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Dreams and grievances, biography and metaphor, truth and fiction—it all swirled together in Smith’s music until every throwaway line seemed like a secret. Smith fans were spooked into lifelong identification because of the purity of that voice, its unmistakable sadness, its seeming simplicity. But the deeper you peered into Smith’s music the more elusive and diaphanous the portrait of “Elliott Smith” became. Behind “Elliott” was, always and forever, Steven Paul Smith, the guy behind the guy behind the guy who had been working out his childhood songwriting visions for a lifetime and arrived at a point in which his ambitions and his talent synced up in one tall, clean line. The “Elliott Smith” of Smith’s solo records was not a person; it was a project. And XO was a testament to how far that project could go. Right now I've been listening to " Bye" a lot, which I know is weird because it's another instrumental. But my favorite song song is probably " Easy Way Out." I love that one. Real, perhaps, because it was so deeply rooted. Born Steven Smith into a family from the Community Of Christ church, a Mormon denomination, he was only six months old when his parents split. His mother married an insurance salesman named Charlie Welch, whom Smith would claim first beat him on their wedding day, aged three. His memories of his childhood had always been hazy, but at 14 he left his mother’s home in Texas to live with his father in Portland. “I didn’t sleep at all for about the first six months I lived there,” he told Under the Radar. “I was very worried about my mother.” In another interview, he elaborated: “I couldn’t stay in the same house as my stepfather.”
What emerged was a dreamlike collection of what Smith called “little movies”, a narcotic drift through pop history, from doo-wop to modern psychedelia, that was arguably the equal of XO. “ XO was about exploring possibilities of the studio and arrangement,” Schnapf says. “ Figure 8 is about playing with form and impressionism.” Smith named the album after “the idea of a self-contained, endless pursuit of perfection”. Yet behind the scenes, things were turning pretty ugly. Hard drugs crept in and escalated fast. Smith’s partner towards the end of his life, Jennifer Chiba, would suggest he wasn’t someone prone to half measures. Shortly after the release of his fifth studio album, Figure 8 — the last record he'd finish in his lifetime — Elliott Smith told a Boston Herald writer why he was so drawn to that titular image. "I liked the idea of a self-contained, endless pursuit of perfection," he said. "But I have a problem with perfection. I don't think perfection is very artful. But there's something I liked about the image of a skater going in a twisted circle that doesn't have any real endpoint. So the object is not to stop or arrive anywhere; it's just to make this thing as beautiful as they can." While he has clearly influenced music supervisors, it’s hard to underestimate the extent of Smith’s influence on musicians themselves. Smith’s music continues to affect people and shape musicians’ output. “I’m still surprised when I hear post-Elliott Smith things, like wow he really influenced a lot of people,” said Tony Lash, a high school friend and former bandmate of Smith’s. “What makes Elliott’s music so interesting is its attention to detail – in the lyrics, in the composition and in the production,” says Sadie Dupuis, from Speedy Ortiz and Sad13. “He had an uncanny ability to pepper introspective emotional observations with visual, evocative props.” When Either/Or originally came out at a time when grunge was still big, Sugar Ray and Smashmouth were hitting the charts alongside the Spice Girls and the Notorious BIG, but Smith created a subtly devastating album using nothing but pretty guitar chords, carefully crafted chamber-pop arrangements and intimate lyrics. The album has made a lasting impression on musicians and music fans across all genres – even Frank Ocean mentioned Smith’s influence in the liner notes to Blonde – and his fanbase continues to grow. Honestly, because I had an iPod, I pretty much shuffled everything, so all those records kind of blended together at first. But then, I got really into vinyl. I got all his records on vinyl and that's how I would listen for a long time; they each have a specific vibe and mood. The song " Son of Sam" I really loved right out the gates, because I've always been super fascinated with serial killers. I was like, "Oh my God — you can write about that?"Phoebe Bridgers: I was in eighth grade. My friend Carla Azar showed me " Kiwi Mad Dog 20/20," which is on Roman Candle. It's a super weird one to start with because it's instrumental. Later, another friend showed me " Waltz #2," which became, and maybe still is, my favorite song of his — I think it just exemplifies his writing. Then I went super deep. Up until then, Smith was known for playing music so quiet it almost died away before it reached your ears. He made most of his first three albums in friends and loved ones’ bedrooms, and it was his 1993 debut Roman Candle, which he recorded in then-girlfriend JJ Gonson’s basement by pressing his guitar strings against a low-quality microphone, that transfixed Luke Wood, DreamWorks’ A&R. The thought of Smith singing over a full orchestra might’ve seemed as unlikely in that moment as collaborating with Metallica. Smith soon left Portland for Brooklyn, characteristically low. His New York roommate Dorien Garry told Spin: “He always talked about suicide… He made me promise that I wouldn’t be mad at him. He just talked about it as if it were going to happen.” Seemed like he went pretty all-in,” Schnapf sighs, sadly. “Up until then he didn’t smoke weed, he didn’t do drugs. A lot of Figure 8 was very positive. It just started to slowly unwind… Towards the end of the process there was skittish behaviour, not looking you in the eye kinda stuff. It seems like everybody hits this point in your late twenties or early thirties where however you’ve been dealing with shit stops working. Either you start to get your shit together or go heavily down the other way. He hit that fork and went the other direction.” In the wake of the Oscars, Smith signed with DreamWorks Records, but Schnapf feels the press and radio “game” that ensued played further on Smith’s insecurities. “It’s a double-edged sword of wanting to do what’s being asked of you and really hating what’s being asked of you and not being good at it, in that he’s real, he’s not a bulls*** artist.”
