But having come from a prog background, it wasn't hard for me to negotiate all the time changes. He had so many ideas and he hadn't really developed his arrangement skills, so the songs would start in one place and go through all these sections and then end arbitrarily. A friend of mine introduced us because we both liked Rush.Įlliott's songs were ridiculously complicated then. He was funny, and we were both kind of nerdy. TONY LASH : In the high school band, I played flute and Elliott played clarinet. ( It is around this time that Steven Paul Smith begins going by “Elliott.”) When he returns to Portland after graduation, Gust, Smith, Lash, and bassist Brandt Peterson form the final version of that band. Upon graduating, he goes off to Hampshire College in Amherst, Massachusetts, where he meets Neil Gust and forms an early version of Heatmiser.

There, at Lincoln High School, he meets Tony Lash, future drummer of Heatmiser, and forms his first band, Stranger Than Fiction. In 1984, Elliott Smith-born Steven Paul Smith-moves to Portland from Duncanville, Texas, to live with his father, Gary Smith, and Gary’s wife Marta Greenwald. The combination of profound ambivalence and fierce conviction in their voices, as they opened themselves up, was chastening. Some are speaking now for the first time. Some of the singer's closest associates have simply declined to go on record: Having been prodded multiple times, they have understandably snapped shut. The story of their self-imposed silence, and their individual choices to break it or hold it, runs in powerful counterpoint to Smith’s own story. They’d been burned before, they warned me. Many of the 18 people who spoke to me-bandmates, producers, managers, friends-emerged hesitantly, stepping gingerly over their own profound misgivings, issuing grave caveats. The story told here begins at this hinge point, as Smith begins exploring the possibilities of his fiercely intimate four-track solo recordings that would pull him away from Heatmiser and, eventually, into the national spotlight.įor those who knew him personally, the task of speaking for Elliott Smith wavers between privilege and burden. In some ways the development of the former triggered the latter. That discovery dovetails with the dissolution of his first band, the loud-rocking Heatmiser. But the arc traced here begins with the emergence of That Voice: the flowering of his talent, the development of the intimate, inscrutable folk-pop he would mine for the rest of his career.

The lines between life and music are tangled, of course, in ways that aren’t neatly prizable, and darker stories eventually creep into the frame at the edges. What follows is not an oral history of his life, but of his music specifically, his solo career. They became storytellers for Elliott’s genius and originality, champions for someone allergic to championing himself. His story is dotted with followers, people who instinctively grasped the appeal of his music and felt themselves helplessly conscripted to his cause. Since the moment Smith began making solo recordings, beginning with the whispered, hyper-intimate 1994 collection Roman Candle, he has inspired fervent reactions. When an artist has this gift, they stir powerful needs. Smith’s music, with its forensic attention to mood, dredges some of our murkiest emotions to the surface and coaxes unnameable sensations into focus. Ever since he died, 10 years ago today, people have been clamoring to tell Elliott Smith's story for him: writers, poets, fellow musicians, his religiously devoted fans-anyone who felt the subliminal undertow of his songs.

Elliot blown away