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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. 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”. 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. 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?"
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.”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.”
He was remembering traumatic things,” Chiba said to Spin and, while Welch denies any wrongdoing, Smith spoke obsessively about his belief that his stepfather had abused him. “My stepfather used to take me up to the attic,” he told his friend Andrew Morgan, according to Spin. “That’s all I remember. I don’t remember what he did.” 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." 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?
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. 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. 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.
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.” Whether or not you can ever know an artist through his music isn’t nearly as important as if the songs speak to you – if they can help you through a broken heart, or inspire you to call the person you like, or even to finish your workout at the gym. Music transcends the artist’s biography or even intent, which is part of the reason people don’t mind mondegreens, because mishearing lyrics almost doesn’t matter if you love a song. To crib from Smith himself, new fans may never know him now, but they’re going to love him anyhow. 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? 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. 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.”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?
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