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If anything, a solo version of “Angeles”, one of five live performances from the Yo Yo A Go Go Festival in Olympia, 1997, is even more intricate than Schnapf and Tom Rothrock’s studio take. Understated virtuosity proliferates on this expanded set. It sounds so natural, and so simple - then you try to play it.” It was ridiculous that he was able to just nail a vocal and guitar performance live, and he was able to double it live again…. “It was just absurd,” co-producer Rob Schnapf told Pitchfork for an excellent oral history in 2013. XO and Figure 8 might have expanded Smith’s canvas, but the likes of “Angeles” are already elaborately layered masterpieces of folk-baroque. It’s a process of clarification that tends to enhance the album’s air of intimate engagement instead of diminishing it, while at the same time pointing up the fact that, albeit on a tiny scale, Either/Or’s songs are meticulously arranged confections. One of Smith’s old Portland associates, Larry Crane, has remastered the dozen songs on Either/Or, scurfing off some of the lo-fi muffle and adding new zing to, for instance, the steady clip of the drums on “Alameda”. The reissue credits list the houses in Portland where these songs were first recorded, but at the same time Either/Or acts as a farewell to that city, and to home recording. For all the protests of self-deprecation, it’s the sound of a singer-songwriter clearly aware that his gifts demand a bigger stage. While his previous two solo records had been seen as adjuncts to the career of his substantially rockier band, Heatmiser, now it became apparent that this music – a silvery, whispered folk-pop, always more ornate and complicated than it was given credit for – should be his main focus. Smith probably never reached that point of transcendence, but his Either/Or can be interpreted as a determined attempt to try and get there. “The true eternity,” Kierkegaard continues, “lies not behind either/or but ahead of it.” But while the Danish philosopher may have alluded to suicide, his existential point was more sophisticated about how, whatever dilemma one faces, it’s hard to be satisfied with any binary option. The album title was borrowed from Søren Kierkegaard’s Either/Or: A Fragment Of Life (1843), and it’s easy to find clues in the original text – “If you hang yourself, you will regret it if you do not hang yourself, you will regret it” – that reinforce a certain dark perception of Smith. Such complexity, an unstable blend of strength and insecurity, is key to understanding Smith’s work, and Either/Or in particular. When he started being surrounded by fans and people who would do everything for him, he lost that need to use the part of his brain that could figure things out or be organized.” In the midst of such upheaval, he seemed to require significant care and reassurance.īut, as Bolme says in Autumn de Wilde’s book, Elliott Smith, she and her friends always saw Smith as a practical, capable man “A smart guy, not just some creative genius… He could do all sorts of other shit. Smith’s career was blooming, with a recent Oscar nomination for Best Song, a major label debut (XO) in the works, and a move from the hometown security of Portland, Oregon, to New York. At his side was his former girlfriend, Joanna Bolme, who had come along to London to look after him. With a similarly unexpected candour, he was swiftly talking off the record about how he’d been institutionalized a few months earlier. I first met Smith in spring 1998, as Either/Or was being belatedly released in the UK, and he was sweet, funny, solicitous, and not quite as shy as his increasingly formidable reputation suggested. “When they clean the street,” he sings on “Rose Parade”, “I’ll be the only shit that’s left behind.” “ Either/Or Reissue Shines New Light On Tormented Singer Elliott Smith,” read a headline on the New York Times website as the 2CD set was announced and, in fairness, it’s easy to accentuate the negative: the intimations of mortality on every album stretching back to his solo debut, 1994’s Roman Candle the fatalism intertwined with his beautiful melodies.
Elliott smith either or album art full#
It’s worth remembering this, nearly 14 years after Smith’s likely suicide, as a deluxe edition of his finest album looks destined to be greeted not just with acclaim, but with the full gamut of doomed poet clichés.