the accidental star
elliott smith on his new album, the oscars, and why he needs a
new favourite shirt
by erik pedersen
typed by rebekah
inside studio three, a jowly, bulldog-faced
musician saws out a few notes on the violin, then pauses to greet
a colleague who, despite the day's post-rain warmth, enters wearing
an enormous checkered scarf. they're here at sunset sound to
record string parts for elliott smith's new album,
and the studio is growing thick with bodies: producers rob schnapf
and tom rothcock joke with an arranger while the bespectacled
conductor chats up the arriving members of two string quartets.
other busy-looking people hustle about with coffee and clipboards
trying to get the session started.
in the back of the control room, elliott smith stands quietly,
hands stuffed in his pockets, nearly unnoticed in all the commotion.
"wow," he says, eyeing the proceedings with slightly
raised eyebrows. "i hope it sounds good."
for smith, whose waltzing new song "i wish" will get an ominous string arrangement today, things are sounding very good. since the release of his album either/or last year on the olympia, washington, indie kill rock stars, the singer-songwriter has been garnering attention from outside the typically insular indie-rock realm for his beautifully melancholic songs. not that he sounds particularly affected by it.
"i don't take compliments very well," he says. "i hear people say, i really like your record, and i don't think they're lying, but at the same time it doesn't connect to a center in my brain that makes me feel any different. i just don't think about it."
while his albums and live shows have
brought him much acclaim, the work has paid off in more concrete
ways as well. he's just signed to a major label, dreamworks,
for whom he is recording this new album. he says he's planning
to call it, for the moment anyway, grand mal, also the name of
a
particularly severe, blackout-inducing epileptic seizure. and
the there is the thing that really started the phone ringing,
the thing that caused his normally well-attended la shows to start
attracting music industry and young Hollywood types, the thing
that smith simply calls "a freak accident." this highly
talented, but less-than-famous troubadour got nominated for an
academy award. his song, "miss misery," which appears
over the end credits of gus van sant's film good will hunting,
was one of
this year's best original song contenders. and there he was,
onstage at the shrine auditorium, sandwiched between trisha yearwood
and celine dion, looking shockingly human and out of place amid
the titanic proceedings, but delivering a warm, confident rendition
of his song, a moving if
unlikely nominee for an award that generally favours the mushy
bombast of ms. dion, the eventual winner. though obviously pleased
with the nomination, smith seems a little bewildered by it as
well.
"it seems to have made my friends really happy, other people in bands that i know in Portland seem to have the feeling of yeah, we're winning! one of us made it into the little club!' and that's really cool." he stubs out a cigarette. "but it's also a little bit weird because i don't know how much this really has to do with anything that i do."
although he wasn't chosen out of the same pool of bankable film talents as the other nominees, smith's involvement with the film's soundtrack wasn't entirely accidental either. director gus van sant knew smith from his days in portland, and used to come see him play occasionally.
"somebody wrote that gus discovered me playing in a coffeehouse last year. i don't know where that came from, but, like, we're friends," says smith, bristling at the idea of being discovered hollywood-style. "they're all songs i wrote before, except the one that was nominated, and they're all on previously released records. that's why it was so weird when someone was like, oh, gus discovered him last year playing in a coffee bar. it's like, right, since then i went back in time and recorded three records. it makes a good story, but it's not true."
unlike the hollywood glamourati with
whom he strolled down the red carpet, elliott smith's lack of
airs don't offer much hope that he'll be getting a slick post-oscars
make over. he might have performed at the ceremony in a bright
suit, but this is a man who wore a black hank williams jr. shirt
on
his last album cover, as well as nearly every time he appeared
in public in the past year. he's even got it on today, but has
it hidden under a yellow oxford.
"i really need to get some new clothes,"
he says sheepishly, especially since a photographer shooting promotional
pictures for his next album caught him in it recently. "he
brought some pictures by and i realized that i was wearing the
same shirt that was on the cover of my last record.
i was like, Jesus, anybody that cares to notice is gonna be like,
what, does this guy only have one fucking shirt? does he ever
bathe? he looks exactly the same as he did a year ago.'"
smith grew up in dallas, where he started writing and recording his own music on four-track. he later moved to portland, and after leaving to attend college in massachusetts, returned there and joined heatmiser, a hard-rocking band more in the vein of early 90s Seattle-sound bands than the introspective music that he was making on his own. it was an uneasy fit. "i was in a band and the band was in the northwest and at the time it was all, you know, like mudhoney and nirvana and stuff like that." so he kept his own music under wraps. "basically i was too chicken."
he kept writing, however, and considered sending a tape to cavity search, the portland indie that had released a single by heatmiser. but the courtly songwriter worried that the label might feel unnecessarily obligated to release a singly by him, so he almost let the idea drop. finally, after the urging of friends, he mailed it off. he got a call back a few days later.
