At the beginning of “Some Song,” we hear Elliott mumbling to himself. He quips, “This is a rock song. Loud, loud, loud.”
What follows is one of Smith’s most restrained, depressive, and haunting ballads. It is the furthest thing from rock.
To put his remark into perspective, we must take a trip back to 1994. The sonic blasts of Nirvana had defied all conventions, leaving a permanent wake in popular music. In grunge, the younger generation had found a new form of expression. Whether through its deep ruminations on depression and isolation (“Nutshell” by Alice in Chains) or its stark portrayals of misanthropy and self-illusion (“Lithium” by Nirvana), grunge channeled the pervasive angst of the younger generation—angst that stemmed from the vast uncertainties of the turn-of-the-century milieu.
Now take Stephen Paul “Elliott” Smith, a scrappy twenty-something with a degree in philosophy and political science. With his classmate, Neil Gust, he formed the grunge band Heatmiser in 1991. The band’s compositions are gritty and guitar-driven, but not hostile. They’re sentimental, but not personal. There’s a constant balance between frustration and tenderness, especially on Mic City Sons, the band’s swan song, released shortly after the band ruptured. On this record, we can distinctly hear the delicate songwriting that would later characterize Smith’s solo work.
Just like any band, Heatmiser was a group of musicians with different ideas that often conflicted with each other. Moreover, the grunge noise of Heatmiser was more or less a manifestation of four voices screaming out in cacophony, trying in vain to agree upon a common idea. As a result, Smith’s creativity was compromised. But when he sang as a solo artist, with a lone acoustic guitar, Elliott’s voice was singular. It was in unison with itself. No longer was the sound abrasive and filled with uncertainty, and as he later told Rolling Stone in an interview, he didn’t have to strain his voice to sing over the reverb. And in his songwriting, this shift was also reflected. Now that he could think his own mind, Smith began writing more personally. He talked about the struggles of his day-to-day life. More specifically, drug addiction. Loneliness. Depression. Disorder.
Let’s take another look at that remark from “Some Song.” This is a rock song, Elliott Smith says. Loud, loud, loud.
Subtle yet profound, this joke underscores the prevailing expectations in popular music at the time. If artists wanted to survive in the new sonic landscape, they had to play loud and fast. And with his hushed vocals and plaintive fingerpicking, Smith feared he was putting his audiences to sleep. He knew full well that he was out of place. In his time, Smith’s unique brand of songwriting was, in a sense, rebellious: more so than grunge. Not loud or anxious. Quiet, harrowing, painful. That was enough to blow people’s minds.
Though Smith did not sing with the same bombast and aggression as Kurt Cobain, the two artists had very much in common. Their lyrics were scathing and witty, discussing uncomfortable topics, and much like Cobain, Smith was very fragile and kind-hearted. He was an ardent feminist, and as a child, he figured he’d become an ambulance driver when he was older in order to offset the damage he had done by being born a straight, white male.
There’s something morbidly addicting in the melancholy of Elliott Smith’s music. The unceasing, inescapable sorrow in his songwriting reels you in, even when you’d expect it to push you away. His words captivate you with their intricacy, specificity, and subtle rebellion. And his wispy, double-tracked vocals, accompanied by his delicate yet purposeful strumming, puts you in a dream. In “St. Ides Heaven,” Rebecca Gates—friend of Smith and frontwoman of The Spinanes—sings backing vocals, a rare occurrence in an Elliott song. And the refrain is, quite simply, one of the most magical moments in modern music:
High on amphetamines,
The moon is a lightbulb, breaking
It’ll go around with anyone
But it won’t come down for anyone…
And I won’t come down for anyone…
Akin to the weeping of a violin, or the peeling of a bell, his voice rings out, enveloping you. Hushed, it fills the universe. Tortured, it brings you comfort. The song has to do with the bliss of inebriation—the succor of alcohol in times of distress. Lost in his “St. Ides Heaven,” Smith wanders around the neighborhood with his “head full of stars.” Another important aspect of the song is its rejection of outside intervention. Elliott’s friends try to help him get sober and kick his addiction, but he resents them for projecting their own experiences onto him:
Cause everyone is a f—ing pro
And they all got answers from trouble they’ve known
And they all got to say what you should and shouldn’t do
Though they don’t have a clue
In fact, several times in Smith’s life did his close friends stage an intervention. “The people who try to intervene,” he remarked to a fan later in life, “they’re good people who genuinely care about you. But they don’t know what you’re going through. Do what you need to do.”
