File under: Too Good To Be True. An entire album’s worth of Elliott Smith unfinished recordings and outtakes from From A Basement On The Hill has leaked. I’ll be talking more in depth about it (and the glut of recent Elliott leaks, which are all totally awesome) once I’ve had the chance to absorb them, but given my love of Elliott’s covers, it’s amazing to find another one in this tracklist — a version of the Beatles’ “I’ll Be Back.” [Correction: The track was mislabeled and is not “If I Fell”] Elliott’s version is faithful but ragged and noisy as most of the Basement leaks have been, a quality I wish had been more evident on the final version of the album. It’s among his best covers; considering we ought to be scraping the bottom of the barrel of Elliott’s posthumous material here, I can only marvel at the man’s sheer talent and hope that someday other musicians will aspire to be this great.

Elliott Smith – “I’ll Be Back” (Beatles cover): mp3

Elliott Smith – From A Basement Outtakes and Unfinished Tracks: zip (left-click)

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