SUPERSEDED

2000 // Elliott Smith, Figure 8 // “Can’t Make a Sound”

Reviews: Pitchfork // SPIN (review no longer online) // AV Club // Entertainment Weekly // Rolling Stone // Popmatters

In the course of researching this piece, I discovered a few weird things:

1. I know the two people who have written the thesis and antithesis of popular nonfiction titles about Elliott Smith — Matt LeMay’s 33 1/3 title about Smith’s masterpiece, XO, and Ben Nugent, author of the justifiably maligned Elliott Smith and the Big Nothing. One is an old friend, and the other I hired as a staff writer a few years ago; he quit after the first day. (Long story.)
2. The Pitchfork review of Figure 8 was written by Ryan Schreiber, and the AV Club one by Stephen Thompson. These two men, while not solely responsible for the Indie Rock Explosion if the 00’s, certainly helped it along in big ways. Schreiber, as founder of Pitchfork, is a name familiar to the average indie fan; Thompson’s name may be less so — he steered the indie-friendliness of The Onion’s AV Club before moving over to NPR Music a few years back. For the record, Schreiber was kind of meh about the record, Thompson liked it. (Full disclosure: I don’t know either of these guys all that well, but I have met them both before.)

Three other facts worth noting before we get started:

1. I know three people with Elliott Smith-related tattoos. Probably more, really. But three that I can name off the top of my head.
2. The last time I saw Smith play was at a benefit show in Austin in May 2003, a few months before his death. He was shaky, but it was actually a wonderful show, intimate and the crowd was near-reverental. It was the only time I yelled “Thank you!!” after a songafter the applause died down — I was just so moved that I’d finally heard him play “I Figured You Out,” a song he gave to Mary Lou Lord and often declined to do live. You can barely hear it on the bootleg, but you can hear him ask me “What?” (it was a really small room). So I said thanks again, but was pretty much drowned out by people yelling requests.
3. The very first thing you see when you come up the stairs to my part of the house, where someone else might hang a reproduction of a great work of art, or perhaps a religious picture, is a large photo of Elliott Smith, taken by an old friend at Austin’s long-departed Liberty Lunch.

A few months ago, on a weeknight, probably, I was in the back corner of a hipster bar on Second Avenue, soused on gin and tonics, gamely attempting to explain to a friend who had no interest in Smith’s music (and who held the widely-disseminated idea that he was a sad sack junkie with an acoustic guitar) why he should at least give Smith’s music a listen sometime. The friend in question is a total recording genius, and an analog devotee. I found myself drunkenly repeating, “Don’t listen to XO, or any of the other stuff. Get Figure 8. You’ll get it. The studio work. It’s fucking brilliant, man. Brilliant. Intricate.” (Obviously, I’m really not the kind of person who needs to have high-level conversations about the nature of art and creativity while drinking copious amounts of gin.) I don’t know if he was convinced, but the conversation made me come home and re-listen to Smith’s albums again for the first time in years. Like a lot of people, I’d had trouble listening after Smith’s suicide. I’m sure you’ll understand that I was very happy when this round of re-listening didn’t make me sad all over again.

While it’s true that the songs on XO had the benefit of percolating in Smith’s live show for what seemed like half a decade (maybe it actually was that long…), he was like a kid in a candy store with the trappings of big-studio production. And yes, though the most songs on Figure 8 aren’t perfectly-honed kicks in the gut (well, some are!), it’s the studio work holding those songs up that makes me perhaps the most annoyed about Smith’s suicide. I wish he’d had more time in the studio to really fully arrive where he was headed artistically. And grow and change past that as well.

I think that’s why, in a raft of really great songs (Schreiber’s complaint that the album was just too long is uncomfortably ironic now), I chose to share the album’s penultimate track, “Can’t Make a Sound.” I’m still stunned by perfect movement from acoustic guitar and voice that are joined by by bass and drums, that slide through a traditional electric guitar-based bridge, then chorused vocals, then strings, then a massive crescendo that melts into postpunk rhythm guitar textures ripped right out of the shoegaze playbook as the lyrics become more and more focused and sharp, before the song collapses in on itself leaving nothing but a wheezing synthesizer to close out the proceedings.

***

It would be too convenient to say that my starry-eyed devotion to indie rock died with Smith; instead, that unhappy date coincides with a time in my life that was also very troubled. I’d also already frozen my love of his work to encapsulate the first five albums. This was almost kind of fortuitous, I suppose, as the two posthumous collections of his studio output — the unfinished sixth album, From A Basement on a Hill, and New Moon, a collection of mid-90’s demos — have that raggedy not-ready-for-consumption feel to them. I’ve never spent a great amount of time listening to either.

So, Figure 8 is the the endcap for my interaction with Smith’s ouevre. It always struck me as Smith’s grown-up record; he’d whittled his songwriting into such perfect shape that that it was almost too-perfect. It was also clear that he really, really knew what he wanted the album to sound like. As I sit here listening to it again, I’m still struck by the production values — especially the songs that are just guitar and vocal. It’s all the more entertaining when reading reviews that kind of half-apologize for liking the actual building blocks of the record so much, as if this would betray one’s indie cred somehow.

[As an aside: It suddenly strikes me that it was probably XO and Figure 8 that led so many of the successful indie rock acts of the second half of the aughts to embrace big studio production sounds over lo-fi recordings. Which is what made it more accessible to the average person, which made it practically mainstream. And we’re feeling the backlash to that trend now, with the rise of faux-outsider lo-fi music made by twenty-something hipsters on computers, trying to capture the sound of stuff like Smith’s early 4-track songs put out by Kill Rock Stars.]

But, as I was saying: It generally seems that complaints about this record rose more from a decline of concreteness in Smith’s lyrics — which is to say, I think people were less-than-thrilled that they were not as semi-autobiographical than his previous work. But, as LeMay points out in his book on XO, Smith’s lyrics were never all that terribly “autobiographical” to begin with, once the songs reached their completed state. Though they may have been based in a factual situation at some point, the trail of demos and live recordings shows the near-methodical evolution of a number of Smith’s songs. His was the the work of a novelist, not a memoir-writer.

In interviews around the time of Figure 8, Smith said that made an intentional move to make the lyrics on this album more “impressionistic” and “dream-like” than the solid stories stamped on his earlier work. And, listening now, these songs actually have more staying power than his previous narratives. I’m actually surprised to find that they speak to me in a different way than they did almost 10 years ago — whereas the songs on his earlier albums, though wonderful, are pretty static. Full of strong characters and really forceful, specific emotions, they’ll always tell the same stories. The open-endedness of Figure 8 (further enforced thanks to the haunting, distant piano impromptu “Bye” that closes the record) is almost a balm to smooth over losing Smith too soon. I have no doubt that this record will say new things to me five, ten and twenty years from now, too.

Notes:

1. sillycurlyhairedman liked this
2. wrestlingentropy liked this
3. pgwp liked this
4. permanentsix liked this
5. superseded posted this