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APPRECIATION: ELLIOTT SMITH |
SWEET MISERYFew songwriters have made torment sound as beautiful and lyrical--even uplifting--as did Elliott Smith. "It's a picture-perfect evening and I'm staring down the sun / Fully loaded, deaf and dumb and done," he sang in "Sweet Adeline," his soft voice hovering over gently strummed power chords. "Waiting for sedation to disconnect my head / Or any situation where I'm better off than dead." Words like these now take on a tragic resonance since the young troubadour--just 34--apparently took his own life at home in Los Angeles on October 21.The quiet desperation in Smith's songs often drew comparisons with Nick Drake, another gifted and troubled songwriter/guitarist who left us too early. But musically, Smith's songs have a very different vibe, harking back to the grand harmonic and melodic gestures of Big Star and the Beatles. While Smith's lyrics wrestled with the demons of depression and drug abuse, his music soared above it all. Elliott Smith was born Steven Paul Smith in Omaha, Nebraska, and first made his mark in Portland, Oregon, in the early '90s with the alt-rock band Heatmiser. Early solo albums like Elliott Smith and Either/Or (Kill Rock Stars), with few frills beyond voice and acoustic guitar, won Smith a devoted following in the rock underground and are still widely considered to be his best work. After Smith's songs were featured in the movie Good Will Hunting, directed by his friend (and fellow musician) Gus Van Sant, Smith found himself in a truly surreal moment of television history. The ultimate non-Hollywood type, Smith took the stage at the 1998 Academy Awards show with scraggly hair, a white suit, and a flattop guitar to sing his Oscar-nominated song "Miss Misery." Poetic justice did not prevail, however, and the shiny statue went to the ultimate Hollywood type--Celine Dion, for the Titanic love theme. Smith was an adept guitarist, traveling all over the neck in dramatic chord progressions that steered clear of folk and rock clichés. On XO and Figure 8 (DreamWorks) he proved himself a tight one-man band, covering keyboards, bass, and drums along with guitar and vocals. Smith had been keeping a low profile since the release of Figure 8 in 2000, and at the time of his death he was completing a double album called From a Basement on the Hill. Release details are unavailable at this writing, but in a tribute show on Santa Monica's KCRW, Luke Wood, of DreamWorks A&R, described the set as spanning the voice-and-guitar intimacy of Either/Or and the orchestral sweep of Smith's later albums. A Basement on the Hill is an apt image for the space that Elliott Smith inhabited. His songs will long be remembered for providing gorgeous, sweeping views while evoking so vividly the darkness underground. --Jeffrey Pepper Rodgers |
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