I was very much a latecomer
to Elliott Smith’s music. I’d been aware of his rise in popularity in the late
1990s and had a lot of friends who loved his music but for whatever reason it
didn’t appeal to me then. Working at an independent record store in fall of
2004 during the release of Smith’s final and posthumous album, From a
Basement on the Hill, proved to be a surreal and transformative time for
me. The album came out almost exactly a year after Smith’s tragic and
mysterious death and in some ways I felt like an usher at a funeral; I’d guide
customers to Smith’s last album and listen as they discussed their sense of
loss and connection to his music. A few customers even confessed that during
the era of rampant downloading they felt compelled to come into their local
record store and buy a physical copy of the album. That experience introduced
me to From a Basement on the Hill, a heavy, messy, and ultimately
beautiful document of Smith’s artistry that has survived as one of the best
rock albums of the last twenty years.
A few weeks ago in
preparation for writing this post, I sat down and listened to From a
Basement on the Hill from start to finish and came away not only impressed
once more with the strength of all of the songs on the album, but also excited
to have the chance to celebrate this remarkable work. Unfortunately a
lingering, limiting perception of Elliott Smith’s music that has become
increasingly common is that it is sad and only sad. The album’s opener, “Coast
to Coast,” subverts this view by slowly building from an abstract introduction
of soaring, overlapping notes into an arresting, ramshackle tempo before Smith
launches into a defiant assertion of independence. At the end of the song,
Smith’s righteous willfulness slowly gives way to a morass of dueling voices
that could belong to poets, preachers, or talk radio hosts. This device allows
Smith an opportunity to reflect humorously on his music getting lost in the
commentary of others as well as to establish the album’s sound-collage
aesthetic that binds and unites these fifteen songs. A few songs later “Don’t
Go Down” stutters through a false start and then coalesces into a spiraling
guitar riff before Smith kicks off a narrative of a doomed relationship with a
brazen, devastating opening couplet: “I met a girl, snowball in hell. She was
hard and as cracked as the Liberty Bell.” Later on, “King’s Crossing” ambles
through over a minute of interwoven conversation, ambient instrumentation, and
dissonance before culminating into a piano figure and layers of wordless
harmony. This subdued preamble soon gives way to playful, yet nightmarish
imagery reminiscent of Charles Bukowski’s writing as Smith’s ragged, distorted
guitar amplifies the proceedings into one of the album’s most powerful moments.
Although I’ve highlighted a few of the album’s heavier and more deconstructed
songs, From a Basement on the Hill finds its enduring balance with a
number of Smith’s gentler and more conventional songs including “Let’s Get
Lost,” “A Fond Farewell,” “A Passing Feeling,” and “Memory Lane.”
Posthumous albums will
always be a dodgy proposition in part because we as listeners will never know
if the artist would have wanted us to hear this music. The already tricky
equation of posthumously released music became even more suspect in 1990s and
early 2000s after a trend of frequent releases by recently deceased artists
that often seemed more commercially calculated than artistically substantial.
Ultimately once these works have been released, it’s up to the listener to
judge the music’s merit, but untimely death can cast a shadow of confusion and
doubt over the album’s release. At the time of Elliott Smith’s death, From a
Basement on the Hill was a work in progress, but it wasn’t finished. It is
very possible that this may not be the album Elliott Smith would have released
had he lived, but fourteen years later it’s hard for me to imagine life without
this album.
-
John Parsell
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