Opening with “Needle in the Hay,” a track which Smith described as a “big ‘fuck you’ song to anybody and everybody,” the album can certainly come off as angsty, and sometimes it is. Smith said of the album in a March 2000 interview with NME, “at the time I felt it was fully what it was and I had no concern about what people would think of it.” He also recognized that it was by far the darkest of his works at the time.

It wouldn’t be until after his 1997 album Either/Or that Smith catapulted into national notoriety yet so many of his fans today name Elliott Smith as their favorite of his works, myself included. Twelve lo-fi, acoustic tracks driven by delicate fingerpicking, urgent strumming, and vocals a step or two above a whisper, Smith’s sophomore album was radically different from any of the loud, “technically-interesting” rock music his label, Kill Rock Stars, was putting out at the time. So in the quiet moments between the noisy, punk rock band gigs that burst his smoker’s lungs, Elliott Smith wrote his lovely, vicious songs, his only audience the dog sniffing at the bedroom door.Įlliott Smith’s 1995 self-titled (or untitled, depending on who you ask) album didn’t sell very well. Every alternative kid in this small-big city was hardcore (or trying to be) when the early 90s rock scene flushed in-to be the sensitive singer-songwriter covering George Harrison songs was nearly sacrilege.

Fall back-before the California rehab stints, MTV interviews, and “Miss Misery” at the Oscars- into someone’s musty Portland basement, where an ex-Texan boy sits with a 8-track Tascam recorder and a well-loved acoustic guitar.

Elliott smith either or no more