Elliott Smith was one of the great songwriters of the late 20th Century.

That he received such well-deserved mainstream recognition of his talent through breakthrough songs like ‘Between The Bars’ and ‘Miss Misery’ and albums XO and Figure 8 feels like some justice. But that he left us so early in his life and career remains as heartbreaking as the saddest of his songs.

This deeply emotive, literate artist whose work was as stunning as anything we’d heard before will forever be the subject of obsession from lovers of fine singer-songwriters until the end of time.

Feature by Tom Hawking

Chapter 1

A geographical examination of the work of Elliott Smith

Elliott Smith’s music has been looked at through many lenses, but one of the less-examined aspects of his music is how it reflects a sense of place.

His solo career divides into four main chapters, each of them corresponding neatly to the city where he was living at the time.

His early years in Portland, Oregon, his move to New York City as his solo career really took off, his subsequent relation to Los Angeles, and his final work, most identified with the “basement on the hill” that gave its title to his last, posthumous album.

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Chapter 2

Dallas, Portland, and the legacy of abuse

None of the music that Elliott Smith released was recorded in Dallas, but in a way, it's to that city that all his songs lead.

He was born Steven Paul Smith in Dallas in 1969, and lived there until 1983, when he left to live with his father in Portland, Oregon.

They're songs, they're not like a speech or a journal. They're more like dreams; they're true in one way, but they're not factually true. Elliott Smith — Washington Post, 1999

Smith endured what biographers euphemistically call a "difficult" childhood, largely because of the abuse he often spoke of having received from his stepfather, Charlie Welch.

Smith's parents divorced soon after his birth, and his mother Bunny married Welch – a member of something called the Reorganized Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints – when Smith was four years old.

According to Smith, Welch beat him regularly. In his final years, Smith also talked of having been sexually abused.

For his part, Welch denies the accusations of sexual abuse, although he admitted in a letter to "having been too hard" on his stepson.

At age 14, Smith had had enough. He left Dallas and moved to Portland to live with his father. The decision to move to Portland was one that would shape Smith's life and art. He formed his first band (called Stranger Than Fiction) at high school, and, not long after graduation, began calling himself "Elliott" instead of Steven.

"[My songs] come more from moving out of my mom's family than anything else," he told Rolling Stone in 1998.

The ramifications of the decision manifest throughout the rest of his life and throughout his discography. The legacy of abuse is a constant theme in Smith's songs, from his earliest work right through until the very last songs he recorded before his death.

It's always a difficult business trying to find an artist's own life in their work, especially an artist as cagey as Smith. He often expressed frustration at people taking his lyrics as being directly autobiographical.

"[My songs] have to come from somewhere,” he told the Washington Post in 1999. “They're songs, they're not like a speech or a journal. They're more like dreams; they're true in one way, but they're not factually true."

Still, there are some lyrics that clearly have their roots in Smith's own experience, even if that experience has been used as a basis for something more universal.

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‘Roman Candle’, the title track of his first album, takes aim directly at his stepfather:

‘I want to hurt him/ I want to give him pain/ I'm a roman candle/ My head is full of flames.’ "Southern Belle" is an expression of bewilderment at the relationship between his mother and stepfather, asking, ‘How come you're not ashamed of what you are?/ And sorry you're the one she got?’.

And then there's 'Abused', a song that was recorded for the From a Basement on the Hill sessions but didn't make it onto the final posthumous release (a release that was curated, it's worth noting, by Smith's family). It’s a heartbreaking discussion of the way that childhood abuse stays with you forever:

‘You may never understand this affliction/Although you feel the effects you feel/ Bruised now, body and mind you feel used now/ Almost all of the time/ Been abused.’

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Smith had a tattoo of Texas on his arm. "I didn’t get it because I like Texas," he explained to Comes With A Smile.

"[It's] kind of the opposite. But I won’t forget about it – although I’m tempted to – ‘cause I don’t like it there."

If Dallas is a shadow on the wall in Smith's songs, then Portland is rendered in full colour and intricate detail.

There are some artists whose work you just understand little more clearly when you visit the city that functions as their muse: the strangely wistful and surreal nightscapes of David Lynch's work are a perfect evocation of Los Angeles, for instance, and Suede's mixture of desperate glamour and basement flat squalor is infinitely more relatable once you've tasted the "love and poison of London."

So it is for Smith and Portland. His first three albums – 1994's Roman Candle, 1995's self-titled, and 1997's Either/Or – all play out against a backdrop of the melancholy beauty of America's Pacific Northwest, a region that combines spectacular natural beauty with a climate characterised by fog and incessant rain.

