Sophisticated melodies... the late, great Elliott Smith
I first became aware of Elliott Smith through an associate at Creation Records, who urged me to sign him. I'll admit it, I didn't get it at first but after a few more releases I realised that he was a true world-class talent and I became a fan. I met him once in the late 90s. I was in a club in LA watching some bad music industry buzz band when he walked over and hung out for a couple of hours. At the time I didn't recognise him. He was wearing traditional LA gangsta wear, had a patch over one eye and looked like he hadn't slept in months. As he left the club a girl asked me: "So what did Elliott have to say?" The changes that had come over him had been so fast and brutal that he barely resembled the Elliott Smith in the photographs that I'd seen a few years earlier.
Smith went from punk-inspired origins to playing acoustic demos that would eventually lay his path to fame and set the template for others such as Jose Gonzalez. At the time of Britpop, cocaine, confidence and Chas 'n' Dave-like records, his first 1993 album Roman Candle stood out in stark contrast. It was a brutally nocturnal record, a vivid snapshot of Smith's life at the time that was imbued with promisingly sophisticated melodies.
However, it was his self-titled album released on Kill Rock Stars a couple of years later that brought him to people's attention. A singer-songwriter releasing records for a riot grrrl label was enough to cause consternation among the holier-than-thou folks but the songs spoke for themselves regardless. The album demonstrated what Roman Candle hinted at, a songwriter that produced brilliant, durable songs using comparatively little (who can forget Wes Anderson's use of Needle in the Hay in The Royal Tenenbaums). There was also a distinctly haunting quality to the music, a captivating juxtaposition of pretty melodies with bleak subject matter: "No bad dream fucker is going to boss me around/Christian Brothers going to take him down." The intense combination of heavy lyrics with finger-picked, delicate music revealed what Elliott had learned from his punk rock schooling.
Before long a summons arrived from Hollywood. When Gus Van Sant used Smith songs in his Good Will Hunting (the soundtrack being the only thing worth remembering about the film) an unlikely stardom seemed ascendent. The moment was confirmed when Smith stepped on to the Oscar stage clad in a white suit and played Miss Misery. He then signed to Dreamworks. Though this move and the lavish pop production that ensued caused many fans to balk, Smith himself remarked that he had always wanted to write a pop song with the universality of I Second that Emotion. With the financial backing of Dreamworks, he released XO. The record sounds like an artist testing the boundaries of a new creative freedom. Sparsely produced acoustic numbers had made way for richly layered compositions.
Dreamworks got it right. They understood Smith's potential and launched a major artist around the world. The melodies and instrumentation recalled artists that Smith covered during this period: George Harrison, Nico, Ray Davies, Bob Dylan and the Band. It was the sound of an artist dreaming in technicolour and making classic records. The next release, Figure 8 in 2000 was a further revelation. While the chamber and baroque feel of XO was developed further, the lyrics had also grown increasingly enigmatic (see Son of Sam). The record is a strange mixture of finely tuned, contagious pop and an unignorable theme of weariness and disappointment. Following this release Smith's personal life was to become increasingly out of control but he appears to have remained consistently ambitious and active in his music. Stories of his conflicts with Dreamworks, a run in with the police, and spiralling drug paranoia from this time perhaps inevitably cloud the brilliant (if uneven) material that Smith recorded for an album that was never to be completed.
From a Basement on the Hill is a tough listen and not only because of the lyrical themes. There is the inevitable question of whether the record resembles the artist's intended release. With the record unfinished, friends and associates set about the uneasy task of drawing material together. From the accounts of David McConnell, a friend involved with the recordings of LA pop band Goldenboy, the intention had been to attempt a contemporary version of the White Album. What was finally released understandably lacks coherency. There are glimpses of a harder, more experimental sound on Coast to Coast and King's Crossing with their psychedelic haze and layered guitars. For me, a valuable insight into what the album may have sounded like is offered by the demos and completed songs on elliottsmithbsides.com.
Though From a Basement on the Hill contains moments of bold experimentation, it also feels like the third part of a trilogy that began with XO. The album is a soundtrack to the night-owl drug culture of Los Angeles with similar referencing to Skip Spence's Oar, the despair of Alex Chilton's third Big Star album and the advocacy of Neil Young's Tonight's the Night. This is clearly an incomplete work but nonetheless fascinating for it. A new compilation of songs from earlier times is soon to be released by Kill Rock Stars. Hopefully New Moon will help to secure Elliott Smith's legacy and draw the attention of those unfamiliar with his brilliant albums.
Ultimately, I think Smith demonstrated the expressive potential great pop can aspire to. He leaned towards the superb musicianship and imagination of The Beach Boys and The Byrds but infused his melodies with rawly personal lyrics. At the end of the day he aspired for me. And in doing so he wrote great pop songs.
He knew that you shouldn't get pissed off at great songs. He wrote enough of them to know.
