How two Elliott Smith classics cancel each other out: “A big fuck you song”
To define the life of Elliott Smith as a tragedy is reductive, yet it can’t help but be accurate. The man was rarely quite stable, forever on the cusp of needing urgent help, especially when his career was at its peak.
Yet, he was also a real-life human being, and he deserves to be remembered as one, and not the caricature we force upon the artists we lose too soon. He was flawed, yet fascinating and brilliant at his best, and one needs only to take a cursory look at his songwriting to see this.
Honestly, the recorded work of Elliott Smith is a tough listen today. Still utterly magnificent, mind you. The man was a consummate melodicist. A superlative songwriter who took the best of Paul McCartney and Alex Chilton, shed the former of his cloying whimsy and the latter of his pop star ambitions to become the best of both worlds. A yearning, powerful solo artist whose mix of alternative rock, power-pop and hushed singer-songwriterisms could have made him a global superstar.
Yet, the man had a powerful knack for getting in his own way, one only rivalled by the famously catastrophic likes of Paul Westerberg, and not only down to his addictions, either; he was a man who could be famously difficult to deal with. Who stubbornly refused to play music industry games, who hated promoting his own music and whose neuroses had a habit of turning his live shows into infamous trainwrecks. If this sounds a little parasocial, I understand. I’m writing like I know the man personally.
Yet not only do those who know him best talk about him like that, the man was so transparently, almost uncomfortably, frank in his songwriting that it sometimes feels easy to know him. Elliott Smith has five studio albums and two posthumously released compilations to his name, and rarely shied away from putting his deepest, darkest thoughts into song. Perhaps that’s what made performing live so profoundly scary for him. After all, you try standing on stage and telling a room full of strangers your darkest secrets, see how much you want to do it again and again.
What two songs summed up both sides of Elliott Smith?
The music of Elliott Smith does have that dark, profound reputation for very good reason. Smith was an addict for most of his life, who tried to chase away his demons with hard living and ended up making them worse. All those hard times made it into his music and then some. However, he was more than just a miserabalist. He was, after all, an actual human being and not a musical reputation. He wrote about the full range of his life, and there were many high points to it.
The best example of this came from a concert he performed in June 1998, at the London Garage’s tiny upstairs venue before he’d made his mainstream breakthrough. The 11th song of his set was the shockingly dark ‘Needle in the Hay’. An unforgettably downbeat song conflating drug addiction with a toxic, codependent relationship. There’s a good reason why the song fits so well in The Royal Tenenbaums, where it’s used in a scene depicting someone attempting to take their own life.
After he finished the song, Smith said to the crowd, “This next song cancels that one out”, before starting up ‘Say Yes’, a love song that, while not exactly happy, is a hell of a lot more hopeful than the bleak precursor.
In an interview with Comes with a Smile, Smith elaborated on why he said that: “Well, ‘Needle in the Hay’ is, for me, the darkest one, and it’s a big ‘fuck you’ song to anybody and everybody. Whereas ‘Say Yes’ is like a love song, and my mood was completely reversed. ‘Say Yes’ was written about someone particular, and I almost never do that. I was really in love with someone.”
A reminder that no matter an artist’s reputation, there is always a human being at the centre of their music, no matter how justified that reputation may be.
