“If you’re a straight white man, she made it seem impossible to live your life without constantly doing something shitty. “I was reading all this heavy-duty feminist theory, and Catharine MacKinnon in particular,” he says. Some of the dark imagery came when Smith returned to Portland, Oregon, after graduating from Massachusetts Hampshire College in 1991. “But Elliott’s songs admit that the world’s fucked up, and this is just a beautiful moment we get to have.” “Some beautiful songs try to make you think that, for a moment, there’s no crap in the world, that it’s just a beautiful place,” says Slim Moon, founder of Kill Rock Stars, the Olympia, Washington, label that released Smith’s second and third albums (1995’s Elliott Smith and 1997’s Either/Or). However calm his songs sound, they still roar like a car crash echoing in a seashell. But no matter how much his songs reveal an urge to burn all the photo books, there’s a bone-tired weariness in his singing that can’t let go of old business.

“I’m so glad that my memory’s remote / ‘Cause I’m doing just fine hour-to-hour, note-to-note,” he sings on his fourth album, XO. Maybe he likes songs too much: His keep gagging on pieces of the past. He likes songs so much that, on his nights off, Smith rounds up friends and rocks the karaoke machine with versions of Scorpions and Don McLean hits. For everything it can mean this year, he is the songwriter to beat, a waltz-loving, George Harrison-quoting, profane craftsman who gets fan letters from Courtney Love and still beats up on himself. “It’s a big game to play, trying to make something that’s mainstream enough and still human.”Įlliott Smith just may prove up to the task. I’d be really happy if I could write a song as universal and accessible as ‘I Second That Emotion,’” he says. “I’m not interested in making ‘Elliott Smith Records’ over and over again. “It’s all okay,” he says with a fraction of a smile. A pair of Dutch dowagers try chatting him up from their bar stools, and they have a conversation neither party understands before Smith repairs to his table. Happier than someone who sings about the need to “bottle up and explode,” and happier than someone who last year tried to kill himself. Massaging a glass of beer, he seems happy, truly happy, which is not something a singer/songwriter so often linked with words such as “gloom” and “Garfunkel” is supposed to be. Smith flashes his room key, and confirms that all these people actually are his friends. “Trying to look good just gets on my nerves,” he says. He heads back to the Columbia, the rock-star haunt that’s the British version of the Chelsea Hotel, where friends and road crew and fellow traveling Northwesterners Sleater-Kinney are lining up at the bar, ordering drinks, and when the bartender of this private club room explains that they have to be staying at the hotel to order a drink, every one of them says the same thing: Their friend Elliott is the man, Elliott is coming soon, Elliott really, really is staying at the hotel.įinally, Smith arrives, in his T-shirt from Value Village, his bargain-bin green suede shoes, his knit cap, and frayed, flared green pants. He graciously excuses himself and waits until he’s across the room before muttering, “The last thing I need right now is somebody telling me how fame can make you crazy.”īut morning has broken here in London, and nothing can bring Smith down. Until finally he can’t take it any longer. All but Smith, who politely listens with nary a squirm. Other fans back away band members stick their head in the room and quickly withdraw. Having commandeered the singer’s attention, he bangs on about how fame drove sensitive strummer Cat Stevens nuts, drove him into the hands of Islam, drove him to call for the head of Salman Rushdie. “You must be a Cat Stevens fan, the kind of music you play,” this young man with opossum eyes says. Soon, the crowd diminishes, enough for one dogged follower to claim Smith’s attention. Just one hour ago he was sitting in a tiny backstage room, enjoying a post-show libation and breathing in a blue cloud of smoke courtesy of a gang of well-wishers. An expanded reissue of Either/Or is due out Mafrom Kill Rock Stars.Įlliott Smith recovers nicely. In honor of the 20th anniversary of Elliott Smith’s third album, 1997’s Either/Or, we’re reprinting it here. RJ Smith’s profile of Elliott Smith originally ran in the January 1999 “The Year in Music” issue of Spin.

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