People do not—as artists, writers, musicians—have some pre-formed condition that they then seek to express in an art form and communicate to others. The contours and characteristics of experience are given meaning and value through the process of expression and communication …
A songwriter may decide to write a sad song, regardless of how they’re feeling at that moment. A painter may wish to convey a sense of anger at the atrocities of war. We may hear the song or see the painting and interpret it as an example of someone condensing their experience into song form or pictoral representation and then relaying it to us. But the act of expressing whatever sadness or anger we may recognize and relate to is realized in the act of making the song and painting. It doesn’t exist in some pure or prior state which words, music or paint then approximate in some way or other.
This myth of creativity intersects with Negus’s inclusive and insightful definition of genre as a series of culturally agreed upon expectations; indeed, different “genres” rely upon and activate this particular construction of creativity in different ways. Broadly speaking, those musicians whose “genre” casts them as musical innovators or cultural pastiche artists are not necessarily presumed to be expressing some deeply held emotion or experience. By contrast, the “folk,” “acoustic” or “singer/songwriter” genre construct is often presumed to be the most directly confessional. When postmodern posterboy Beck released the more conventionally “folky” Sea Change in 2002, it was suddenly held as a shining example of personal “truth” put to music, dramatically recasting the type of “creativity” credited to artist who had previously been seen primarily as a clever aesthetic manipulator. Rolling Stone called Sea Change “an impeccable album of truth and light [created] from the end of love.” Nobody seemed particularly interested in what emotional experience(s) may have informed Midnite Vultures, nor in the possibility that Sea Change was simply another genre experiment from one of pop music’s most dexterous stylistic chameleons.
Indeed, while Beck has his roots in the self-proclaimed “anti-folk” scene and helped to usher in the playful aesthetic irreverence of the mid-to-late 1990s, even he could not escape some of the longest standing cultural assumptions about creative production. The mythology surrounding the “author” is central to modern cultural studies, and forms the basis for many of the ideas set forth by scholars such as Ellis and Negus. In the seminal essay “The Death of the Author,” Roland Barthes discusses at length the way that literary criticism privileges knowledge about the author him/herself as a means of interpreting a work:
The author still reigns in histories of literature, biographies of writers, interviews, magazines, and in the very consciousness of men of letters anxious to unite their person and their work through diaries and memoirs. The image of literature to be found in ordinary culture is tyrannically centered on the author, his person, his life, his tastes, his passion, while criticism still consists for the most part in saying that Baudelaire’s work is the failure of Baudelaire the man, Van Gogh’s his madness, Tchaikovsky’s his vice. The explanation of a work is always sought in the man or woman who produced it, as if it were always in the end, through the more or less transparent allegory of the fiction, the voice of a single person, the author “confiding” in us.
Barthes goes on to explain how this sort of interpretation is advantageous to the critic, giving him/her a clear set of criteria by which to validate his or her opinion.
Once the author is removed, the claim to decipher a text becomes quite futile. To give a text an Author is to impose a limit on that text, to furnish it with a final signified, to close the writing. Such a conception suits criticism very well, the latter then allotting itself the important task of discovering the Author (or its hypostases: society, history, psyche, liberty) beneath the work: when the Author has been found, the text is “explained”—victory to the critic.
To expand Barthes’ assertion with the modern aphorism “everybody’s a critic” is to understand part of what we stand to lose by disjoining Smith’s craft and his biography. The process of uncovering the “truth” behind a piece of art is gratifying for everybody and, in the information age, a pursuit that is by no means limited to critics or “men of letters.” Ironically, the burgeoning online media democracy seems only to have exaggerated this effect; as blogs and message boards offer up innumerable, conflicting interpretations of creative work, the urge to fix a piece of art to its “true” meaning is more prevalent than ever.