"they're like,'yeah, we wanna do it' and i said, which songs? they're like, we wanna put it out as a record,'" he laughs. "i seem to have a way of backing into good situations." the album, roman candle, was a stripped-down collection of stark, tuneful songs, and it provided the blueprint for his next two records, elliott smith and either/or: spare instrumentation, downbeat lyrics and haunting melodies. it's also notable for containing four songs with no names.
"that is kind of weird," he says. "i mean, it's good to have names of songs, but if no one else is going to play on them then you don't really need names because you don't have to be like, all right, let's play one of those that doesn't have a name. you just go, ah, i think i'll play this one now. but then it ends up that you're playing somewhere and someone wants you to play one of them and so they call out the name that's on the record. and so i've come to know which ones are which numbers, you know, but that wasn't supposed to be the name of the song. it was supposed to not have a name.
"but anyways," he smiles, "i dug my own trap there."
on his next record, the songs were even stronger and they all had names, but that created a new set of complications for smith. offering such song titles as "needle in the hay," "the white lady loves you more," and "st. ides heaven," the album is littered with references to drugs, drink and despair. sung in a quiet, affecting voice and backed by his delicate guitar playing, the record could easily be interpreted as a portrait of the artist on a downward spiral, or at least one with a burgeoning collection of bad habits. smith says people can attach whatever meaning they'd like to his songs.
"that's what happens when people hear songs: they make them literal to them. or ideally, they do. that's a good sign, not a bad one. but there's no particular connection between what someone else thinks a song is about and what i do.
"like that song angeles,'"
he continues, referring to a track that appears both on either/or
and good will hunting. "some people think it's about the
city, some people think it's about the record industry and some
people think it's about a girl. and when i was making it up i
was making it up about a feeling, you know, that could be a feeling
you get from a city or from a person or from a situation. for
me, my big kick when i was writing the words was to not make it
about any one of those things
exclusively and to try to make it so that it was about that feeling.
it didn't matter what was giving you that feeling. it's just
sometimes people get that feeling. at least i do."
despite the dark imagery*a junky scrambling
for a fix, a drunk passed out on the bar at closing time, an angry
lover wandering the streets*and his often-recriminating lyrics,
smith's sophisticated melodic sense and impressionistic storytelling
somehow give the songs a beleaguered sense of
hope.
"i'm not the giddiest person in
the world, but it's not like i'm trying to make a symphony of
one note for the rest of my life," he says. "i think
that song say yes was actually a pretty happy song, all in all."
the song, about a man who realizes he loves a woman after he's
broken up with her, is a perfect example of smith's strengths
as a songwriter: as melancholy as it sounds, the song's somber
chords are played with a buoyancy that reflects the optimism inherent
in asking for another chance.
"sometimes people say, why do you write such sad songs?'"
says smith, repeating a line he's used before. "to me, they
don't make me sad."
unlike his previous records, which he
wrote and recorded largely on his own in a variety of basements
and friends' houses, the new one he's working on is his first
to be recorded in a real recording studio. "it's got more
instruments on it because there's more instruments here. i've
never been in a pro place before, and then usually i just play
whatever instruments are around. and it's especially fun if i
don't know how to play them yet," he laughs. "on the
last record, there were a lot of limitations because i didn't
want to have to keep getting up and rewinding the machine, so
like the way the drums sound and stuff like that is just a total
accident. it's like, put the machine on record, sit on the drums
and play them and make sure the meters were moving and then walk
over and
turn it on and play it. unless it sounded really bad i'd just
go with that."
a little more than a year later, he's gone from recording himself on a basement four-track to hiring string quartets for a major-label release. "well, we'll see how that goes. they're supposed to be tension-creating strings, not like sentimental, let's-warm-this-up type of strings," he says. "it's something to try. i don't play to make each record get bigger and wider and huger. in fact, the next one might be straight acoustic, i don't know."
what he does know is that, having survived the oscars, he plans to keep things simple. "i'll go back to playing music and not being an academy award nominee," he says. "that'll be" he pauses "just fine."