But that isn’t to say the album is a giant warning against drugs. Elliott openly rejected that notion. Instead, it has more to do with dependence. I depend on this liquor, or these friends that comfort me sometimes. And in Elliott’s early life, that dependence was a way to escape his pain, as he grew up in an abusive household. As he grew up into adulthood, though, Elliott learned that he couldn’t kick that dependence, because it was his only means of sealing his emotional wounds. We see that theme in “Christian Brothers” (also named after an alcoholic beverage):
No bad dream f—er’s gonna boss me around
Christian Brothers gonna take him down
But it can’t help me get over
Don’t be cross, it’s sick I want
I’ve seen the boss blink on and off
The “bad dream” that he references in this song is his abusive stepfather. He depends on “Christian Brothers” to give him courage to fight back against Charlie, the “boss.” And yet, even though people in his life grew irritated with him for his addiction, he insisted that it was “this sick” he wanted—alcohol was the only way to escape his misery.
In the music of Elliott Smith, we hear some of the darkest, gloomiest sounds he would ever produce in his career. And yet, there is a sense of contentment and peace in it. Almost reconciled with his problems, Smith allows himself to look past them and create something new out of them. He knows and accepts that in his life, there’s no point in fighting what ails him.
I know what you are, I just don’t mind
I won’t say you’re wrong
(From “Alphabet Town”)
There’s always a sense of other-worldliness to his music. Each song builds its own landscape, a unique universe with different characters and thoughts. Even with such limited instrumentation (though a harmonica, a cello, and a drum set appear in one song each), he manages to craft a world with a million sounds and voices. It is through this sparsity that he creates fullness. The harmonica that opens “Alphabet Town” sets you in a trance; it’s the feeling of stumbling home on a cold, windy day as you stare at the sidewalk, the weight of the world bearing down on you. In “Clementine,” he takes us through the rainy streets of a city: somber yet peaceful. Or in the “Biggest Lie,” we can see deep, layered metaphors that describe his woeful existence:
I’m waiting for the train
The subway that only goes one way
The stupid thing that’ll come to pull us apart
And make everybody late.
Elliott depicts a character waiting for the train to take him away. Here, he builds a world around you. It feels as though you’re standing on the train next to him. But when we look below the surface, it’s about suicide, and his contemplation of death. He’s waiting for the moment when it all falls apart: when he only has one option left. When the only escape is final and irreversible. It’s a “stupid thing,” he admits, and it’ll only cause others sorrow. In his music, Elliott talked a lot about futility and how stupid decisions ruled his life. He couldn’t seem to ever get anything right.
In every sense of the word, Elliott Smith defied convention. But what truly makes his songwriting sui generis is his manipulation of song structure. His melodies stick in your head, but not because they have a hook, then a verse, then a bridge, et cetera. Quite the opposite. Many of the songs on Elliott Smith lack a chorus or bridge. It’s in this way that they act more like musical trains of thought. Connected through instrumental bridges, they feel like distinct songs that have been skillfully joined together. For example, in “Needle in the Hay,” after the second chorus, Elliott plays a chord for a couple extra measures before completely switching strumming patterns. This takes us into the second half of the song, wherein the character is no longer lamenting his life, but taking a bus to the city:
Now on the bus
Nearly touching this dirty retreat
Gonna walk, walk, walk
Four more blocks plus the one in my brain
Elliott adored the idea of multi-part songs. In fact, his love of music began with The Beatles, specifically The Beatles (colloquially, the White Album). Throughout the record, this particular style of songwriting is ubiquitous (“Happiness Is a Warm Gun,” for instance, is divided into three distinct sections, none of which has a chorus.) Smith likened this concept to the experience of switching channels with a TV remote. And perhaps the self-titling of the album is a subtle homage to the Beatles, too.
In the album’s 25th anniversary remastering, there’s a picture book full of candid photos from around this period. There’s also a second vinyl disc with a handful of previously unreleased songs on it. They’re from a 1994 concert at Umbra Penumbra, a small coffee shop (now out of business) in Portland, Oregon. Not a stadium, not an arena, not even a bar or a garage. A coffee shop. Nothing can testify to the intimacy of Elliott’s music like that. He wasn’t a rockstar that gallivanted from gig to gig. He was a man with a soul and a heart, whose voice would stick in your mind forever.
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