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There are direct geographical references – ‘Falling out/ 6th and Powell/ A dead sweat in my teeth’ from ‘Needle in the Hay’, for instance – along with songs that reference events like the annual Rose Parade (‘Rose Parade’, from Either/Or.)

And there's the occasional exquisite little flourish of detail, like the observation in ‘Clementine’ that ‘[the] street's wet/ You can tell by the sound of the cars’.

Smith has a reputation as a "depressing" artist, and the three albums he recorded in Portland certainly aren't cheerful listening; Elliott Smith, in particular, with its observations of heroin addiction and depression, can be harrowing at times.

But there are also moments of genuine loveliness.

Perhaps the best example from this period is ‘Say Yes’, a bleary-eyed ballad that evokes the feeling of waking up with a belting hangover, an unexpected but entirely welcome presence in your bed, and the feeling that for today, at least, everything has turned out alright.

When Pitchfork decided in 2016 to put together a list of The 50 Best Indie Rock Albums of the Pacific Northwest, Either/Or took its well-deserved place at #1.

"Either/Or [was]," wrote Jayson Greene," ... the flowering of [Smith's] songwriting genius and the first real statement to his hometown of Portland and beyond that he might not just be good, but brilliant like few in his generation."

It was also his last album from the place he'd come to call home. In early 1997, he moved to New York City.

His band Heatmiser, who'd been creaking under the strain of Smith's unexpected solo success, had finally gone their separate ways, and in the wake of the success of Either/Or, DreamWorks offered Smith a contract, which he accepted.

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Chapter 3

New York City and the comfort of anonymity

New York had been a presence in Elliott Smith's work for quite some time before he moved there.

Elliott Smith album track ‘Alphabet Town’ is a tale of searching for heroin in the wilds of Alphabet City, even now a corner of Manhattan where gentrification hasn't fully reached, and in 1995 not the sort of place where you’d venture unless in great need.

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From the same album, ‘The Biggest Lie’ found him wandering the subway tracks at night, thinking, not unfondly, of what might happen if he walked into the path of an oncoming train.

The city's presence is felt most strongly, however, on XO, an album he wrote largely while he was living in Brooklyn.

XO has long been heralded as the moment where Smith stopped whispering and started... if not shouting, then at least speaking more audibly. It was his debut for major label DreamWorks, and its arrangements embellished the skeletal guitar figures that characterised his earlier work with strings, piano and horns.

The change is encapsulated by the moment when, about a minute and a half into opening track ‘Sweet Adeline’, the acoustic-guitar-and-voice introduction suddenly explodes into orchestral grandeur. It's like the moment on a winter's day where the clouds part and the sun's rays flood through the gap, illuminating the monochrome landscape with a gentle, life-giving light.

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There's a sense of genuine joy to some of the songs on XO, perhaps reflecting the mood of their creator.

"Writing got to a point where it was really fun," he told CMJ shortly after he moved to New York. This feeling shines through in the sound, if not always the lyrics, of songs like ‘Baby Britain’ and ‘Tomorrow Tomorrow’, which evoke the sense of possibility that comes with a new city.

To Smith, like to so many others, New York offered a blank slate, a place where he could lose himself in anonymity.

"I spend a lot of my time in bars in Brooklyn," he explained to Irish website Muse in 1998. "It's a good place to write and draw inspiration for songs. I like observing people and faces and how people interact in conversation with each other.

“Bars are good also because you get the chance to observe all this stuff and no one will take any notice of me. I fit right in, just another scruffy person in the corner.''

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That said, XO isn't all sweetness and light. The title comes from a song that's perhaps Smith's single saddest and most beautiful reflection on his relationship with his mother, ‘Waltz #2 (XO)’, which reflects on his departure from Dallas, and the guilt that resulted, with the lyric ‘I'm never gonna know you now, but I'm gonna love you anyhow’.

There are songs that relate heartbreak and broken relationships – ‘Pitseleh’, ‘Waltz #1’ – and Smith's trademark melancholy is never far away. It was never far away in his life, either, it seems. Once the thrill of having a new home had worn off, it seems the city began to wear on him.

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All the time Smith spent in bars did nothing to help his burgeoning reliance on alcohol. He once said that his time in New York was the point at which he became "a bad alcoholic".

His use of other drugs also intensified, and album track ‘Everybody Cares, Everybody Understands’ is a visceral snarl at anyone who might have been concerned about his ever-increasing intake:

‘Everybody cares, everybody understands/ Yes, everybody cares about you/ Whether or not you want them to/ ...You say you mean well, you don't know what you mean/ Fucking ought to stay the hell away from things you know nothing about’.

