Elliott Smith's XO (4 page)

In an excellent 1998 interview with
Magnet,
Smith explained how his use of drug addiction terminology—the theme in Smith’s music perhaps most commonly assumed to be rooted in his “life story”—is
not,
in fact, a matter of simple biographical transposition:

The thing that’s fun for me is to make parallels between things. That’s more interesting to me, at the moment anyway, than writing really straight songs about a particular person or event. Metaphors work a lot better when you don’t draw attention to the fact that they’re metaphors. Talking about drugs—and
why people do drugs and how they feel about it—just leads you to the same things as talking about relationships and people in love … [When I wrote “The White Lady Loves You More”], Drugs were on my mind, but they weren’t only on my mind because of my involvement with them…. They were partly on my mind because it’s a very useful device to talk about other things that are harder to name. If you can’t name the big thing, you have to break it apart into small things with names and build it back up using the small things.

Indeed, to whatever extent Smith’s experience with drugs may have sparked his interest in the subject matter, he uses the language of drug addiction as a means of outward reflection, not inward confession. And yet, as he told
Magnet,
he never made a point of announcing these rhetorical maneuvers within the songs themselves. In the second issue of his fantastic
Last Plane to Jakarta
‘zine, John Darnielle wrote of
XO
as an album that does not draw attention to its own lyrical complexities:

While
XO
doesn’t require the magnifying glass called for by
Roman Candle,
it’s hardly written in the universal language, either, and while those willing to meet a song halfway will find it heavy with poignant moments and a few truly, breathtaking sequences, it’s easy to imagine Elliott Smith getting pink-slipped at
the end of his contract. It’s a pity, because he should be loved and praised for his vision, and he should be well paid for his great originality. It usually doesn’t work that way, though, so in all probability Elliott Smith’s career will wind up as one more object-lesson in how unfair the world is. None of which makes any difference in the final analysis.
XO
is a great record, plain and simple. It doesn’t need your love, but it deserves it.

Perhaps the most remarkable thing about
XO
is that it doesn’t
ask
for your love; Smith’s performances, as with his lyrics, wholly lack the cues that singer-songwriters (a term I use here as an occupational, not aesthetic, description) will often drop to draw attention to their craft, particularly the “this is a clever lyric” panache that makes a small handful of “clever” pop singers so compelling, and many more of them so insufferable. Excepting the works of those songwriters who have owned and mastered this irony (Morrissey, Stephin Merritt, etc.), any gesture at a song’s own greatness vastly and irreparably diminishes it.

I am hard pressed to think of a single singer-songwriter as lyrically
or
musically clever as Smith who showed so little interest in projecting the brilliance and sophistication of his music back onto himself. For Smith, singing always seemed like a disembodied act, an earnest attempt to generate something that could
exist apart from its creator and, in turn, speak for itself. In the coming pages, I attempt to trace the process by which Smith gave voice to the fourteen astonishing songs that constitute
XO.

Though
XO
is more ornate than Smith’s earlier solo records, the album’s first aesthetic departure is a subtractive one: the lack of a double-tracked lead vocal. In his earlier recordings, Smith would often work by recording one take of guitar and vocals, then almost-duplicating that take, in effect doubling both the guitar and vocal lines. When Smith’s voice enters fifteen seconds into “Sweet Adeline,” it stands alone, naked, singular and upfront. Technically speaking, Smith was by no means a tremendously gifted singer; he had a fairly limited range and was not given to any sort of theatrics. But on “Sweet Adeline,” his voice sounds strong and certain. He is pitch-perfect, sings clearly, and ends each line with an elegant vibrato, a performance that effortlessly rises to the meet the song’s pristine production.

Lyrically, Smith opens
XO
with an invocation: “Cut this picture into you and me / burn it backwards, kill this history.” This presence of the word “cut” suggests a separation; “cut up this picture of us so as to separate you from me.” But the line also invites a reading that
is more ontological than relational; Smith is not only singing about the relationship between “you” and “me,” but also about the difference between “you and me” and a pictorial representation. “Pictures” appear frequently in Smith’s oeuvre, often as a way of expressing sensory distance and isolation. Indeed, throughout
XO
, the language of the romantic pop song (as well as language typically used to describe drug addiction) is used primarily as a jumping off point for broader conceptual explorations. Smith never really says who “you” and “me” are—situational and personal specificity is beside the point.

