I really identified with the tone and the vibe. I felt like there was a friend over there on the other side of the speaker.
At a deeper level, Smith was doing something with his craft that drew Erez's professional attention. But good songs are rare. Erez performed "Angeles," and then he sneaked in a cover of "Southern Belle," from Smith's self-titled album. This album is one of my favorites of all time. To me, this album seems a lot more chill.
It was his friend. I think that was what Elliott was going for on this album. This used to be my number 1 favorite for a long time. This album is a lot more upbeat compared to the last two I talked about. I like his voice the best on this album. It has that the relaxing after a long day vibe that I was talking about earlier. At first, the skin's waxy softness, the three-days' growth, the brawler's nose, is all you notice.
He looks uncared for and unconcerned. But look closely, and what slowly reveals itself is something gentle and exhausted. He denies that they were anything but friends. In a dressing room backstage of a big club in Portland, the Smith profile takes a sip from a microbrew.
It becomes apparent how Gary Smith, Elliott's father, lent a lot of his features to his son, along with a precise way of speaking that holds each word out an even beat.
Gary Smith is a psychiatrist; he speaks this way for a living. He and Elliott's mother divorced when Elliott was one year old. Elliott stayed with his mom in Dallas until he was 14, and then moved with his father and stepmom to Portland. Right then in walks Elliott, who's just rehearsed a George Harrison cover he'll perform with Quasi that night.
I put The White Album on a lot. He loved Rocky Raccoon. When Elliott was 14, he entered a talent contest held by the farm team of capitalism. For weeks, the sound of Elliott practicing Beatles songs on his guitar wafted from his bedroom.
And Elliott played Blackbird and I was stunned, and I thought maybe it was just me, but after he finished playing there was a hush, and then this warm applause filled the hall. It was the first time I knew, whoa, this is where he's going. It was the beginning of that sort of …". He doesn't finish the sentence, because the father and son are both laughing out loud, giddy as goats, at what is so obvious it doesn't need to be said: It was the beginning of not quite getting the prize, of not quite knowing if you want all the yankee-doodle-doo up the road.
He's quiet, but potent. Elliott Smith — 'I don't feel any sadder than anybody else I know': a classic interview from the vaults. But when the magazine visited the singer-songwriter at his home studio in the city, they were confronted by an unusually bright Smith. He had successfully passed through rehab, and was now grappling with a vast number of songs planned for his sixth solo album. Here, we would be reminded, was a singer-songwriter of ineffable delicacy and, even by the solipsistic extremes of the genre, unnerving emotional force.
Smith could be tender and misanthropic, romantic and self-loathing, candid about his drug use and densely, poetically allusive. On October 21, , his girlfriend Jennifer Chiba found him dead in their bathroom, stabbed through the heart. In spite of much grisly speculation about the tragedy, what had happened seemed clear enough: Smith may have been clean of drugs, but his depression was not so easily abandoned. Better, then, to see this as the last work of a permanently troubled, inordinately gifted songwriter — although, tantalisingly, there may well be another dozen or so finished songs still awaiting release.
Elliott Smith despised his reputation as a depressive icon, hated the fact that people were attracted to his music because of the grim assumptions they made about his life. By John Mulvey. Trending Now. Interviews John Lewis -. News Tom Skinner -. News Michael Bonner -. Album Jason Anderson -. Latest Issue. Buy Now.
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