UDiscover Music is operated by Universal Music Group (UMG). “I’m never going to know you now,” he laments in the chorus, only to walk that back with an even more heartbreaking promise: “But I’m going to love you anyhow.”īuy or stream Elliott Smith: Expanded 25th Anniversary Edition.įor the latest music news and exclusive features, check out uDiscover Music.
The kiss and hug in the title is for Smith’s mother, whose marriage to Smith’s abusive stepfather fractured her relationship with her son. It’s such a light and gorgeous tune that you might miss the heaviness of the lyrics. “Waltz #2 (XO),” which heads this list of the best Elliott Smith songs, reminds us that he could be both at the same time. The title of Either/Or, Smith’s finest album, suggested a dichotomy: Smith was either a lo-fi singer-songwriter or a composer of lush, orchestrated pop. With lyrics that are both comforting and controlling (“Drink up one more time and I’ll make you mine/Keep you apart, deep in my heart”) “Between The Bars” stands as one of the most devastating and best Elliott Smith songs. But the song also forms a barrier between the songwriter and who he once was, numbing himself to his traumatic past. Much has been made of how the “bars” of the title refer not just to taverns, but to the barrier that drinking forms between Smith and “the things you could do, you won’t but you might”. It’s a testament to Smith’s songwriting mastery that “Between The Bars” sounds like a love song – which, in a twisted sense, it is, sung from alcohol to an alcoholic. Sure enough, the follow-up to Either/Or would see Smith sign a new record deal and leave Portland for Los Angeles. Adding to the song’s sense of finality are the lyrics, which read like an imagined dialogue between Smith and a dubious industry head. Softly-sung vocals and fingerpicked acoustic guitar had been Smith’s modus operandi for a few years, and he’d continue to record songs this way for the rest of his life, but ‘Angeles’ feels like a peak. While “Say Yes” is the song that concludes Either/Or, it’s “Angeles” that bids farewell to the first half of Smith’s career. But there’s no question that Smith’s newfound love of power-pop and electric guitar did nothing to dampen his knack for catchy melodies, as “Son Of Sam” demonstrates. Different from its predecessors, it needs to be met on its own terms. 19: Son Of Samįigure 8may be Smith’s toughest album: noisy and cluttered where its predecessors were hushed and spare. “We’re all in the downpour you carry around for/Trashing a lifestyle you’ve never known,” he sings. Like the Søren Kierkegaard text from which the song takes its name, Smith’s lyrics wrestle with futility – in this case, the futility of dealing with someone who doesn’t know what they’re talking about. It does, however, appear on New Moon, a collection of outtakes from the mid-90s that’s as essential as any of Smith’s studio albums. The planned title track to Either/Or didn’t actually make the cut for the album, though it’s stronger than some of the songs that did. Listen to the best of Elliott Smith on Apple Music and Spotify. Have we missed one of your best Elliott Smith songs? Let us know in the comments below. In fact, we wouldn’t be surprised at all if your selection of the best Elliott Smith songs was different from our own. It’s easy to form a personal relationship with Smith’s songs, and that’s precisely why it’s so hard to rank them. But the beating heart of his work, from the first song he recorded to the last, was his ability to wring musical beauty out of such ugly subject matter as addiction and depression – things Smith, born on August 6, 1969, wrestled with until his tragic death, at the age of 34, on October 21, 2003. By the time he recorded his final, posthumously released album, From A Basement On The Hill, he was in a studio on a major label’s dollar, rendering his songs in Technicolor with keyboards and strings. Elliott Smith’s solo career began in a basement on a hill, with little more than an acoustic guitar and a four-track recorder.