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The last part of that lyric was a familiar refrain to anyone familiar with Smith's music. He made the same argument in ‘St Ive's Heaven’, from the self-titled album, and often expressed a similar sentiment in interviews: that he should be allowed to self-medicate as he saw fit.

The album’s saddest – and most exquisitely beautiful – moment, though, is final track ‘I Didn't Understand’.

You can find versions of the song on YouTube where Smith accompanies himself on piano, but the XO version is an entirely studio-based creation, built out of a series of vocal loops that are as delicate and gentle as spiderwebs.

Over this backing, Smith sings of a broken relationship:

‘You once talked to me about love, and you painted pictures of a never-neverland/ I could've gone to that place, but I didn't understand’.

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Musically, it pointed the way to where Smith would go next: an increasing reliance on piano and intricate, multi-instrumental arrangements. That direction required another change of scene, this time to a city that seemed the single most unlikely place for Elliott Smith in all the USA: Los Angeles.

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Chapter 4

Figure 8 and the Widescreen Canvas of LA

In March 1998, Elliott Smith played at the Oscars, a scenario that was as bizarre to watch 20 years ago as it is to recall now.

The performance itself was beautiful, if truncated – he played only two verses and a chorus from ‘Miss Misery’, nominated for Song of the Year by virtue of its inclusion on the soundtrack to Good Will Hunting – and Smith seemed to enjoy himself, later commenting to the Boston Globe, "I wouldn't want to live in that world, but it was fun to walk around on the moon for a day."

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He even made friends with Céline Dion, whose armored überballad ‘My Heart Will Go On’ beat 'Miss Misery' out for the award, telling Rolling Stone that "she was the nicest person I’ve met in a while."

There's been plenty written about the two minutes he spent on stage as both a watershed moment for indie music – you can draw a direct line between Smith's pioneering performance and, say, Arcade Fire's unexpected Grammy victory in 2011 – and for Smith's career.

They also marked Smith's move to Hollywood, in the most literal sense; he left New York for Los Angeles to work on his new album, to be entitled Figure 8.

As ever, a sense of place manifested in the new songs, and the traces remain, long after Smith's death.

Fans still make the pilgrimage to the Figure 8 wall – the mural in front of which Smith posed for Autumn De Wilde's cover photo – in Silverlake, even if a couple of years back, a restaurant opened up in the building and moved part of the mural inside to make way for an ugly glass brick window. Nothing lasts forever.

The music, though, is immutable. At first listen to Figure 8, you can't help but think the sunshine agreed with Smith. Though written in LA, the album was recorded at Abbey Road studios in London, and it is suffused with The Beatles’ influence.

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The production is somehow both widescreen and intimate: one moment, it'll sound like Smith is sitting right there, singing to you, and then next it's like the camera has pulled out and you're sitting in an imaginary concert hall, bathed in the sound of strings and piano.

Some of the songs – ‘In the Lost and Found’ and ‘Color Bars’, for instance – sound exuberantly, wonderfully happy.

The most direct reference to the change of scene is ‘LA’, the song, which captures both the sunny panorama of the city, and the way that your past tends to drag you down:

‘You'll be walking in the sun/ Living in the day/ Last night I was about to throw it all away’.

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As ever with Smith, the melancholy and pain isn't far beneath the surface – he was, by all accounts, in pretty terrible shape while recording the album – but you also get the sense that he was trying to get well.

In this respect, ‘Happiness’ is a statement of intent: ‘What I used to be will pass away and then you’ll see/ That all I want now is happiness for you and me’.

It's the tension and conflict between Smith's pain and his attempt to create, as he put it in Figure 8's accompanying press release, "a happy-sounding record", that makes the album so compelling.

Sadly, the mood of optimism that surrounded the album wasn't borne out in the life of its creator, because it was after Figure 8 that Smith entered his period of most profound depression and drug use.

Heroin had always been a presence in Smith's songs but, early in his career, he had sung of it as an observer, rather than a user. By the end of the Figure 8 tour, though, he had well and truly crossed that line. Either during or shortly after the tour, his use had progressed into full-blown addiction, and then some.

According to journalist Liam Gowing's exhaustively researched and detailed feature from Spin's December 2004 issue, while Smith "[denied] that he’d been a junkie before moving to Los Angeles in 2000", by May 2001, he was "smoking up to $1,500 worth of heroin and crack per day, as well as ingesting potentially deadly amounts of prescription tranquilizers".

By early 2002, pretty much everyone expected Elliott Smith to die.