For his part, Lash, Smith’s friend and former Heatmiser bandmate, doesn’t think it’s possible to really know Smith through his music. “I think people ascribe more autobiographical content than is really there. There was a lot more to him and his personality than what he put into his songs,” said Lash, who thinks the biggest misconception about Smith is that he went through life gloomy and heartbroken. “His awesome sense of humor doesn’t come through in his music and it was a very important part of his personality,” he said. “Just taking his music would give people a pretty skewed, narrow sense of who he was.” At the time this record came out in 2000, some people were kind of miffed that he'd signed to a major label and started making more elaborate arrangements — like it automatically meant he was selling out. We don't talk about those things in quite the same way anymore, and when you listen to a record like Figure 8 now, that narrative kind of falls away. Was it ever on your radar with him? Totally — maybe even more than XO , this is the record of his that I associate with inventive production choices just as much as I do great songwriting. From a production standpoint, are there elements on this record that have inspired your own music directly? Not really. I mean, I hear it's an old folk tale, the idea that someone could sell out. It's such a goofy stance. There's so much less money in music [today] that sometimes getting a car commercial is the only way that you're gonna make money. People don't make nearly as much money as they did in the '90s, so I think it was way more prevalent then. But also, who wants someone to just be lonely and be making records in their basement instead of collaborating with a band and touring and making sounds? I feel that way about it. It's lonely to make records by yourself. I hear a joy in the more jammy songs on this album. Though she only came to his work after his death, Phoebe Bridgers has listened to Elliott Smith's Figure 8 more times than she can count. Her second album, Punisher, is out in June.
On his 34th birthday, on 6 August 2003, Smith quit drinking overnight, and also soon gave up red meat, caffeine and sugar. “He might have been cleaned up, but he was not well… still super paranoid,” Schnapf says, yet Smith felt hopeful enough to propose to Chiba in the studio. Then, following an argument in their Echo Park apartment in the afternoon of 21 October, Chiba claims she emerged from the shower to find Smith with a knife in his chest. He died in hospital an hour later. His final album, From a Basement on the Hill, would be completed and compiled by Schnapf and Smith’s family posthumously. The breadth and depth of XO astonished even his benefactors. “The clarity and continuity of [his] thought is amazing,” said Wood. “He can take a metaphor…and sing about it for three minutes and never leave.” Waronker himself said that Smith was “as good as it gets when you’re talking about layers within lyrics.” On the stunning closing chorale, “I Didn’t Understand,” Smith sighs the line: “My feelings never change a bit, I always feel like shit/I don’t know why, I guess that I just do.” It sounds like a pure depiction of depression, in all its weariness and ingrained fatalism. It sounds, as it always does, like confession, like the truth that remained after exhaustion had burned away all artifice.
The nadir came in North Carolina that year, where a severely intoxicated Smith was impaled on a tree during an impulsive attempt on his own life. “I jumped off a cliff,” he told Spin. “But it didn’t work … It wasn’t like I made up my mind to throw myself off a cliff. I got freaked out and started running, it was totally dark, and I ran off the edge of a cliff. I saw it coming up, and it wasn’t like, ‘I’m gonna throw myself off this cliff and die.’ It was just, ‘Ground’s coming up. Who cares, whatever.’” Only rarely did the lyrics suggest distraction. “Son of Sam”, he explained, concerned not so much the infamous New York serial killer as “a destructive, repetitive person” wrestling with a “clouded mind”. “Junk Bond Trader” spotlit the plight of the artist pressed to “give the people something they’d understand”, and “Everything Means Nothing to Me” was born of a violent reaction, during a 48-hour mushroom trip, to the pressures of having to worry about the future of his “art”.It's kind of hard for me to believe this album is 20 years old, because in a lot of ways it still sounds very fresh. Do you think it would find an audience if a record like this were released today? I think I'm one of those people you're describing: That's not a record that I've spent much time with, and maybe I was just too upset. It can be intense to go down certain rabbit holes with him. But Figure 8 is a record I don't consider as dark — it has its moments, but by and large it feels more like an exploration of his pop sensibility. When did you first encounter that one, and how did you make sense of it within the rest of his catalog? To Bridgers, though, Smith's music is something more than an influence: It's absolutely foundational. "It's like The Beatles to me, and I mean that in every way," she tells me. "If someone doesn't like his music, I actually feel like I'm not going to agree with them about anything. It informs everything I like." That's perhaps the greatest comparison Smith could have received. His adoration of the Fab Four bookended his life and career: He once claimed that the first record to ignite his desire to be a musician, when he was just 5 years old, was the ambitious and playfully eclectic White Album. ("It was pretty much my inspiration, that and AC/DC," he said in an interview the month before Figure 8 was released.) Much later, in those troubled days of 2003, the final song he ever played live was a cover of the haunting White Album cut "Long, Long, Long." That a young talent like Bridgers would call him her hero — and mention him in the same breath as his heroes — evokes that Autumn de Wilde image on the cover of his magnificent 2000 album. Maybe he never got to see that colorful continuum of music that snakes out behind him. But plenty of us can still hear it. Lindsay Zoladz: I'm 33 now, so I was in high school when Elliott Smith died. I have a pretty vivid memory of it — I definitely wrote a really bummed LiveJournal entry that day. Since you got into his music after he was already gone, I'm curious about your earliest memories of listening to him, and what record you started with.
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