Object: Elliott Smith Covers
I spent most of the week listening to this album.It’s covers of Elliott Smith by Seth Avett and Jessica Lea Mayfield. It’s an odd one because without Elliott’s enormous craft talent a lot of the songs are actually sadder: ‘Fond Farewell’ is no longer a secret song about suicide. It’s just a song about suicide. What to do? Smith’s work was always a langue/parole game, songs about addiction and death arranged at the 99th percentile of folk/pop craft. What relationship, between the beauty of the confessing object and the pain of the confession? If, listening to ‘From a Basement on a Hill’ we almost forget that it’s twilight, is that an artistic achievement, a lie, or both? And if, in one’s own writing, a decade should have been spent largely in pursuit of atomic craft, and largely in pursuit of elegance at that, does the fact that Avett/Mayfield’s relatively graceless iterations of the Smith classics are in some cases (Between the Bars/Fond Farewell) more emotionally affecting than the originals indicate that there’re times to just sock the reader in the mouth? That flight-to-elegance is also a variety of flight?