These opening lines of “Sweet Adeline” introduce a wary and fearful view of the past that permeates
XO.
Smith continues the song’s opening verse: “make it over, make it stay away / Or hate will sing the ending that love started to say.” Here, the past is set up as a threat to the future; whatever love has started to say, the presence of this “picture” or “history” threatens to not only disrupt it, but to turn love into its dreaded antithesis. Additionally, the act of speaking is ascribed to love, the act of singing ascribed to hate. In keeping with Smith’s skepticism toward the “singer-songwriter” role and “flowery” language, direct communication is privileged and artifice is suspect.

As with many of Smith’s songs (including “Miss Misery”), “Sweet Adeline” segues from an emotionally
specific but narratively broad opening verse to a dream-like second verse:

There’s a kid a floor below me saying

“Brother can you spare sunshine for a brother, old man winter’s in the air”

Walked me up a story, asking how you are

Told me not to worry, you were just a shooting star

This segment is typical of Smith’s more surreal passages, introducing a character who is given no narrative pretext yet seems to possess some kind of knowledge or relevance. Matching tone to content, Smith sings “asking how you are” as a more casual “asking how ya are,” marking his tendency to deliver bits of conversation in a more casual voice. Indeed, for a singer often described by both fans and detractors as essentially expressionless, Smith shows a remarkable sensitivity to the relationship between lyrics and performance.

Throughout the second verse of “Sweet Adeline,” a lone organ part oscillates above Smith’s guitar and vocals, musically mirroring the verse’s “shooting star.” As the verse concludes, this organ line quietly subsides, leaving room for a momentary bass swell to usher in an explosion of drums, piano, and guitar. The fanciful piano chords immediately following the song’s walloping chorus (which slyly nods to Smith’s song
“Clementine,”) evoke the British Music Hall tradition mined by the Beatles and Elvis Costello, among countless others, announcing definitively that this is
not
going to be a “singer-songwriter” record, in aesthetic or in musical approach. The rollicking, propulsive chorus settles into a fleshed out third verse:

It’s a picture-perfect evening and I’m staring down the sun

Fully loaded, deaf and dumb and done

Waiting for sedation to disconnect my head

Or any situation where I’m better off than dead

This verse, often harped on for its “better off than dead” lyric (which was, thankfully, not ultimately used as the song’s title), reintroduces the “picture” as figure of dissociation from the present; there is more than a little bit of irony to Smith’s use of the phrase “picture-perfect.” The evening’s idyllic description frames Smith’s feeling of disconnection; the sensory deprivation of being “deaf and dumb and done.” (A phrase Smith revisits in
XO
’s second track, “Tomorrow, Tomorrow.”)

It is worth noting that “Sweet Adeline” is far from a structurally conventional song, sporting three verses and a single chorus that echoes the song’s introduction in melody and feel. It is also deceptively complex rhythmically, from the momentum-building piano figures in its chorus to the stray hi-hat sixteenth notes
in its third verse. Though no early demos of “Sweet Adeline” have leaked to the public, the song’s airtight arrangement was a long time in the making; Crane recalls seeing similarly arranged versions of its music dating back as far as 1989.

“Tomorrow, Tomorrow” is one of a handful of songs that developed almost entirely during the
XO
sessions at Sunset Sound. Schnapf recalls seeing the song come to life after setting Elliott up with a uniquely tuned “high-strung” guitar:

For “Tomorrow, Tomorrow” he had that guitar bit [during the song’s introduction]. I’m sure it was kicking around—I don’t think anything just flew out of him. But the vision definitely came in the studio, when it was like, “oh! It’ll go like this, then this, let’s roll”—and then boom! He was playing it one way and then I had my 12-string strung like a high-strung, where you get a set of 12 strings and you take off all the low strings, so it winds up being a really close-voiced, more piano-y kinda thing. Except for I leave the unisons on, the E and the B.

