{"id":22594,"date":"2024-09-10T07:00:00","date_gmt":"2024-09-10T06:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/aata.dev\/?p=22594"},"modified":"2024-09-09T22:01:38","modified_gmt":"2024-09-09T21:01:38","slug":"elliott-smith-roman-candles-count-to-thirty","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/aata.dev\/index.php\/2024\/09\/10\/elliott-smith-roman-candles-count-to-thirty\/","title":{"rendered":"ELLIOTT SMITH Roman Candles: Count To Thirty"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

ELLIOTT SMITH:<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Roman Candles: Count To Thirty<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

by Norman Warwick<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

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The prime source for the article below was written by one of musics most eclectic and perceptive music journalists and published earlier this summer in Paste on-line magazine<\/em><\/strong>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In every piece of music Elliott Smith<\/a> released, I hear a restlessness I\u2019ve yet to fully pin down. I never hear true sedation, only movement. I hear bar conversations rattling around tchotchke-decked walls and stained tables. It builds a space half-lit and already hungover, but never fully lulling you to sleep\u2014throwing you off with a disarmingly conversational line, never presenting an emotional theme without grounding it. It\u2019s always made sense to me that he preferred writing in bars, never directly pulling from patrons\u2019 conversations but needing to feed off the physical proximity to people trying their best to get through their day. The Elliott Smith songwriter\u2019s credo is that everything is fucked up, and he lets that out not only in violent stabs at written revenge, but in vivid bursts of light, too. Despite an easy narrative or an assumption we all might fall back onto from time to time, I think that as an artist, Elliott Smith wanted to be seen and heard in full-on, overwhelming color.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I recently revisited a YouTube compilation<\/a> of Elliott Smith interviews, most of which take place following his contribution to the Good Will Hunting<\/em> soundtrack in 1997\u2014which marks the beginning of his strange, ill-suited semi-presence in the mainstream. \u201cThe thing that\u2019s kind of a drag about [the] singer-songwriter little tag is that it has this connotation of being just super sentimental, really kind of manipulative lyrically,\u201d he tells his interviewer in one of the clips, \u201cas if the person singing is trying to get everybody to feel just like them.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Somewhere in this sentiment, I believe, is the gist of Elliott Smith and what sets him apart from what his legacy has twisted itself into. The concept of influence is a difficult one to grapple with, especially as I tend to not believe in artists shaping how they\u2019re remembered outside of simply creating their work and letting the public absorb it how they will. The thing is, I would feel comfortable making the statement that no one\u2019s influence can be felt as strongly in indie music today as Elliott Smith\u2019s can. Yet, with someone so distinctive and still omnipresent\u2014whose fingerprints you can decipher within the first 10 seconds of a given song by someone else\u2014I sometimes fear we\u2019re flattening him into something he\u2019s not to make him easier to categorize or digest. Even before he passed away, people spoke about him as if he existed in a two-dimensional shape, draining his preternatural talent for songcraft and production of all vibrancy, falsely sticking him under the umbrella of \u201csad guy with a guitar\u201d\u2014the ultimate version of a person \u201ctrying to get everybody to feel just like them.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Even the people who knew he was special treated him like he\u2019d already exited the building, behaving less like he was a person and more like he was a vessel for their own truth he\u2019d tapped into. When you watch fuzzy VHS footage of people howling requests and proclamations of love at the man, you get the feeling they\u2019ve already martyred and buried him, even if that wasn\u2019t their intention. Smith\u2019s own personal battles are probably (unfairly) the most documented thing about him, but I\u2019d imagine those two extreme reactions from others would be difficult for any person to deal with. For such a natural musician who traversed everything from lush Beatlesque pop to harrowing, noisy guitar-rock in the span of a few years, I can understand how limiting it might have felt. It\u2019s strange, because I\u2019ve never listened to Elliott Smith and thought he was telling anyone how to feel. If anything, he was working to realistically capture what he saw and felt. He let you fill in the blanks, but I guess he couldn\u2019t help if people filled them in with just as much intensity.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

