Ames Progressive

The first posthumous collection of Elliott Smith’s songs, 2004’s From a Basement on a Hill (ANTI-Records), showcased the music he had been recording in the months immediately preceding his death. There he can be heard leaning more heavily on electric guitars, experimenting with trippy ambient noises and sounding at times like a self-conscious one-man Beatles. From a Basement hinted at the new directions in which Smith could have gone if he were still alive. And now we have a second collection of previously unreleased material, New Moon (Kill Rock Stars), two discs of songs recorded between 1994 and ‘97; songs to fill a space around the work he released in his lifetime, marking the width of the path his music took in his short career.

From the beginning until the end, Smith rarely recorded songs with only one vocal track. He is almost always heard singing with himself. In the music from the first three years of his solo career, Smith’s voices move along together, magnifying each other, singing the same notes in the same octave until they expand unexpectedly outward into a web of harmonies for only one or two beats before contracting back into the doubled line of the melody. On the albums he recorded before 1997, and in the songs on New Moon from the same period, the motion from doubled voices to rich harmonies occurs only periodically, often for only one word, as in the strange song “Riot Coming” from 1995.

But, as the songs on New Moon subtly show through their intelligent and non-chronological arrangement, something happened between 1995 and 1997 that deepened the beauty and complexity of his music. Rich and unpredictable harmonies are increasingly characteristic of his songs after 1997, reaching their peak on his lush XO (DreamWorks). The unpredictable harmonies of “First Timer”, “Go By” and especially “Pretty Mary K” are New Moon’s best examples of Smith’s increased focus on harmony during this period.

The majority of the songs on the two discs were recorded during or around the same time as the sessions for his great album Either/Or (Kill Rock Stars) in 1997. There are, in fact, as many songs from the Either/Or sessions on New Moon as there are on Either/Or and, taken together, these songs can be heard as a parallel version of the album.

The first of the songs from the Either/Or sessions on New Moon, the catchy “New Monkey”, has Smith exhibiting his talent for turning abstract linguistic entities into substantial presences as, on Either/Or and XO, he often does with the words “everybody” and “everyone”. “You’ve got a lot of time left to go” he sings, “and now you’ve got to fill it with something . . . anything is better than nothing”. A generalized Something, anything at all, is sufficient to fill the unpopulated Nothing of the future. But, he confesses, “this is how I spend my time: / lazing around, head hanging down / stuck inside my imagination / busy making something from nothing”. Not a something-to-do, not a life-to-be-lived, but a fantasy Something pulled from and retreating back into the thingless otherworld of the imagination - that is how he is resigned to spending his time.

The lyrics of “New Monkey” elaborate a dark theme but they are sung in an upbeat melody over a bouncy and exuberant electric guitar part. Likewise, in the song “Either/Or” (the album’s title song, not included in the original record but available on New Moon), Smith sings of fakery and posing, of indecision and ambivalence but the mood stays light with the ringing organ part lending a reluctant tone of contentedness to the ballad. Both songs display the unmistakable mark of Elliott Smith’s art: his capacity for complicating and deepening the darkness of his lyrics through the beauty of his melodies and harmonies.

Lyrics that, on paper, are bitter and sometimes viciously self-loathing, take on an entirely different quality when magnified and modified by the loveliness of the music within which they are sung.

From the tensions and discordances formed between his painful subject matter and its pretty presentation, a higher resonance emerges. And there is still another layer of meaning, external to the music itself, which nevertheless informs, changes and complicates the songs. And this is, of course, the unavoidable knowledge of Smith’s violent suicide. It is impossible not to hear Smith’s songs, and especially the songs that have been released since his death, in the light of this knowledge. The listener can’t help hearing warnings and innuendos and hints of instability in addition to the direct references to suicide. A confrontational absence haunts many of his songs like another track of harmony or dissonance supplied by the mind of the listener - an inaudible overtone. But, equally, the listener can’t help appreciating the unusual beauty of the sounds, the confrontational presence of his voices - the lasting, audible tones.