Gowing's Spin feature suggests that even Elliott Smith expected Elliott Smith to die.

It quotes his final girlfriend, Jennifer Chiba, as saying that Smith had told her "[that] he’d wanted to kill himself many times... but didn’t want his mother to get a phone call one day saying that he’d done it, so he was going to commit ‘socially acceptable suicide,’ the slow one – alcohol and drugs – because he knew that would eventually destroy him."

As it turned out, Smith didn't die. He got clean.

And then he died.

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Chapter 5

A Basement on a Hill

People kill themselves after they get clean. It's an unpleasant fact of addiction.

When you're using opiates, your world revolves around getting opiates. Your existence has an anchor, as strange as it sounds. You have no time for questions about what your life is for or what you want it to be. And, in any case, the drugs you're using blot all those questions out.

If you or anyone you know needs help:

Lifeline on 13 11 14

Kids Helpline on 1800 551 800

MensLine Australia on 1300 789 978

Suicide Call Back Service on 1300 659 467

Beyond Blue on 1300 22 46 36

Headspace on 1800 650 890

When you're not using drugs, your world revolves around... nothing, really, beyond the daily battle not to relapse, a struggle that feels increasingly futile with every passing day. Your reward for staying sober today is the battle to stay sober tomorrow.

All the depression and anxiety and trauma you've been suppressing burst through the fragile little chemical dam you've built for them and come pouring back into your consciousness.

As Chiba said to Spin: "Anyone who understands drug abuse knows that you use drugs to hide from your past or sedate yourself from strong, overwhelming feelings. So, when you’re newly clean and coming off the medications that have been masking all those feelings, that’s when you’re the most vulnerable."

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There's a technical term for this: post-acute withdrawal syndrome (PAWS). People tend to think of the strange, wonderful, sprawling double-album that'd be Elliott Smith's final, posthumous release – From a Basement on the Hill – as a drug album, but more than anything, it's a PAWS album.

It's an album that evokes the daily grind of sobriety, an album that addresses recurrent trauma, an album that abandons the orchestral beauty of its predecessor for a sound that's dirty and distorted.

Although its title is quite literal – it was made in a basement on a hill, mostly, in a series of sessions that were by all accounts excruciating for all involved – it also evokes the feeling that your life has somehow contracted, that your sobriety is a small shelter cobbled together of the wreckage of the great, ramshackle, collapsing structure that your life once was.

Its tracklist – which, as noted above, was not put together by Smith himself – is a strange mix of past and present. On the album's release, MOJO noted that "to [see the album as a suicide note] would be to miss the crucial point – that From a Basement on the Hill is of a piece within a body of work that stretches back to the mid-'90s."

More than that, the album encompasses that entire body of work. Old songs rub shoulders with songs that were uncompleted on Smith's death: ‘Memory Lane’ is an old song first played in the late '90s, while ‘Suicide Machine’ – omitted from the album tracklist, but available on YouTube – was the last song he completed before his death.

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There are certainly plenty of songs that reflect on their creator's drug consumption, and are unambiguous in doing so.

‘King's Crossing’, ‘A Fond Farewell’ and ‘Strung Out Again’ are bleak documents of the day-to-day reality of addiction, ‘Twilight’ laments the impossibility of maintaining relationships when your first love is heroin.

The exquisitely beautiful ‘Little One’ ends with the forlorn but somehow peaceful couplets, ‘If I seem to be reckless with myself/ It's the fault of no-one/ All things have a place/ Under the moon, as well as the sun’.

But overall, the album brings the catalogue of Smith's lyrical concepts full circle, because the drug themes are a footnote to the predominant theme: the legacy of abuse.

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The aforementioned ‘Memory Lane’ reflects on a stay in the psych ward, where Smith felt he was sent for being too open about his problems: ‘If it's your choice to be open about yourself/ Be careful, or else’.

‘The Last Hour’ is ambiguous enough that it could be about any abusive relationship, but the lyric ‘Your opinion was the law of the land/ The single thing I could always understand/ I lived it out from hour to hour’ certainly sounds like it alludes to the walking-on-eggshells feeling that comes from living with an abusive authority figure.

Then there's ‘Abused’, left off the album, but as with ‘Suicide Machine’, surely intended by Smith for inclusion. If anything, its absence invites listeners to draw their own conclusions.

It's impossible to know to what extent the released version of From a Basement on the Hill coincides with the vision Smith had for it, but it's a wonderful record.

It's the sound of someone trying to put their life back together, someone struggling to stay alive, and the fact that that struggle ended in death only makes listening all the more poignant.