To be honest, the emotion I\u2019ve always felt most potently in his work is anger<\/em>. Obviously, that\u2019s only a half-step away from sadness on the emotional flow chart, but there\u2019s a clear strain of resentment\u2014aimed at himself, at those who tried to hurt him, at those who tried to help him, for a world that doesn\u2019t know how to help him after a certain point. There\u2019s beauty in it too, but this doesn\u2019t seem to have translated to the average listener when you watch interviewers badgering their stilted interviewee once he\u2019s thrust into the public eye\u2014forced to play live and do interviews in a trade-off to be able to write and record, as Smith\u2019s friend and collaborator Larry Crane says he had expressed to him in the 2014 documentary Heaven Adores You<\/em>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The other crucial mistake is to make the assumption that all writing is entirely autobiographical, as if one can only observe and empathetically portray things if they\u2019re from experience. The most comfortable I\u2019ve ever heard Elliott Smith sound speaking in an interview is with Barney Hoskyns in 1998<\/a>, shortly after his famous performance of Good Will Hunting<\/em>\u2019s \u201cMiss Misery\u201d at the Oscars. \u201cI\u2019m definitely in [the characters in the songs], but on the other hand, it\u2019s not like a diary or anything,\u201d he told Hoskyns. \u201cPeople seem so chaotic internally, but being filtered through some form, like making a record, sort of filters it down into something that can be understood. It\u2019s hard to represent chaos or an absence of something. It\u2019s much easier to represent the presence of something or a situation. People can be chaos, but it\u2019s hard to fit it into some creative piece that you made.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Perhaps, then, the true hallmark of Smith\u2019s writing is that he remained faithful to documenting human chaos\u2014whether it was his own or if he decided to funnel his imagined version of characters\u2019 lives into tales of grief, fury and quiet beauty, all in three minutes\u2019 time. Perhaps that\u2019s what makes him so frighteningly tangible, what makes the devoted so attached. It\u2019s more like creating an impressionistic dream more legible than it is writing in a traditional folk mold. His lyrical specificity rang true because the universal could be gleaned from it. For better or worse, biography will inform what we hear, but knowing him<\/em> wasn\u2019t the point. I don\u2019t think he ever wanted it to be.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The beats of Elliott Smith\u2019s brief life story are almost hallowed music legend now, but are worth summarizing in order to capture the lead-up to his solo debut album: Smith, aged 14, moved to Portland, Oregon to live with his father after primarily growing up with his mother and stepfather (Bunny and Charlie, two of the real people from his life to frequently show up as characters in his songs) outside of Dallas. He formed the band Heatmiser with his friend Neil Gust while studying at Hampshire College, eventually becoming well-known in Portland\u2019s thriving indie scene.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cI didn\u2019t like how I sounded singing in my band,\u201d he told Hoskyns later on, \u201cbut it was hard to sing like how I wanted to because playing live, I had to just be at the top of my lungs all the time and it made me sound like I had a really bad cold or something. It sounds really hoarse and macho and weird. I just didn\u2019t think other people would like it, so I didn\u2019t play it for them. But eventually, I got over that, which I\u2019m happy that I did.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Wanting to venture outside the heavier sonic palette of Heatmiser, Smith continued to harness his writing chops with songs that didn\u2019t belong to any specific project. Having already released Heatmiser\u2019s debut album Dead Air<\/em> the year prior, late 1993 saw Smith record his latest batch of nine in-between songs on a four-track machine that belonged to the roommate of his girlfriend, photographer and Heatmiser\u2019s then-manager J.J. Gonson. Gonson played the tape\u2014recorded and played entirely by Smith in her basement\u2014to local Portland label Cavity Search, who requested to release the entire thing as-is, much to Smith\u2019s dismay. Once he\u2019d been convinced, he chose one of Gonson\u2019s pictures of his bandmate Neil Gust and their friend Amy Dalsimer for the cover and named the newly-minted \u201calbum\u201d after the first track on the tape: \u201cRoman Candle.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