If we are to give up the quest to fix Smith’s music in its “true” meaning, we must also give up the romantic illusion that this meaning is only accessible to a select few “true” fans, or to those who knew Smith personally. To do so is both to draw a tenuous interpretive perimeter around Smith’s work itself, and to accept that the potential meanings that exist within that perimeter are limitless. In. doing so, we recast Smith not as a rarified genius whose artistic concerns are beyond our understanding, but rather as a skilled, dedicated, and fallible craftsman whose work we can all discuss, interpret and enjoy. The myth of Smith’s “genius” explodes his agency; he is at once omnipotent and impotent, blessed with a preternatural gift that was somehow beyond his control or understanding. (In one of the more darkly romantic iterations of this myth, this blessing inevitably becomes the curse that leads to the artist’s tragic downfall.) Crane suggests that it was hard work, not some unquantifiable spark of “genius,” that ultimately elevated Smith’s musical output to the stellar heights of XO:
I was just reading This Is Your Brain on Music by Daniel J. Levitin…. There are no geniuses, but there people that are called “geniuses.” In every case, it’s 10,000 hours of practice before anybody ever starts to say that. And that’s got to be the case with [Elliott]. I remember we were tracking one song, playing it on guitar, and he goes, “eh, I’m not sure if this is working out. Maybe I’ll try it on piano.” And he just walks over to the piano, and plays the song perfectly, top to bottom. And I know he hadn’t practiced it; he was just able to transcribe it in his head, and then really play it on the piano—we’re talking left and right hand and everything. And then he could walk over and play it on drums. And it’s because he’s already done that work—he’d recorded thousands of hours of stuff that no one needs to hear.
Indeed, among the countless live and demo recordings I have pored over, there are some true clunkers—awkward, inelegant, obvious, and cloying musical and lyrical snippets born of the same creative mind that gave us XO. Smith, like all of us, was given to his share of good ideas and his share of bad ideas. It is impressive, to say the least, that Smith conjured enough critical distance from his own work to distill a glut of demo recordings and unfinished songs into a handful of concise and unerringly strong records.
It is also impressive that an artist as clever and self-aware as Smith never released an album that intentionally and explicitly sought to counter his popular construction—no Get Happy!-esqae retort to the critics who saw him as a one-dimensional caricature. In an interview with Salon.com, Smith demonstrated a keen awareness of his own popular image, and of how that image differed from his own understanding of his music:
I just make up songs that to me feel human. And they’re bound to be seen by some people as confessional or depressing, some sort of real one-way assessment that is not how they are to me…. And it’s really easy not to worry about all that, except for the persistent questions that come up. Maybe not in this interview, but in a lot of them. “Why are you so sad?” … There must be some reason why I always get these questions, which to me seem like totally surface things about my music. There’s a lot in my music that I find happy and optimistic, in both the melody and the lyrics.
Just as every single one of Smith’s records is cited in support of his cultural myth, every single one of Smith’s records is subtle and substantive enough to outlast it. Smith was not afraid to take his cues from timeless, canonical albums—the very kind that are often seen as critically and creatively unappr
oachable on account of their creators’ singular “genius.” Smith detested artistic self-importance, but he was never afraid to take his work seriously—to listen, write, think, and edit until he crafted a record that could hold its own among those he most admired. It is an approach too inclusive, too pragmatic, and too daunting to be the stuff of cultural myth. Instead—like XO itself—it is improbably, beautifully, real.
* * *
Ghosts may not exist as metaphysical apparitions, but they do exist as semantic artifacts. Any piece of writing about an artist like Smith is, in a sense, haunted. Smith’s death hangs heavy over every line of his lyrics, and every word written about him. Aside from the insurmountable sadness of a creative life cut short, Smith’s untimely death seemed only to validate the mythology surrounding his body of work. As an end point to the narrative of the “tortured singer-songwriter,” it could not be more fitting; some pieces written after Smith’s death read as “I told you so” as much as they did “I’m sorry.” Many brief obituaries offered only a sad, shallow glimpse into a wonderfully rich creative life: “singer-songwriter who struggled with drug addiction.” Or, in the words of the UK Guardian, “No one was too surprised when Elliott Smith—a boozy, druggy Oscar-nominated folk singer who had talked openly about killing himself—was found dead.”
