements.
So while Elliott Smith serves as a stark blueprint for his 1997 masterpiece Either/Or, it also creates a bridge from the heavier music he played with Heatmiser. In songs like “Christian Brothers,” his voice is tougher and lower than it would ever sound again, as he growls that “no bad dream fucker’s gonna boss me around.” When he eventually performed these songs live with a full band, his accompanists re-enacted them as pointed, vicious things; he’d raise his delivery a full octave to seethe through “Needle in the Hay.” As presented here, the music is spare but deceptively layered. Note the muted drum part in “Coming Up Roses” that seems to drag his words along with it; how the droning strings in “The White Lady Loves You More” turn it into a doomed romance; how the frenzied strumming of “Southern Belle” seems poised to attack at any moment as Smith envisions a way out of the childhood memories that still raged in his mind.
This kind of songwriting—tied with the dark path his own life would go down, through addiction and hospitalizations and suicide attempts—can lead fans to look for clues in his songs, as if he laid them out like a cry for help. But he described his music more like dreaming: less in the interpretive, Freudian sense than the mysterious way you wake up feeling fragile and uneasy and inexplicably pissed at someone you haven’t spoken to in years. And for all of the addiction talk in the lyrics, Smith explained to journalists that it simply felt like a potent metaphor, a conduit toward bigger questions: Why do we turn self-destructive? How does it affect the people who love us? Where does it lead?
This insistence on not being taken literally is why Smith dismissed the idea of being a folk singer, someone who showed up on stage with a story to tell and a moral at the end. As soon as he was given the budget, he turned his records into expensive, symphonic opuses that seemed hell-bent on erasing the image of a quiet kid in his friend’s basement with an old acoustic guitar and tape recorder. Revisiting “The Biggest Lie,” the closing track on the record and one of his most heartbreaking songs, it’s almost jarring to hear him refer to “a crashed credit card/Registered to Smith.” It’s a classic trope of folk music: turning himself into a character, one whose future seemed as hopeless as the guy we imagine to be singing it.
The following years confirmed these premonitions. For his final record, From a Basement on the Hill, Smith experimented with switching his songs from mono to stereo halfway through, which might be the logical endpoint of staying up for days smoking crack in the studio but also of wanting to find new ways to burst through the speakers and make a connection: to make every part the best part. The music industry does not take kindly to these excitable, sensitive minds. He fractured more with every step, leaving Portland to seek refuge in New York and eventually Los Angeles. Pressure built; expectations grew. Late in life, he became so frustrated with projections about his future that he carved the word “NOW” into his arm and wrote a song as he bled onto the piano.
This pain eventually consumed him. But there was always some levity. During most of his live performances—a constant stressor that he once compared to a bullfight—Smith would turn to the crowd and ask for requests: “Do you want to hear a happy song or a sad song?” In his bruised, shaky voice, it always sounded kind of like a joke. After all, the magic of the girl in Either/Or’s “Say Yes” who was still in love the morning after was that, through her eyes, Smith could pretend that any sense of joy in this world might last. He claimed to have written this song in just five minutes and I wonder if we’d have gotten to hear it if he let it sit any longer.
Instead of “Say Yes,” I’d point to this album’s “St. Ides Heaven” as his most purely optimistic moment—the one I’d come closest to calling “happy.” Granted, the guy singing it is high on speed, drunk on malt liquor, and wandering around a parking lot, resenting every person who ever tried to help him. “Everyone is a fucking pro,” he laughs, because he knows, sooner or later, they’ll end up in the same place he’s at right now. Smith seems at peace knowing this. On the front cover of Elliott Smith are two bodies free-falling from apartment windows; on the back cover, tucked in the corner like a postage stamp, is Elliott Smith with dyed-blond hair, stopping to smell a flower.
Another bright moment: hearing the harmony vocals in “St. Ides Heaven” from the Spinanes’ Rebecca Gates. It’s a subtle performance that makes me consider how accustomed I am to hearing Elliott Smith singing by himself: in tight double-tracked vocals, in uncanny ribbons of harmony, as his own ghostly choir. With Gates next to him, he sounds different, maybe lighter. She wrote a little about the sessions in the liner notes for New Moon, a posthumous collection released in 2007. She remembers feeling shy but having fun, doing a few takes then going home. She also writes about a night, some time later, wandering around Portland with Smith. At one point they’re commiserating about the music industry; she remembers him being moody, wearing a raggedy old raincoat. Then somewhere along the way, they burst into laughter. It’s the kind of vague, half-remembered scene that always comes to mind when I hear these songs. You can see the rain on the street, the moon in the sky. It’s getting dark. They have the whole night ahead of them.
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