30 years on, I don\u2019t think it\u2019s radical to hold the opinion that Roman Candle<\/em>, while great, is the \u201cworst\u201d of Smith\u2019s six albums. It\u2019s certainly the least fleshed out for obvious reasons, given the background of its recording. It\u2019s redeemed by the fact that the songs are strong, even in their skeletal form, as Cavity Search clearly heard. The spareness is a matter of necessity, but you can tell it can bear the weight of dense arrangements\u2014showcasing Smith\u2019s often overlooked technical playing abilities. The only reason we might underrate it now is that we can look to what this seed of insane talent will build to, though the first record introduces thematic concerns and a penchant for melodic complexity that will show up again in subsequent records.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Roman Candle<\/em>, thematically, is all about halves\u2014half-riddles, Irish goodbyes, phone calls where no one says what they really want to say and pleas to not talk about it. Even before his own drug use started, Elliott Smith always focused on dependence, capturing people drifting apart or coming back to things they depend on. I\u2019m sure that reliance strikes further fury into the hearts of those who experience it, leaving them unsure where to turn. There\u2019s an intimacy to the album simply because of the way it was recorded, but this would prove to be a factor that allowed fans to feel as if they knew Smith as it remained his signature delivery style down the line. Even as\u00a0Figure 8<\/em>\u2019s full-band forays allowed him to widen the scope of his musical ambitions, it still sounds like he\u2019s singing right next to you\u2014voice double-tracked and fragile, even when it\u2019s telling you off.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The title track feels like an almost archetypical Elliott Smith song\u2014a precursor to a song like \u201cSouthern Belle\u201d on the following record, both in terms of the intricate guitar work and the subject matter of an abusive man, most likely fueled by his relationship with his stepfather. It already contains the aggression and eerie intensity that betrays how close the music sounds to its listener, leaving them to exist inside the narrator\u2019s rage: \u201cI want to hurt him \/ I want to give him pain \/ I\u2019m a roman candle \/ My head is full of flames.\u201d \u201cNo Name #4\u201d tackles a similar subject, laying out the story of a woman trying to escape a dangerous situation before tacking something as staggeringly conversational as \u201cAnd you look scared \/ It\u2019s our secret, do not tell, okay? \/ Let\u2019s just not talk about it,\u201d onto the end.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cCondor Ave\u201d is maybe the clearest example of Smith\u2019s short story impulses, neatly presenting plot points and description of a woman who storms out after a fight with her significant other, only to fall asleep behind the wheel after she drives away and hits a homeless man, killing them both. His more purely fictional lens brings out some of his most poetic lines, but the final verse pivots to what seems to be the now-dead woman\u2019s perspective, shifting the tone and language completely: \u201cWhat a shitty thing to say, did you really mean it? \/ You never said a word to me about what passed between us \/ Now I\u2019m leaving you alone, you can do whatever the hell you want to.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

These sharp moments where Smith\u2019s personality as a writer shine through work in contrast to something like the nocturnal, Samuel Beckett Watt-inspired \u201cNo Name #3\u201d (the album\u2019s most well-known song, likely because of its use as the one pre-existing, non-Either\/Or<\/em> song in Good Will Hunting<\/em>), which lopes alongside what reads as a disgruntled couple shaking off a fight that took place earlier in the evening. The hazier tracks, fit to stagger home to, feel digestible compared to the more actively frightening work Smith would create later\u2014especially compared to the booming, White Album<\/em>-esque hallucinations brought to life on the posthumously-released From a Basement on the Hill<\/em>\u2014and still holds the listener at a slight distance she figures out how to write outside of his thrashing post-punk enclosure.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

