Mr. Misery
This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.

Just after noon on October 21, 2003, Elliott Smith was found lying on the kitchen floor of his Los Angeles apartment with two knife wounds, apparently self-inflected, to the chest. He died within the hour at University of Southern California hospital.
This may seem like a macabre way to begin an album review – and for Smith fans, an unnecessary rehashing of painful events – but it is impossible to discuss Smith’s final album, “From a Basement on the Hill” (Anti) or his legacy, without addressing it.
It was an unfortunate end for this once-in-a-generation talent, but hardly a surprising one. In the last years of his life, Smith had struggled with deepening drug addictions, suffered from paranoia (convinced men in white vans were following him), developed a severe eating disorder (he consumed only ice cream),cut himself off from the support network of friends he’d relied upon so heavily, and talked and sung openly about suicide. He had made half-hearted attempts to take his own life on several occasions.
Smith began work on the album that would become “From a Basement on the Hill” in this troubled state. He initially partnered with producer Jon Brion, but the two split over Smith’s drug-fueled work regimen, which drove him to labor furiously for five days at a time, then crash. Eventually, Smith found his way to producer Steve McConnell, who had a house full of vintage equipment, seemingly boundless patience, and – per haps most importantly – a secluded house in the hills outside L.A. into which Smith could retreat.
McConnell and Smith developed a phrase for the sound they were trying to capture: “California frown,” they called it. Smith wanted to subvert the polished baroque pop of his previous two albums, “XO” and “Figure 8,” and he labored obsessively to do it, adding new instruments and tweaking the recording and mixing to achieve the desired effect.
As you might expect from an album recorded in fits and starts over a long period, and ultimately assembled by others, there are actually several sounds here. The first chords on the first track – out-of-tune, soggy, and warped – set a mood that carries through the first third of the album. The sound is that of a sludgy post grunge “White Album,” a subtler version of the self-negation Wilco achieved on “Yankee Hotel Foxtrot.” But after five songs, the music changes character. The distortion quiets and the lyrics sharpen, setting the stage for three of the finest songs Smith has ever written.
“A Fond Farewell,” the first of the three, begins with a catchy little electric-guitar melody that immediately lodges itself in your brain. The vocal seems to float between two- and three dimensions, sometimes doubling, sometimes harmonizing. The lyrics are autobiography in the third-person, an act of both self-distancing and self-examination: “This is not my life / it’s just a fond farewell to a friend / it’s not what I’m like / it’s just a fond farewell to a friend / who couldn’t get things right,” he sings.
The next song, “King’s Crossing” is dirge-like, emerging from a primordial soup of unfocused chatter and warm-up singing. A piano plays echoey and sluggish. Then at the line “I can’t prepare for death any more than I already have,” it snaps to attention with propulsive keys and drums that are both carnival-like and martial. It’s one of those Beatles-esque moments of transformation that Smith does so well, though it sounds strange coupled with such grim subject matter.
In the last years of his life, Smith had terrible difficulty performing. He forgot lyrics and chord progressions and frequently could not finish his own songs. But whatever damage drugs may have done to his memory, they seem to have left his lyric-writing capacity intact. “King’s Crossing” has some of the finest drug imagery since the Velvet Underground: “It’s Christmas time and the needle’s on the tree / a skinny Santa is bringing something to me / his voice is overwhelming, his speech is slurred / and I can only understand every other word,” he sings. It ends with a poetic vision of what may be rehab, death, purgatory, or all three: “This is the place where time reverses / dead men talk to all the pretty nurses / instruments shine on a silver tray / don’t let me get carried away, don’t let me get carried away.” Then the words shift slightly, but significantly, to “don’t let me be carried away.”
After such a steady diet of drugs and death, the song “Twilight” is a relief in that it deals with the comparatively light subject of infidelity – or seems to, anyway. Smith returns to the style of his earliest work, relying mostly on acoustic guitar and his own whispered voice. “You’re wonderful, and it’s beautiful / but I’m already somebody’s baby,” he sings. It’s a touchingly mundane concern for someone living so near the brink.
Or is it? Smith’s songs are often about more than one thing. He layers metaphor and interweaves meaning. Long before he’d developed a habit, his second album, “Elliott Smith,” was rampant with drug imagery. He used the language of addiction to speak about temptation, loneliness, and love. The reverse happens here. “Because your candle burns too bright / well I almost forgot it was twilight,” he sings, “even if I thought that you were right / I’m tired of being down I got no fight.” It begins to sound as if the lover he can’t bring himself to cheat is Death.
The parallels between the lives and deaths of Smith and Kurt Cobain are tempting. Both were formed in the crucible of Pacific Northwest underground rock. Both left enormous promise unfulfilled. Both ended their lives with gruesome, emphatic gestures. But Smith is more Cobain’s antithesis than his twin. He turned his back on Cobain’s musical legacy in favor of a quieter, more introspective direction; in doing so, he paved the way for songwriters like Ben Gibbard, Conor Oberst, and Chris Carrabba.
In death he was also much different. Whereas Cobain’s death became a where-were-you-when generational moment, Smith’s was not so public or communal an event. His connection to listeners was such that it seemed more like a private loss on a mass scale, a sad “farewell to a friend who couldn’t get things right.”