Six albums recorded by a teenage Elliott Smith have emerged online
Six full-length albums by the late singer-songwriter Elliott Smith, which are dated back to his teenage years in the mid-late 1980s, have appeared online.
As reported by Pitchfork, the recently uploaded archive by the teenage musician – then going by his real name Steven Paul Smith – was discovered and distributed by a Dallas-based 20-year-old named Cameron McCrary in an arduous process fuelled by his love of Smith’s work.
McCrary emailed record stores in Portland, Oregon – Smith’s hometown – and posted entries on Discogs as part of his quest. Elsewhere, Tony Lash, who played the drums on several of the albums, sold the surviving copies to another Elliott Smith completist. Other recordings then came to light over the following two years. “It was crazy to me that that just existed, and it was sitting out there,” McCrary told the publication. “Most of it wasn’t online; no one really wanted to talk about it.”
As diehard Elliott Smith fans know, whenever these high school recordings were mentioned after Smith had found success, he dismissed them. “I really promised myself a long time ago I would keep [them] from ever seeing the light of day,” he laughed when asked about them in 2003.
The six albums were recorded between 1985 and 1989 by Smith and his high school friends under various band names. For instance, 1985’s Any Kind of Mudhen, 1986’s Still Waters More or Less, and 1987’s Menagerie are by Stranger Than Fiction, 1988’s The Greenhouse is by A Murder of Crows, and 1989’s Trick of Paris Season is by Harum Scarum. The group disbanded after recording Trick of Paris Season, with it featuring the first use of the alias “Elliott Smith” in the liner notes.
The collection has also been compelling for fans, as it points to the future of the artist who would become Elliott Smith. Musically, the 1988 version of ‘Condor Ave’ is nearly identical to the one found on his 1994 debut Roman Candle, but with markedly different lyrics. Elsewhere, a predecessor to ‘Everbody Cares, Everybody Understands’ from XO is found, amongst many other musical connections.
Listen to one of the tracks below. The rest are on YouTube.
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