This, perhaps, is what makes the penultimate track \u201cLast Call\u201d stand apart. It certainly sounds like it exists in tandem with Heatmiser, featuring the only electric instruments on the album. Still, lyrically and in terms of delivery, it feels like one of the first instances where we see Elliott Smith really aim to wound. Where those little conversational turns just felt like reality checks in largely straightforward songs, \u201cLast Call\u201d scratches and claws in its pointed frustration: \u201cLast call, he was sick of it all \/ The endless stream of reminders \/ Made him so sick of you, sick of you, sick of you \/ Sick of your sound, sick of you coming around.\u201d That repeated swirl of \u201csick of you\u201d feels particularly intentional, squared perfectly with both the melody and the sentiment. By the time Smith is begging for his maker to \u201cnever wake\u201d him at the end, it recalls another thematic staple he\u2019ll return to in years to come: self-loathing as reaction to the ugliness of the song\u2019s situation, of the world he\u2019s reflecting back to us. Even compared to the violent proclamation of \u201cRoman Candle,\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cLast Call\u201d seethes with a hatred that we\u2019ll hear again\u2014though this might stand as the most unfiltered version of the emotion we hear.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Maybe it\u2019s some cosmic trick where the universe knows about Elliott Smith\u2019s affection for writing in bars, but I feel like he always follows me there\u2014the saint of New York dive bars, out to haunt me in the beer-soaked wooden booths even if he\u2019s left them behind. For his relatively brief spell living in New York, he wrote songs for what would become 1998\u2019s XO<\/em> at Luna Lounge\u2014which closed in 2005 and is now built up into a boutique hotel\u2014but I still feel he sneaks up on me in similar places. One time, a bartender at another Lower East Side haunt I adore\u2014quite literally only a block-and-a-half from where Luna Lounge once stood\u2014wore a jacket with the \u201cLast Call\u201d lyrics \u201cYOU\u2019RE A CRISIS YOU\u2019RE AN ICICLE\u201d painted on the back, as if they were the rousing chorus of a punk anthem that had to be enshrined in leather.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

My brain couldn\u2019t help but finish with \u201cYou\u2019re a tongueless talker, you don\u2019t care what you say \/ You\u2019re a jaywalker and you just, just walk away \/ And that\u2019s all you do,\u201d and in that moment, I didn\u2019t think there had ever been anything more damning ever written. It\u2019s a perfect distillation of Elliott, the songwriter. Plenty of guys with guitars came up in the indie wave of my teenage years, playing to shitty boys smoking in lazy, weightless sunlight you could hear, but I couldn\u2019t imagine ever comparing one of them to Elliott Smith. The jaywalker strolls aimlessly and confronts nothing, says nothing. Everything has its place, but these songs never stray from their target. There\u2019s a reason he still disarms listeners like he does, precise and acidic in his effort to stop the sting he feels himself.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Another time, I heard \u201cWouldn\u2019t Mama Be Proud\u201d from Figure 8<\/em>\u2014Smith\u2019s biting ode to his experience on a major label\u2014walking to another bar to meet a friend. When he got to the line \u201cIf I call to keep it together like you say you know I can do,\u201d it occurred to me that I\u2019ve never been able to tell whether he\u2019s saying \u201ccan\u201d or \u201ccan\u2019t\u201d there. The lyrics are printed on the physical copies of the album I\u2019ve owned over the years, but I still don\u2019t feel in my heart of hearts that I can trust it. My own answer shifts depending on the day I listen, which feels pertinent to me somehow. Does it change the meaning of the song? Is this other person he sings to\u2019s opinion on whether he can or can\u2019t make it the whole point? Is the \u201cyou\u201d referring to the listener, the person who arguably binds him into these constrictive professional situations? How should we take that, now that we know how his life tragically ends? Is it a challenge? Is it a plea for us to leave him alone? I got to my destination still feeling the question prodding at me.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Most recently, I sat in a dive near Washington Square Park where the walls are decorated in bottle cap art and happy hour is still cheap despite the surrounding area\u2019s new, unsuitably shiny exterior. I sat by myself reading when \u201cWaltz #2m (XO),\u201d easily Smith\u2019s most famous song to allude to his relationship with his mother, started blasting into the large, empty space, and I felt I had no choice but to put my book down and mouth all the words to no one but myself. I thought about my own mom playing me this very song in her old car when I was young, and how that was probably the first time I had ever heard his music. She\u2019s always been an avid music follower and had been an Elliott Smith fan in real time. I\u2019ll still come upon incredible sets he did in town while she still lived here and I think about asking her why she didn\u2019t go\u2014like his show at the old Knitting Factory on New Year\u2019s Eve of 1999<\/a> (and then, after a champagne toast with the crowd, into New Year\u2019s Day of 2000), where he closed with \u201cLast Call\u201d at an audience member\u2019s request\u2014but then I remember she was probably taking care of me instead of getting her hand stamped to sit hushed and awed in Elliott Smith\u2019s presence. This simply has to be the order of parental priorities, I suppose.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

