That’s not the album that I’ve been listening to that’s not the album that Smith intended to make.
And on either/or, Smith’s breakthrough 1997 album released 20 years ago this week (newly celebrated with an expanded Kill Rock Stars reissue including unreleased demos and outtakes out on March 10), he covers too much ground in those 35 minutes to be encapsulated in one glib, nuance-free emotional reading. Elliott Smith also made music that could be bright and joyful. His music was thoughtful and observational. To simply say that Elliott Smith’s music was sad is to overlook the depth of his songwriting. When he donned a bright white suit to perform “ Miss Misery” at the 1998 Academy Awards, the comparisons transitioned from Paul Simon to beatmaking troubadour Beck, based on little more than the two musicians’ sartorial choices, for instance. But the overwhelming misconception about Smith’s music is the one that’s hitched a ride with his legacy as a tragic figure gone too soon-a “junkie saint” in the mold of Kurt Cobain: that his music was overwhelmingly sad, the product of an artistic genius who ultimately couldn’t overcome his demons. The most difficult thing for an artist to do is have any control over the way an audience perceives their work, and Elliott Smith spent the better part of his career fighting misperceptions about him or his music. People can play alone just because they love playing music.” “When people hear acoustic music,” Smith said in a 1998 Magnet interview, “they say, ‘Oh, he sounds like Paul Simon,’ or ‘Oh, a man with a guitar, he must be playing in order to point out things that are wrong with the world.’ Which isn’t necessarily true. Smith had a good reason to be annoyed the one thing that the two musicians had in common was simply that they played an acoustic guitar-a quality that arguably connects the vast majority of rock musicians. And that’s another way in which Smith was unlike Paul Simon Simon’s done plenty worse that he hasn’t apologized for. He called Simon’s lyrics “corny” in an interview with Australian fanzine Spunk, which he later apologized for. And the fact that his self-titled 1995 Kill Rock Stars debut-a primarily acoustic record of stripped-down lo-fi indie folk-seemed to yield the comparisons only seemed to annoy him.
He was never married to Carrie Fisher, and he never made a cameo in a Woody Allen movie.
He never recorded with Ladysmith Black Mambazo. Elliott Smith also didn’t particularly like being compared to Paul Simon. Elliott Smith didn’t sound like Paul Simon.
0 kommentar(er)