These articles are problematic not because they overstate the extent of Smith’s personal troubles (which, again, I don’t see fit to comment upon here), but rather because they insist upon a particular correlation between the darker parts of Smith’s biography and the whole of his musical output. This correlation inevitably sparked a search for “clues” in Smith’s lyrics; when New Moon was released in 2006, internet forums were abuzz with discussion of the already-long-leaked “Georgia, Georgia,” and its lyric “Oh man, what a plan, suicide.” Most of this chatter omitted the line’s conclusion, “… it’s just not that much different from my own affair,” which positions its subject matter as metaphorical, not confessional. Indeed, Smith’s interest in themes of drug addiction and suicide was not simply a reflection of his personal opinions on these subjects, let alone his personal experiences. These issues in and of themselves never seemed to be of much interest to Smith; it was their bearing on bigger questions of agency, intellect, and emotion that intrigued him. (Smith was, after all, a student of philosophy and the son of a psychiatrist.)
As I have suggested, this tension between rational thought, creativity, and experience is not simply a passing thematic concern of Smith’s; it is at the very core of his lyrical approach and musical philosophy. Smith’s reliance upon a simple and straightforward vocabulary often masks the complex and consistent internal language of his work, not to mention his unerring precision as a lyricist. Few musicians manage to write with Smith’s pinpoint emotional accuracy, and fewer still manage to do so without sacrificing the coherency of their work as pop music.
Ultimately, the distinction that must be made is that between the craftsman and the craft itself. The particulars of how the “real life” of Elliott Smith informed his work are not really accessible to anybody other than Smith himself, who insisted both in interviews and in his music that personal struggle does not translate into great art. Indeed, as Negus suggests, the very idea that art is a mere transposition of preexisting emotions and experience is a fallacy. The urge to understand Smith as a human being is by no means an innately ghoulish one; Autumn de Wilde’s picture and interview book does a great job of providing nonlinear glimpses into Elliott Smith’s life via people who knew him. It is the urge to reduce his life into a cartoonish narrative, then read that narrative back into his music, that threatens to bleed the color, life, and complexity from an amazing body of work.
De Wilde’s book is interesting largely because it consists largely of interviews with artists and musicians. The “Elliott Smith” who exists as a ghastly foregone conclusion seems very different from the Elliott Smith treasured by fans and musicians alike. Indeed, many of the most interesting conversations I’ve had about Smith’s music have been with musicians; Smith’s work ethic, craft, and formal discipline are tremendously inspiring. Still, I doubt that Smith will ever be categorized as a hugely influential musician; his work is at once too musically unique and too aesthetically broad to fit into any clear lineage. Elliott Smith will never really be owned by the history of “acoustic” music or “folk” music or “lo-fi” music, or even “pop” music—his work will always be, simply, Elliott Smith music.
Indeed, while Smith is often invoked as a cautionary figure, his devotion to songcraft was nothing short of instructive. In an interview with Comes With a Smile, friend and frequent musical collaborator Sam Coomes described watching Smith come into his own as a musician:
I’ve known Elliott for a long time. And when I first met him I thought he was a talented musician—but I know a lot of talented musicians; I never thought he was the most talented or anything. But he’s just pushed himself and grown as a musician pretty intensely over the years and I’ve been able to watch it from close range and that’s extremely instructive—musically—but it’s also gratifying to see a friend and associate pick himself up like that and get a wider recognition.
Smith worked tirelessly to make himself a better musician, and the result of that work lives on, strong and stunning as ever. XO stands as a tremendously powerful statement that art can transcend and outlive the difficulties we face; that even if a writer is “stuck inside [his] imagination,” the products of that stasis can be remarkable. Focusing on the supposed tragedy of Smith’s personal life serves only to rarify his suffering and belittle his creative achievements. There is no dearth of pain and sadness in the world, but there are very few albums as singular and exquisite as XO.
Sources
Larry Crane was extremely helpful in constructing a timeline for the events leading up to XO’s release; I hope I have accurately reflected the information he provided.
Philip Fischer meticulously compiled and transcribed the live and demo recordings addressed in this book.
Whenever possible, lyrics cited are verified by official materials. Unverified lyrics were transcribed by myself and/or Philip Fischer.
[Author Unknown] “Elliott Smith,” Guitar Player, September 1998.
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