los angeles times april 19, 1998
writer unknown
typed by rebekah
"a few weeks ago, elliott smith
performed his oscar-nominated song "miss misery" for
more than 55 million on the academy awards telecast. a month
earlier, he was playing the tiny l.a. rock club spaceland. a
year ago he was trying to kill himself. this is what you might
call progress. "i'm a
lot happier now than i was a year ago," says smith, 28.
" kind of got about as bummed out as i could get. i don't
know. if you sort of bottom out, then there's only one way to
go." that's arguable, as smith well knows. but indeed his
path has been up, in a big way. his songs were deployed prominently
in a hit movie, good will hunting, capped by the oscar nomination
he signed a contract with the prestigious dreamworks records,
which will release his major-label debut album this summer. he's
even patching things up with is girlfriend. and he's getting
used to the reviews. "smith's voice is nuanced and supple,
as full of mystery and suggestion as an overheard conversation,"
david gionfriddo wrote in esquire, describing a recent performance.
"and his gift for penning classic pop melodies and confessionally
desperate lyrics makes the lilting, beatles-esque verses of say
yes and the boozy, last-call seductiveness of between the bars
alternately hummable and harrowing." could things be going
too well for someone who's always given the impression that he
prefers obscurity, and whose art seems tied to hard times? "well,
i think people tend to play better if they're not on a winning
team," he says with a smile. "i mean, it's not like
oh, this attention is terrible.' it's really nice in a way.
but it doesn't help anybody to make up better songs. in fact
it kind of gets in the way when other people pay attention to
you and are constantly directing your attention to your outward
self, which is not where songs come from. it's easier for me
to make up stuff when i make my little circuit of bars in new
york without being recognized or having my attention drawn away
from what i'm thinking about." central casting couldn't
deliver a better model of the tortured troubadour than the real-life
elliott smith.
wearing a quilted jacket and lighting
a succession of cigarettes, he looks every bit the street scuffler,
or maybe the day labourer he was before music earned him a living.
he sits on a couch in a lounge at the selma avenue recording
studio in hollywood where he's making his album, looking straight
ahead as he speaks in soft tones. smith's manner is so modest
and his outlook so tolerant he sincerely insists that he still
hasn't met any "bastards" in the music business that
you wonder whether he's fit to move into the big time as the great
new hope of literate song-craft. but smith who will play the
troubadour on may 19did show some fight when it came to a key
crossroads in his career last year. heatmiser, a rock band that
smith played in concurrently with his solo career, had signed
with virgin records, and when the group broke up, the label claimed
the rights to smith as a solo artist. he balked and eventually
reached a settlement that made him a free agent. "the drive
is there because he has so many songs he has to get out,"
says his manager, margaret mittleman. "his drive isn't obvious
and he doesn't talk about it every day. he's not overly ambitious.
but he's ambitious enough." no one expects smith to outdistance
hanson or "titanic" on the charts. but many of his
supporters see him as a potential pacesetter for a new breed of
singer-songwriter,
one that's tapping traditional forms while sorting thru alienated,
post- 60s upbringings in resonant, idiosyncratic music.
smith's signing with dreamworks earlier
this year brought that potent into focus, because it linked the
singer with label co-founder lenny waronker an artist-friendly
executive who has worked in the past with such individualistic
talents as randy newman, rickie lee jones, van dyke parks and
james
taylor. "they all occupy their own space, and elliott is
the epitome of that," waronker says. "i think that
he is a major songwriter who has his own vocabulary. most great
writers do." smith who moved to brooklyn after heatmiser
and his last relationship both broke up came to this threshold
thru a route usually associated with his harder-edged brethren
the pacific northwest indie-rock underground. he recorded his
first album, "roman candle," for the tiny portland label
cavity search, and his next two, "elliott smith" and
"either/or," for a higher-profile independent, olympia-based
kill rock stars. those records and smith's regular solo tours
seeded a growing audience, attracted to his quietly searing, subversively
catchy music. his songs seem to come with a built-in tension
and a melancholy backdrop as he spins demon-haunted scenarios
describing suspicion, deceit and obsession. in "between
the bars," on of the four songs from "either/or"
that director gus van sant used in "good will hunting,"
smith turns alcohol into a taunting character:
drink up with me now and forget all about the pressure of days . . . the images stuck in your head people you've been before that you don't want around anymore that push and shove and won't bend to your will i'll keep them still
in virtually every one of his miniatures,
smith balances his desperate content with rich melodies that carry
the promise or is it illusion of escape? "there's something
very fragile and almost eerie about [his style] that was attractive,"
says waronker. "and then when you start to pay attention
to what he's saying, and the melodic smarts, it all adds up to
somebody who's quite special." his label chief isn't the
only one who's used "fragile" to describe smith's music*and
it's not a word the artist is thrilled with. "i don't really
have any goals as a songwriter, other than to show what it's like
to be a person*just like everybody else who's ever played music
does," smith says. "i don't feel my songs are particularly
fragile or revealing. . . . "they're songs. it's not like
a diary, and they're not intended to be any sort of super intimate
confessional singer-songwriterish thing. i like the beatles.
dylan. the saints and the clash. all the good things about
what they did or do is probably the same things that i'm trying
to do." indeed, subtle production touches in his low-budget,
homemade albums create haunting currents in the music, and suggest
that he's a record-maker as well as a songwriter. smith
hasn't yet asserted the range of his role models, but what can
you do? "the fact that it seems like a lot of my songs are
what's the word, dark? is definitely a problem to me. it's not
like i want to carve out a little corner and stay there. . . .
happy songs are great when they come along. i mean, they haven't
come along a lot. . . ." lighting another cigarette, he
seems to tighten up a notch as he starts talking about his childhood,
and as he proceeds he carefully skirts the details. he grew up
in dallas with his mother and stepfather and his stepfather's
children, and at 14 he moved in with his biological father and
his family in portland. "it wasn't too good," he says
of both situations. "but a lot of people's aren't too good,
and there's probably plenty of people complaining about whatever
time they had as kids without me piling on. . . . yeah, the whole
thing was kind of a bummer, to say the least. but it was a long
time ago." smith graduated from hampshire college in massachusetts
in the field of political philosophy, but he had no particular
aims. back in portland he went thru a period marked by unsuccessful
relationships, artistic growth, serious drinking and sporadic
depression. ee hit bottom about a year ago. "i freaked
out for a little while and tried to bring things to a stop, but
it didn't work," he says, speaking quietly and evenly.
"now i'm glad. i'm just happy right
now. drinking too much will really depress anybody. but sometimes
people drink too much because they're really depressed. it's
hard to say what the cause is." the rising career fortunes
have contributed to smith's upbeat mood these days. so have his
recent reconciliation with his girlfriend, and some recent gestures
of rapprochement from family members. "in the last year,
elliott has gotten so much more comfortable with who he is and
what he's doing," says mittleman, his manager. "it
was tough in the beginning. the records weren't available, and
people were unsure about the music because it was so quiet. he's
definitely much happier, though there's an element of sadness
to him, in general, which you can hear in the songwriting."
for smith, that songwriting ultimately remains a mystery, and
he wouldn't have it any other way. in fact, he sometimes likens
his songs to dreams. "i don't really care so much if i fully
understand what I'm talking about, as long as it feels a certain
way," he explains. "it's good if you can understand
what your dream meant. but whether you do or not, it's having
an effect on you. and on a certain level, you do understand what
it's about. it's very important. people that can't fall asleep
and dream go crazy."