By leaving the unison strings on, Schnapf effectively provided Smith with a pre-doubled acoustic guitar. Like “Sweet Adeline,” “Tomorrow, Tomorrow” begins
with the sound of that guitar unaccompanied. But while the acoustic guitar figure on “Sweet Adeline” is shapely and directional, “Tomorrow, Tomorrow” is more textural and tense.

Lyrically, “Tomorrow, Tomorrow” starts on similarly impressionistic terrain:

Everybody knows which way you go

Straight to over

No one wants to see you inside of me

Straight to over

“Straight to over” is a fairly unwieldy line to repeat; the vowel sound in “to” is essentially lost to the long “o” in “over” (a contraction that effectively mirrors the line itself). Smith continues:

I heard the hammer at the lock
Say you’re deaf and dumb and done

Give yourself another talk

This time make it sound like someone

Again, Smith uses the phrase “deaf and dumb and done” to describe a character who is stuck in an internal world; the “hammer at the lock” literalizing an external force trying to break through that sealed off façade. The second two lines of the verse are telling as well, presumably instructing someone to make
his/her self-directed pep talks more believable—or at least more believably grounded in a perspective other than his/her own. Characteristically, this passage is vague on details but specific in emotional resonance; Smith delivers “make it sound like someone,” a line that introduces an extraneous syllable to the song’s rhythmic structure, with just the right degree of conversational contempt to enhance its affective valence without disrupting the song’s flow.

“Tomorrow, Tomorrow” sets up a framework for past, present, and future that carries through the entire record. “Tomorrow” is a place of uncertainty on
XO,
and it is often where the bad influences of the past and the bad decisions of the present come to fruition and inflict harm. The song’s second verse speaks to this danger:

The noise is coming out

And if it’s not out now

Then tomorrow, tomorrow

They took your life apart

And called your failures art

They were wrong, though

They won’t know ‘till tomorrow

“They took your life apart and called your failures art / They were wrong, though” is perhaps the most illuminating line on the record, its most direct and
clearly stated assertion that great suffering does not create great art. Smith’s caveat that “they won’t know ‘til tomorrow,” again sets up the future as a place of potential consequence—the worst results of your failures are yet to come.

As the song’s lyrics become more concrete, the musical arrangement is subtly but effectively fleshed out. When, in the third verse, Smith intones, “I’ve got static in my head / The collected sounds of everything,” the word “everything” is delivered in a soaring three-part harmony that recalls Crosby, Stills, and Nash—the kind of understated musical payoff that can drastically elevate a song that is fairly consistent in structure and dynamics. Smith continues:

Tried to go to where it led

But it didn’t lead to anything

The noise is coming out

And if it’s not out now

I know it’s just about

To drown tomorrow out

The “static in [Smith’s] head” (“head” being used, as it is throughout
XO
, very specifically to represent the rational mind) speaks to the confusion of the present; Smith tries to follow “the collected sound of everything” to a distinct future, but it doesn’t lead anywhere—it is incoherent and irreconcilable. One can
read the last word(s) of the song’s penultimate line as “about” or “a bout.” Following the first reading, the future is perpetually self-nullifying. Following the second reading, the present is perpetually sacrificed to stave off the future. Either way, “tomorrow” is left obscured and uncertain.

It has been suggested that Smith wrote “Waltz #2” about a memory of his mother and her husband singing Karaoke at a Texas bar. According to Crane, Smith’s relationship with his mother was not fodder for musical confession, but rather a personal starting point for broader issues to be broached:

I think he used archetypes. And he definitely played with his relationship with his mom, and build on that, using that character as a basis for an idea. I think he could look at things with a kind of cold eye sometimes. He read a lot of philosophy. When people are searching with him for a sort of confessional song-writing thing, you’re getting maybe a little piece of that, but you’re also getting this deeper look at who people really are. It was real writing.