A few years ago, she read a biography about him, and the only thing I can recall her saying about the book was \u201cYou know, he was so smart<\/em>,\u201d delivered emphatically. I think she was referring to how effortless the musical side of it was for him, how involved he was in the production and arranging process\u2014the craft and complexity baked into it all. Still, as someone who grew up around other adults who were largely insensitive when they spoke about those who struggled with mental illness or had chosen suicide as their way out, probably due to a lack of education or experience with it themselves, I\u2019ll always remember that my mother, who still loves Elliott Smith to this day, didn\u2019t choose the word \u201cweak.\u201d She chose \u201csmart.\u201d I really hope he knew that about himself, too. I never want those of us who still love his work to forget how masterful it is in the online circle-jerk of pithy punchlines about how sad he sounds, how sad he makes us. I still feel he deserves more than that.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The genesis of this all comes accidentally, with Roman Candle<\/em> born in a basement on a four-track tape under the assumption that no one would hear it\u2014until everyone under Elliott\u2019s later material\u2019s spell ventured back to the CD racks to seek it out. \u201cWhen they wanted to put out my record, I was totally shocked,\u201d Smith told Under The Radar<\/em><\/a> about his first record in his final major interview. \u201cI thought my head would be chopped off immediately when it came out because at the time it was so opposite to the grunge thing that was popular.\u201d He knew that his own work contained that same grit, the same disaffection as the rock du jour, but seemed aware that it would take time for that to click\u2014sitting and answering the same unresearched questions until he wouldn\u2019t let anyone ask him questions anymore.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

It\u2019s painful to go back and look at these filmed interviews now, most of which ask some version of \u201cWhy are you so sad?\u201d\u2014which Elliott Smith evidently decided didn\u2019t deserve a dignified answer, so he repeatedly avoided giving one. If Smith\u2019s music was his method of taking something dreamed or incomprehensible and molding that into a tangible body of work, then there will always be people returning to him as they search for someone to voice their own ruthless joys and fears.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

For all the times where he slid into self-deprecation in his writing, I return to XO<\/em>\u2019s \u201cTomorrow Tomorrow\u201d and think about that tricky concept of legacy a lot. I wouldn\u2019t dare assume the song was meant to be personal or to dream up Elliott Smith\u2019s intention for you now, but maybe, when I was younger, I\u2019d always hoped he\u2019d written it as an olive branch to that creative side of himself\u2014the side he felt he could rely on to make all human chaos worthwhile. When he sings \u201cThey took your life apart and called your failures art,\u201d he doesn\u2019t end the line with the jokes others will tell, the box which record labels and press will force him into or the morbid mythology trumping a generation-best body of work\u2014where a death colors the artist\u2019s vision against their will, allowing others to romanticize that which was painfully real for both the artist in question and his still-living loved ones.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Instead, he sings: \u201cThey were wrong, though.\u201d I hope that, wherever he is now, he still believes that. I know I do.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

As you can see from the above Paste is the kind of magazine that attracts journalists who are both informed and informative. We hope that you will continue to read our not for profit daily posts here at Sidetracks & Detours. Nevertheless we hope you will follow our signposts to the professional media and subscribe to those that match your interests. Simply put key names and titles into your search engine and that should take you straight to your destination<\/em><\/strong>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

.<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

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