# Elliott Smith

“It sounds like I am being really pessimistic and awful to be like "I’m never going to get the carrot. I’m always going to be a failure in a certain way,” but it is a failure that means nothing to me. By accepting that I am not going to be at the top of the charts, it frees me up from all that crap like “Oh, I gotta be at the top of the charts.” Because if I felt like that, my god, I’d never get anything done. I’d hate everything I’d do.“

“My most treasured possession is a guitar that my dad gave me. But the really prize one is a flat-rock that I put a bunch of religious stickers on as a sunday school project when I was a kid. It says "Jesus loves you” on it. It’s called the god rock. My mom sent it to me last year. I think she thought it would improve the vibe of my apartment.“

“I’d like to be in love with somebody. Pretty much the same thing that everybody else wants - to be totally alive and not be deadened down by the way things are… I don’t know if I really have any other goals.”

“I was good at taking tests because the answer is always embedded in the question. It’s an accidental little skill.”

“The more research I did for this article, the less I wanted to write it, all aware of the irony – or flat-out hypocrisy – of writing an introduction like this to yet another article on the very subject I am chastising; fearing all I was doing was insensitively adding to this pile and being yet another unqualified person to talk about the life and death of a person whom I never knew or met. Article after contradictory article I read, an overwhelming strand often found tying these together – aside from the more canonizing, unctuous pieces – is the removal of compassion, treating Elliott as though he was nothing but a story, an object, a subject for copy. Not a human being or a person or a remarkable artist. Even The Guardian wrote in 2004: “No one was too surprised when Elliott Smith – a boozy, druggy Oscar-nominated folk singer who had talked openly about killing himself – was found dead.” Well, actually, I suspect quite a lot of people were, especially his friends and family who had seen him get clean from illegal drugs (he was still on prescription drugs for anxiety when he died) and working on making new music; and naming his primary attributes as simply being ‘boozy’ and ‘druggy’ and a ‘folk singer’ slides into territory that teeters closer to tastelessness than it simply does objectification.”

“It’s better to keep making up new things instead of trying to make old broken things work.”

“It sounds like I am being really pessimistic and awful to be like "I’m never going to get the carrot. I’m always going to be a failure in a certain way,” but it is a failure that means nothing to me. By accepting that I am not going to be at the top of the charts, it frees me up from all that crap like “Oh, I gotta be at the top of the charts.” Because if I felt like that, my god, I’d never get anything done. I’d hate everything I’d do.“

“There’s a humor and a ‘fuck you’ insistence in those songs which is also a weird kind of optimism, but people only seem to hear the darker tone.”

“Some people are scared to get into production or whatever, but fear is not a good guide. You have to use your ears, not your head. So, theres no style that’s really worth anything, to me anyways.”

10.21.2015

“I can’t find anything or anyone I really want to be besides myself. There’s a lot of things I want to do, nothing I really want to be.”

elliott backstage at RKCNDY, 1996

“People think they know all these things about other people, and if you ask them why they think they know that, it’d be hard for them to be convincing!”

“I don’t think I really come across as a good groupie prospect. It freaks me out, I so don’t feel like that kind of guy… Apparently, you don’t have to be handsome, or tall.”