On Elliott Smith

My Feed, presumably because somebody has a new book coming out, is saying "Elliott Smith" to me. So I am, today, engaging with Elliott Smith. Earlier today I listened to his second self-titled record (the Blue Jumpers record). I'm planning on listening to Either/Or and XO later. Here's one thing I've written about Elliott Smith in the past:

Between the Bars - quintessential guitar and voice ballad (though there are at least two guitars here, and there's some kind of organ towards the end). Robbed of almost all the techniques and tools one would normally use to build a song, how does one pull off the feat?  

Option 1: Battle depression, alcoholism, and heroin addiction; turn to music as the only possible expression of your own humanity, each song you write and record a tiny, tiny scream into the vast void of an unfeeling universe; realize upon attaining commercial success that now that everyone can hear you, no one is actually listening. 

Option 2: Fake it. 

Technically, he does what he does--layering voices and guitars in such a way that it still sounds like there's only one of each. Both elements super up-front in the recording. You're in the same room with him, right next to him even, and he's whispering his song to you. One perfect, memorable line: "People that you've been before that you don't want around any more." Everything about the construction of the song is easily repeatable by anyone else except for, you know, the actual deeply personal and profoundly heartbreaking expression behind it.

That was back when I was trying to write about music the way my wife was writing about what she reads. That reads, now (and let's be real, it read then), as quite sarcastic. But it's actually completely true and I was only just then realizing how true it was. Human beings listening to music can tell if the singer is actually, you know, singing about something. Telling the truth. Elliott Smith was telling some hard, complicated truths, and people listened to him because they could hear him speaking (singing them). God, every other song on The Blue Jumpers record is about being on heroin, and then it ends with "The Biggest Lie" which, when you get to the end and it turns out that's what this record sums to, is just shattering. Elliott Smith died for your sins. He suffered so that you didn't have to. 

I don't remember if I knew at the time that I myself wasn't doing this; that I wasn't telling the truth when I sang. That I was, in essence, singing nothing. I think the answer was yes, and that the sarcasm in that post is defensiveness over the fact that I thought I just didn't have the ability to sing about anything that meant anything to me. 

What I definitely didn't know at the time was that I absolutely had been singing about real things in the very recent past, and that everybody could hear it when I did (c.f. Control of Electromagnetic Radiation, "Men of Luggage," "Every Day", others). It wasn't that I was lacking talent, it was that I was lacking belief, or possibly energy, or possibly...I mean, who knows why talent abandons a human being? It could be for a lot of reasons. 99% of those reasons are probably about trying to survive as an artist in whatever power regime is in force for any given human context that artist might find themselves in. For me, I'm guessing it was devoting my energy of that time to parenting, which, you may have heard, takes a lot of energy. It can't be a coincidence that I'm (slowly) learning to sing about things that mean something to me at the same time my child is growing up and taking her first steps out of the house. 

It's also something about recording. The '00s and the '10s were really about the illusion that finally you could sit in your house and make a record and the world would just come to you, would come to hear your music. Because, when we were young, that is what had happened to us. Music was brought to us via the radio, via MTV, via the LPs, cassettes, and CDs that we bought. And yet and still the music changed our lives, even in that watered down version, and so we imagined that what we wanted was to be the artist on the other end, whose song was on the radio, who was making all the people feel what we felt when we heard those songs. Weird how long it took me to figure out that Elliott Smith never felt a thing when I listened to "Between The Bars" on my iPod. The only time he could have felt anything of what I felt was when he played it in my presence (and that of the rest of the audience) that one time at Chop Suey. And he seemed to be pretty numb then -- he was trying, but I think people were a little bit too much for him.