And I’ll Make You Okay, And Drive Them Away
Elliott Smith, I discovered twice; the first time was during Good Will Hunting, where I thought “This is a terrible film, but I like the music, it reminds me of Big Star,” and thought little more about it, and the second was when I was in the middle of one of those breakups where everything takes on significance of its own, no matter what you do. At that time, I was listening to a lot of Big Star’s third album – the infamous, depressive Third, which I somehow managed to have in two different versions – and from that, mostly “Blue Moon” and “Take Care,” the… I don’t know, the sweetest songs on the album, perhaps? I was melancholy and lost, so it was no surprise that when I heard someone play “Waltz #2 (XO)” on the radio, with its heartbreaking melody and lyrics, that I fell in love.
“Between the Bars,” the song above, is probably one of my favorite songs of his. Again, it’s less anything you can explain and more the overall experience of the song, the way his voice sounds as much as what he’s singing – I’m a sucker for the things you can’t put into words – and the odd, melancholy hope of the song. For someone who gets a lot of shit for being so depressing-sounding (Kate repeatedly says that he sounds so sad everytime she hears him), I’ve always found something optimistic about most of his music. There’s a song that might’ve been a B-Side or a demo or something else that you find on the internet and don’t really know the proper origins of, called “Place Pigalle,” and there’s one point towards the end of the song where he sings the simple line “The taxi waved down, goodnight, sleep well,” and every time I hear it, it makes me think it’s the most hopeful, love-filled thing that I’ve ever heard.
He’s dead, of course, and his death depressed me for weeks after; even now, I secretly hope that it wasn’t really suicide but some elaborate murder that we’ll never know the truth about, as if that’d somehow make it better. The album that he was working on when he died, the post-humous From A Basement On The Hill, may be one of my favorite-sounding albums ever made, but it’s also one that I’m scared of, that I’ve given all this supernatural power to, thanks to my listening to it for the first times around the time that my mum died. For weeks afterwards, I was terrified that somehow the album had some magical power that had indirectly led to her death, and I refused to listen to it, to even let myself think about it. Even today, when I hear songs from it, part of me wonders whether something terrible is going to happen to someone I love.
And yet, despite that, Elliott Smith is a hopeful, positive person to me. Despite all the better reasons to think otherwise. I still don’t know if that’s stupidity or optimism.
