Elliott Smith’s four favourite writers: “They’ll cross my mind if I get stuck”
“Singer/songwriters are usually dying to fit into the box instead of getting out of the box,” Elliott Smith told a reporter during promotion for his third studio album, 1997’s Either/Or. “They want to be recognised as singer-songwriters, a box characterised by a lot of stylistic cleverness without much backbone.”
When Either/Or was released, Smith was 28 years old and still a year away from an unanticipated brush with stardom, as he suddenly found himself performing on stage at the 1998 Academy Awards. Director Gus Van Sant had loved Either/Or and plucked three tracks from the record to put on the soundtrack for his new film Good Will Hunting. He also asked Smith to write an original song for the movie, and that humble effort, ‘Miss Misery’, earned Smith an Oscar nomination.
The fame that followed—as a wider audience was drawn toward Smith’s raw and vulnerable (but decidedly not emo) songwriting—proved to be the classic blessing and curse for a man not remotely interested in fitting into any boxes. By 2003, Smith’s ongoing battles with drugs and alcohol had led to his death—in a presumed suicide by stabbing—at the age of just 34.
In the aftermath of his shocking passing, Elliott Smith fans returned to his earlier albums looking for deeper messages and meaning, but as Smith tried to explain himself during his life, he didn’t see himself as the heart-on-the-sleeve balladeer that many of his fans did.
“I don’t need to get a bunch of feelings off my chest,” Smith told LA Weekly in 1997, “At least not in the same way as James Taylor, for example. Sometimes people say to me, ‘Oh, these songs are so personal, is it painful to play them?’ I don’t think of it that way. I don’t have any interest in confessing, particularly. If it happens, it happens because I like to make records.”
Because the title of the Either/Or album was named directly after the 1843 existentialist book by Søren Kierkegaard, some fans and journalists also presumed that Smith might be more directly influenced in his songwriting by the world of literature, as opposed to other pop songwriters.
“I have my favourite authors,” Smith acknowledged in that same interview. “Samuel Beckett, James Joyce, Dostoyevsky, Kierkegaard. They’ll cross my mind if I get stuck. But if I don’t get stuck, they don’t. They’re in a whole different ballpark. I’m playing rock n’ roll.”
It’s hard to know, all these years later, whether the notoriously shy and self-deprecating Smith was merely downplaying the higher-brow elements of his work or if he truly did see himself as a simple rock ‘n’ roller. The important thing seems to be that Smith was centrally focused on following his instincts and avoiding the pitfalls of trying to follow an existing blueprint, be it in the worlds of punk, folk, or indie rock. Creating a sort of identifiable “character” for himself in his songs was best avoided—an ironic goal considering the mythical stature he now has as one of his era’s most “personal” songwriters.
“I don’t differentiate between who I am in the song and who someone else is or whether any of the other people are me,” Smith said. “I just kinda write a bunch of stuff, and then I mess around with it until it seems right. I don’t keep the pronouns straight.”
