And, though suffused with melancholy, it never wallows. It throbs with a dull ache rather than stabbing you with sadness. It may have been all I listened to for the rest of the year.Įither/Or is a big album about the tiniest, near-invisible things. Immediately, I devoured the Metric cover-several times over-and found my way to the original. A friend, who I always considered my cooler twin from back home-we had the same hair, the same musical pretensions-sent me a YouTube link, likely accompanied by many pre-emoji analogue emoticons. I was barely a whisper of a human when Smith released Either/Or in 1997, but in 2006, when Metric’s Emily Haines recorded a cover of “Between the Bars,” I was a seventh grader, still adjusting to a recent move abroad. It came just before Good Will Hunting, before the Oscars, and before “he wasn’t just our little Elliott treasure anymore,” Crane explained in a recent interview with the New York Times. Smith’s third album was the articulation between his earliest, lo-fi work ( Roman Candle and his self-titled sophomore album) and the major-label records XO and Figure 8.
transplant via Portland on the cusp of making it big.Įither/Or turned 20 last month this Friday, on the occasion of its anniversary, Smith’s one-time label Kill Rock Stars, will release a remastered, expanded edition of the record in collaboration with Larry Crane, a recording engineer who worked with the musician on his fourth album XO and “Miss Misery,” the Good Will Hunting theme that earned Smith an Oscar nomination. But when it was released, he was still small-ish time, an L.A. Smith’s third studio effort is a quietly devastating record and, paradoxically, the one that catapulted him into the hands of a major label (he signed with Dreamworks the next year) and onto the stage of the 1998 Academy Awards. (This makes a public mourning site a curiosity.) Nowhere is this better exemplified than on Either/Or. Discovering Smith has been something of a rite of passage for certain young people, but in spite of the vast fan base he cultivated during his decade-and-a-half-long career, the music he made is so intimate, so intensely personal, it asks individual, rather than communal, engagement. The strangest thing has always been sharing Elliott Smith. Now it is a place called Bar Angeles, which surely must be a reference to the track off the late singer’s 1997 album, Either/Or. That mural marked the site of the Solutions Audio-Visual Repair Shop with Smith’s death by apparent suicide in 2003, it also became a public site of mourning. Or, not Figure 8, exactly, but the red-and-blue mural along Sunset Boulevard in Los Angeles that was the backdrop for the Autumn De Wilde-shot portrait that covered Elliott Smith’s fifth and final studio album. There’s now a bar where Figure 8 used to stand.
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