Elliott Smith
1969-2003
by Wayne Lewis
There's not much new to say about another rock 'n' roll death. Each one has a familiar taste — some
precedent and frame of reference within the existing pantheon. The passing of Elliott Smith set off
a rending of sackcloth that mirrors, on a smaller scale,
the shock, grief and anger that accompanied Kurt Cobain's
suicide about 10 years earlier. Around the time Smith first signed to a major label, when he was
on the cusp between underground ubiquity and the push to find a wider audience, that was one of the
lines on him — a quieter Cobain, whispering instead of screaming, but with the same inborn pain
and Pacific Northwest indie/punk pedigree.
Smith chafed at the tortured artist mantle. He tried to debunk this sad-boy persona by speaking dismissively to the press of his troubled times; he insisted that confessional music (a description easily applied to his melancholy folk-gone-pop) need not be autobiographical. As heartrending as Smith's songs could be, he refused to stand up and claim, "This is my pain." Now, his apparent suicide and the bizarre circumstances surrounding it belie the denials.
For fans who knew Smith only through his music, groping for this tragedy's meaning and intent involves, at best, a great deal of speculation, rumor and conflating the author with his text. Which is to say, such efforts may be useful to you personally, but they don't necessarily bear a relation to reality.
What's left is the music. We're hard-wired with the sense-making instinct to sift through Smith's work — three albums and one EP as a member of the rock band Heatmiser, five full-lengths available and one forthcoming as a solo artist, a wealth of bootlegs and a smattering of singles between these incarnations — in search of "clues" about his demise. We can construct a narrative that turns the shocking into the inevitable, but we should instead search for Smith's embedded messages about living life.
While Smith's subject matter was unquestionably grim, his real message comes through in the musical choices he made. Over the course of Smith's solo career, his recordings evolved from rainy-day folk — hushed and homemade but with palpable lyrical bite — to studio-borne widescreen pop elegance, with production cribbing liberally from his heroes the Beatles, particularly George Harrison. On this trail from home recording to Abbey Road, where Smith recorded Figure 8, the touchstone was a care and precision of arrangement that bled maximum beauty from every breath, every beat, every strum. Smith was making it his mission to take the ugly things of life — abandonment, abuse and addiction, heartbreak and hopelessness — and turn them into something beautiful.
Which is to say little of the songs themselves, pretty puzzles that led some of Smith's musical peers to describe him as the greatest songwriter of his generation. A large swath of his work features characters asking the question, "How could you do this to me?" What saves the results from the whininess or self-pity so often attendant to such a question is, as Michael Azerrad put it in Trouser Press, a sense of "uniquely resigned defiance." Smith would vividly portray the mindset of someone who feels absolutely condescended to, betrayed and beaten down, but who still rebounds to say, "been pushed away and I'll never go back." These are songs about survivors — about accepting that life brings pain, but that even sitting at the nadir, one can keep going.
More often, the question Smith's songs posed was, "How could you do this to yourself?" — or "How could I do this to myself?" Taking his songs as cautionary tales sells them short.
They have less to do with avoiding the wrong path than figuring out what to do when you end up there. Telling someone, "nobody broke your heart/ you broke your own 'cause you can't finish what you start," carries the implicit demand to cast aside victimhood and take responsibility for the consequences of your actions.
These sentiments come bathed in a teeth-grit disappointment, again tinged with a kind of defiance. The people his songs picked apart have ultimately committed the crime of squandering potential. Smith doesn't say you're crawling on your belly; he calls you a "future butterfly." Without saying it plainly, each song is a little call to arms, asking the lost souls of the
world to pick themselves up and make themselves better. We all feel like lost souls sometimes, and to hold out, even in the most desolate moments, some hope for redemption is on the one hand hard to bear, but on the other the deepest kindness.
Songs about death are also songs about life. The bleakest depiction of the human ability to sink into degradation also carries its inverse image, the chance to take broken pieces and make a functioning whole. After the mourning, Smith's music remains — with it is the opportunity for us to do as he said, not as he did.
E-mail Wayne Lewis at capsighs@pacbell.net.
