Five rarities

‘You Make It Seem Like Nothing’

This will always be my white whale, the song I wish we had a studio recording for.

It’s so honest, so lovely, the chord changes evoking something wistful. The speaker is beginning to understand something about himself and the person that he loves, ways he’s failed her, but he’s also convinced it’s too late. Even a simple line like ‘I can’t help you when you’re sad’ carries so much weight. Elliott’s sister, Ashley, told me this song was written about his longtime girlfriend, Joanna Bolme.

‘Burned Out, Still Glowing’

Such a delicate song, made more delicate by the distortion on the tape, like it might shatter when you listen.

I always relish Elliott’s fingerpicking, and this is a beautiful example: complex, but effortless-feeling. The internal wordplay (‘when I hear your footsteps my lips lisp, my feet trip’) is characteristic of his early solo songwriting that borrows from his friend Garrick Duckler’s lyrics, echoing something like ‘Last Call’. Like a number of his rarities, it’s a tantalising near miss: there’s a studio recording of ‘Burned Out, Still Glowing’, but it’s all guitar, Elliott having apparently never got around to adding vocals, and there’s a harder-rocking version he adapted for Heatmiser that was only released last year. But there’s nothing like this fragile little home recording, his wispy voice, never committed to studio tape.

‘Taking a Fall’

There’s something so haunting about this one, only part of a story shared, the rest left to complete in your mind.

A failed bet, a bad choice, the domestic tension of the neighbour’s children screaming . . . and then the suggestion of betrayal in the last stanza. This track was recorded while Elliott was working on XO, but while I was writing the book we found an early tape that showed ‘Taking a Fall’ went back at least to the Roman Candle period five years before. He was still revising, transforming it from that early artefact into something new, and I think the song as it stands isn’t complete.

‘My New Freedom’

Such a classic Elliott song, all hard-edged wordplay with something soft and wounded underneath:

‘You can go anytime you want
I won’t watch if it hurts too much
But if you stay I promise you I’ll be
better to you and better to me.’

There’s some country swagger here, including in the dark humor at the end; you can hear him smiling as he says it, something crooked in it.

‘Confusion’

Ahh ‘Confusion’! No one I talked to remembers Elliott giving it a name, and in the absence of a studio recording, we have more questions than answers.

Is this ‘Confusion’? ‘Living in a Cage’? Something else altogether? The first two stanzas are some of his finest writing: ‘always there standing there staring at a hole in the road / like it was a place somebody had gone.’ His lyrics here are concrete but surreal, suggestive. It’s a longer song, more relaxed, a full band jamming together in ways that gesture at directions Elliott might have gone in post-Figure 8.

Five live shows

Brownies
14 April 1997

When I was working on the book, I kept a file called ‘Elliott crowd interactions’ just to capture funny little moments or ones filled with meaning – rueful little asides, playful interjections, commentary on the meaning of a song or Elliott’s own dissatisfaction with it.

This show at Brownies (East Village, New York) is a treasure trove for those interactions, from the moment at the end of ‘Thirteen’ where Elliott murmurs, ‘Amity Amity Amity Amity’ under his breath (she was in the audience, about to go to Dorien Garry’s house to hear the song Elliott had written for her for the first time) to the sweet, breathless moment at the end of the show when Elliott says, ‘You guys are making me so happy’ and his voice breaks.

One of the funniest bits of dialogue in all of his concerts comes after ‘Cupid’s Trick’, when Elliott quips back and forth with the audience for a few minutes. For anyone who doesn’t have a sense of Elliott’s personality, or doubts what a showman he could be, this Brownie’s performance is Exhibit A.

Crocodile Cafe
11 November 1997

This set is just so full of emotional color, and the backstory is like a palette behind it.

The last time Elliott played Crocodile Cafe (Seattle) was in the tough string of shows leading up to the intervention, where he debuted songs like ‘Waltz #2’ (XO)” and ‘Miss Misery’, his voice cracking. Here he’s easy, relaxed, calling out to Sean Croghan (‘my sweetie’) and delivering a yearning cover of the Left Banke’s ‘Walk Away Renée’ made a little better by his stumbling (‘I’m gonna fucking make it!’ he declares after a coughing fit). It’s a tender little document of Elliott surrounded by people he knew in a place he knew well, in the last weeks before his Oscar nomination changed everything.

Studion
2 June 1998

It’s hard to think of an acoustic performance more perfect than this; the recording uploaded on the Internet Archive is studio-crisp. Elliott plays a range of songs from Roman Candle to XO, and these may be my favourite interpretations of his early material, going back to songs like ‘No Name #1’ and ‘Roman Candle’ with his mature voice, surer footing.

His hum on ‘Roman Candle’ is terribly intimate. I tend to direct new listeners to this show as a gateway to Roman Candle.

Satyricon
14 October 1999

There are so many little mysteries in this show.

Elliott plays a few covers he never plays again, performs a version of ‘King’s Crossing’ we won’t hear again until 2003, and performs, for the first and last time, ‘Confidence Artist’, a song about a star whose spotlight has faded. As his first show in Portland in months, it feels temptingly coded; paired with ‘King’s Crossing’, it registers almost as a threat. But beyond any reading you might impose on the show, it’s simply beautiful, one of his last great acoustic sets.

Maxwell’s
30 December 1999

Elliott recorded so many gorgeous shows at Maxwell’s (Hoboken, New Jersey) over the years, but this set may be my favourite.

It’s the first time most of his New York friends are hearing songs off Figure 8, and while that album offers a kind of cinematic production, full of colour and scope, these iterations of songs like ‘Everything Means Nothing to Me’ feel wonderfully small, concentrated, including his soft whistle on ‘Can’t Make a Sound’.

He also covers, for the only time, Jon Brion’s ‘Trouble’, a song that feels uncannily like it was written for and about him:

‘here’s a working model
that generates despair
and this baby cranks it out
and it will take you out
and I won’t care . . .’

As he sings it, you can see his cigarette faintly smoking on his capo.

Nobody Broke Your Heart: An Intimate Biography of Elliott Smith by Jamie Fisher is out now in hardback and ebook.

Jamie Fisher has more playlists! Enjoy fifty of Elliott Smith’s favourite songs: