A conversation with Elliott Smith from 1998
The morning after a pre-XO solo show at Toronto's Horseshoe Tavern, the eternal indie icon talked about his favourite pop songs, his date with Oscar, and why he never meant to make you cry
Welcome to stübermania, where I dig into my box of dust-covered interview cassettes from the ‘90s and ‘00s and present bygone conversations with your favourite alterna/indie semi-stars. This is a newsletter in three parts: The Openers (links to recent writings, playlist updates, and/or other musical musings), The Headliner (your featured interview of the week), and Encores (random yet related links).
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THE OPENERS
It’s been a chaotic week to say the least, so let the latest additions to the stübermania 2024 playlist provide you with a calming comedown. Denver art-pop enigma Madeline Johnston, a.k.a. Midwife, sets the much-needed tranquil tone with “Rock N Roll Never Forgets,” which is most definitely not a Bob Seger cover, but rather a seven-minute hazy-headed hallucination that imagines what it would be like to spend a night in a dilapidated old mansion haunted by ghosts while listening to Mazzy Star. (More dreamy drones await you on her upcoming album, No Depression in Heaven, out Sept. 6 on The Flensler.) There’s also a breezy new single from recent stübermania headliner Kim Deal, some ‘70s soft-rock comfort food courtesy of the increasingly Steely Danified Clairo, a little self-help synth-pop therapy from Cassandra Jenkins’ excellent new album, My Light, My Destroyer, and Jennifer Castle’s billowing “Blowing Kisses,” which sees the Ontario indie-folk veteran step out with the sort of showstopping ballad that deserves to land her on awards-show stages alongside her old pal/workmate Matty Matheson, who helped place the song in the latest season of The Bear. Speaking of The Bear: as my Pitchfork colleague Ian Cohen noted, the imminently self-destructing Japandroids were too late on the draw to land a season-three placement for their new single “Chicago,” a song so drunk on tough-talkin’ civic pride, Carmy could’ve written it. But if and when season four happens, it’s all but guaranteed to soundtrack every wistful montage.
Click on the image below to access the Apple Music version of the playlist:
And speaking of Chicago: the playlist also features the B-side from the latest single by Windy City wunderkinds Lifeguard: a cover of The Wipers’ 1982 punky power-pop knockout “Telepathic Love,” a.k.a. one of the greatest under-two-minutes rock songs ever. But it’s a tune that will forever remind me of the late Pete Carmichael and his band The Diableros, a locally loved Toronto group who made the song a staple of their setlists in the mid-2000s. (And I’ll use this occasion to remind you that The Diableros’ 2006 debut, You Can’t Break the Strings in Our Olympic Hearts, is one of the best indie-rock albums to come out of Toronto, or anywhere for that matter.)
THE HEADLINER
A conversation with Elliott Smith from 1998
Date: August 20, 1998
Location: The Cambridge Suites Hotel at Yonge and Richmond Street East, Toronto
Album being promoted: XO
The context: Revisiting this interview is bittersweet, for obvious reasons—Elliott Smith is the first person I’ve ever interviewed who later died. And since his death in 2003, it’s been nigh impossible to extricate the disarming intimacy of his songwriting from his tragic fate. But the Elliott I interviewed on a late summer’s day in 1998 was hardly the “Mr. Misery” of legend. Sure, he was a little soft-spoken at first and took some time to loosen up (note the plethora of three-word answers out of the gate), but eventually revealed himself as an ambitious, opinionated artist who bristled at the perception he was some fragile folkie determined to make you feel as sad as he did.
This interview was conducted a few months after the Good Will Hunting soundtrack catapulted Smith from the Pacific Northwest indie trenches onto the Academy Awards stage, where he famously performed “Miss Misery” in between Celine Dion and Michael Bolton. Many of the eulogies written about Elliott Smith over the past two decades strongly suggest that, like Kurt Cobain before him, he was deeply uncomfortable in the spotlight, and that his unlikely success was ultimately the calalyst for his downward spiral. But the sense I got from this conversation was that he didn’t fear celebrity so much as he felt completely ambivalent toward it. At the same time, he didn’t seem interested in clinging to romantic notions of indie purity. He was determined to make the music he wanted to make whether 10 people or 10 million people were tuning in.
Smith’s post-Oscars profile bump partly explains why I was commissioned to do this interview for What! A Magazine, a Canadian periodical that was distributed exclusively in high schools across the country, making it a coveted conduit to the 14-18 demo for Canadian major labels. (Yes, it was actually called What! A Magazine, like the Godspeed You! Black Emperor of teen glossies.) I had just finished up my arts-editor gig at the University of Toronto’s Varsity newspaper, and when you interview bands for campus media, nine times out of 10, you get stuck talking to the drummer. But with What!, I was at least able to participate in roundtable press scrums with big names like Billy Corgan and Alanis Morrisette. And occassionally, I’d get one-on-one time with an artist on the verge of a major breakout moment—like Elliott Smith three days before the release of his major-label debut for DreamWorks, XO.
Our conversation took place the morning after Smith performed a solo-acoustic gig at the Horseshoe Tavern, about which I remember three things:
1. Janeane Garofolo was there.
2. Smith performed the show sitting down, which (if you’re familiar with the Shoe’s low stage) meant that 90 per cent of the crowd couldn’t see him.
3. For the encore, he asked the crowd if they wanted to hear a Big Star cover or John Lennon cover, and Big Star’s “Thirteen” won out. So my first question to him was:
What John Lennon tune were you going to do last night?
I was going to do “Jealous Guy.”
Is that like a standard for you?
I’ve played it before. [yawns]
Are you normally not up this early?
I was up late last night.
You ignored my shout-out request for “Waterloo Sunset.”
Sorry, I haven’t played that in a while.
I’ve never heard it done on acoustic, so I was curious to hear it. Do you have an extensive repertoire of covers?
No, not really, only about four. I hardly plan to play them, it’s just if I’ve played one before, sometimes people remember that and want me to play it again. I kinda swore I would never play “Thirteen” again about a year ago.
But the Alex Chilton fans were out in full force last night. So how long are you doing these solo acoustic gigs? Because you have a tour coming up with Quasi, right?
Yeah, I’m touring with them in September and October. I’m going back to Portland, Oregon to practice to go to play the Reading Festival.
I was surprised to hear how well the more elaborate songs from XO translated to just acoustic last night. Were they all written that way originally and then you just layered on the production?
A couple of them were made up on piano. But I don’t have a piano, so mostly I made stuff up on guitar.
The line on the album that sticks out for me is the first line on “A Question Mark”: “You got a need to always take some shot in the dark.” Is this album like your shot in the dark?
Sort of. Yeah.
Are the saxes on “A Question Mark” your tribute to “Savoy Truffle”?
They weren’t supposed to be a tribute, but yeah, that was the kind of saxes they were supposed to be.
Where did the “Waltz” theme come from?
I just called them that because I didn’t want to name them, and they’re in ¾ time, so they’re waltzes.
Do you have a hard time naming songs?
Not if there’s a good name for them!
I know that Robert Pollard often comes up with the song title first, and then writes the song after.
Yeah, he has a whole different way, a whole different lyrical take.
I noticed there’s a few lyrical references to old records on XO—Revolver, “Cathy’s Clown,” “Crimson and Clover.” Is that in any way connected to the fact that this record has more of a classic-rock vibe sonically?
Maybe. I don’t know… it’s just about not wanting to make the same record again. I know what it’s like to make a straight acoustic record, like, a pretty spare pop record. So I wanted to see if I could make a bigger-sounding thing.
Is this record a hint of greater things? Can we expect your Pet Sounds next?
I don’t know. I’m going to record at Abbey Road in October. I’m just recording there for a week. I recorded a song for the next record after this a few weeks ago. I’m just gonna kinda record a song here and a song there.
Is that the song you did last night?
Yeah. The end doesn’t make sense when I play alone. The recorded version gets a lot louder and bigger and goes on and on. [Note: I have zero recollection of the new song he performed that night—based on his description, it could be “Everything Means Nothing to Me” from Figure 8, but the setlist.fm entry for the night just says “Unknown (What You Wore).”]
That’s the advantage of playing a new song people have never heard before—they don’t know how it’s supposed to go.
That’s true.
So you were going through some pretty heavy personal shit on Either/Or. How would you compare your mindset going into this record?
Well, this record was really easy to make in comparison. Either/Or was easy to make while I was recording it, but it got really difficult after it was done being recorded, trying to pick which songs to put on it. And I got really insecure about it and wound up just thinking, "all the songs fucking suck!" And I usually do that after... when a record is done, being mixed and all that, then it's kind of dead. It's time to move on to the next one. And I usually kind of hate it. As soon as it's done, I start to kind of hate it.
That's so sad!
It's kind of stupid. But, you know, people do it with like their ex-girlfriend or boyfriend. They break up with someone, and they're like, "Yeah, well, it's good that we broke up, because they're such an asshole." And then, like, a year later, they're like, "actually, they were really nice. It's too bad it didn't work out."
Do you like making people cry?
No. My songs don't make me feel like crying.
I don't necessarily mean that in a depressing way... it’s more about helping people get through bad times.
Well, sometimes people cry because they need to just release pressure. If it's like that, then that's fine. I don't want to bum anybody out in a really dark way. But, I mean, to me, my songs don't feel like that. I want to be real, and if that's alternately depressing or comical…
Does the chorus of "Pictures of Me" take on a new meaning, now that your face is everywhere?
Well, that song was never supposed to be about that. That wasn't the literal line. I don't like having my picture taken, that's true. But that song was more about television and violence on TV, it wasn't written in a literal way. It was supposed to be more about pictures of people in general, and since I'm a person like everybody else, the song worked better if I talked about people as if they were all one person.
Have you talked to your friend Mary Lou Lord lately about everything that’s happened to you in the past year? You’ve had a similar coffeehouse-to-major-label trajectory as her…
I never really played in coffeehouses. I played in, like, rock clubs and punk clubs. And she didn't really play in coffeehouses either. She played, like, in the subway. Maybe she played in some coffeehouses. But there aren't really many coffeehouses to play in. I played in one in Boston one time, and it was a drag because the crowd was, like, old purists. They didn't want to hear me singing "Needle in the Hay." They wanted to hear real moralistic songs about political problems.
It's funny reading about you and Mary Lou getting lumped into this nouveau folk movement, because it’s not like you’re making protest music…
I wish they wouldn't do that. I hate it when people try to make movements out of things, because that just kills it. When you define something, people get constricted by the definition and want to do something else.
But I’ve read that you like to spend a lot of time sitting in cafés, writing…
I mostly write in the subway or when I'm walking around or in bars. I hardly ever go to cafés. I can see why people would think that someone who plays acoutic guitar sits in the coffeehouse perusing the newspaper and making up songs about the stories. But that's not my life.
There's that romantic notion of the barfly writing lyrics on a napkin as they watch the world go by…
I do that, just not at cafés! I love coffee, but most of the cafes I know of… people are too well-dressed. I feel more comfortable in the Irish bar that’s downstairs from my apartment. I spend a lot of time in there, but I drink really slow. It’s not like I’m looking for trouble so that I can write about it.
But after being anonymous in those settings, is it hard to go on tour, now that there's all these expectations around this new record?
It’s only hard if I adopt people’s expectations, which I don’t. I understand what some people’s expectations are, but it doesn’t make me able to meet them. I’m doing the same thing I did last year, but it appears to be different to some people.
Well, you do have a string section on this record…
Yeah, but the string section was only eight players, and they only play for like 10 seconds on three songs.
So why did you move to New York? Were you looking to live somewhere a little more exciting, and maybe dangerous, to fuel your inspiraton?
I just moved there because I needed to move somewhere. I had been living in the same place for a long time. I don’t really like the danger of it—I would prefer to not wonder who has a gun and who doesn’t.
Was it a big shock coming from Portland?
Well, I had been to New York a bunch of times before. It was just kind of weird because I didn’t know many people there. But that was kind of the point of moving there.
Were you feeling too comfortable in Portland?
I was just getting tired of being there. I wanted to see if I could live without a bunch of friends, in a hostile city [laughs].
Was going solo after Heatmiser a major challenge for you, in not being able to hide behind a wall of noise?
No, because I've been doing that on my own since I was like 14, recording stuff that sounds a lot like Roman Candle. I didn't play [solo acoustic] shows then, but I liked doing it. It comes more natural.
It almost feels like a bigger to risk to be up there singing these songs on your own rather than just doing noisy avant-garde experimentation for the sake of it.
I don't know... it’s not much of a risk to go out on a tour in any way that you really love. It's more of a risk if you're sort of hedging your bet and trying to do something that you think people like right now. That's risky. The best that can happen is that people really like your songs, but then later on, something else is the cool thing. So I don't feel like it's much of a risk.
Are you afraid of being considered the cool thing now by Rolling Stone and Entertainment Weekly?
Entertainment Weekly wouldn't know what's going on if it crawled up their leg. No, I'm not afraid of it, because even if they thought I was the cool thing, it would be very, very temporary. I'm really not worried about stuff like that.
What are your feelings about indie-rock right now? Do you still consider yourself a part of that community?
I was never really part of, like, a big scene. I don't really like scenes. Indie-rock is not as uptight as, like, the Top 40, but it's not as if it's totally... as soon as there's a scene or a movement, it just kind of kneecaps everybody who's not into that thing.
The first time I heard of you was when you opened for Sebadoh. And at the time, Sebadoh had moved on from their acoustic phase to become a proper rock band. How was that experience for you?
It was really fun, and I liked them a lot. They were very good to me.
Were the crowds good to you?
Yeah, everywhere except for L.A. That's because all the label people came out to see Sebadoh and stood around in the back talking to each other.
So why did you ultimately sign to DreamWorks? Were there a lot of labels interested in you?
Yeah, but I didn't want to have a bidding war. I was in a band [Heatmiser] that signed to a major label and broke up, so I wasn't free to be on Kill Rock Stars anymore… but I'm not supposed to talk about that.
What did DreamWorks offer you that other labels couldn’t?
I don't know. They seemed like they liked what I was doing, and I liked Lenny Waronker and Luke Wood. They weren't, like, guys who looked like coke dealers and practiced their putting on a little contraption in their office.
I'm sure the irony has already been pointed out about how you were recording for Kill Rock Stars, and now you're on a label that wants to make you a rock star.
I'm not much of a rock star. It's only an irony because of the name of the label. And it's an irony to some people who are real purists, but I don't really care about that stuff a whole lot. I really like Kill Rock Stars, but good records are good records—like, I don't really care if Quasi comes out on Up or Atlantic. There's all kinds of politics going on with indie labels, too.
So does touring with your good friends in Quasi help keep you grounded while all this stuff is happening for you?
Yeah, yeah, it does. I'm really close to them, and it's cool to be around them.
They can knock you down a peg if your ego gets too big...
They don't ever think that. If anything, they probably get tired of me having such a detached view of things and not enjoying my moment.
There's songs on this record that people will want to analyze and attribute to certain events in your life. But would you consider yourself a writer in the John Lennon mold—like, a songwriter that spills his heart out—or more like Ray Davies, who's more of a storyteller?
I don't know. I wish I could include myself with either one of them, and I can't. They're both really big influences on me. I don't know. They're both really influential.
Would you say you're more of an observer?
I think that my songs are more descriptive and more informative. Like, I'm not trying to get people to do anything in particular. I think John Lennon only really tried to do that at one point, and he was just getting people to relax and be nice to each other.
So what, in your opinion, are the perfect pop songs?
Um…"A Day in the Life" is a perfect song. "I'm Only Sleeping" is a perfect pop song. "Waterloo Sunset."
Have you ever been to London and seen a Waterloo sunset?
No, I haven't. I've been to Waterloo Station but the sun wasn't setting.
What current songwriters do you admire?
Sam [Coomes] from Quasi, Beck, Lou Barlow...
Okay, here's the obligatory Oscars question. What's more nervewracking: playing to 200 people who know every single word to your songs, or to a million people who don't know anything about you?
Oh, 200 people who know my songs, because I actually want to play well for them. I don't really get nervous, but if I was going to get nervous, that'd be a good reason to. Playing on an awards show is not a good enough reason to get nervous, just because of the number of people.
Now that you've seen how the other half live, is that something you'd ever aspire to?
No. I mean, I like the people that I met from the movie [Good Will Hunting], and I liked the people that I met that night. I didn't meet anyone who seemed like, you know, a real ostentatious kind of movie star. Like, Robin Williams seemed like a great guy, but, you know, everywhere he goes, everybody's like "Robin Williams!" That would be a drag, because if you walk into a bar and people are staring at you, they might be staring at you because they like your songs, or they might be staring at you because they hate your songs, or because they thought you looked better in the picture. It's good and bad, I guess. It's just kind of weird.
So what's this I hear about a movie you're making?
It's a documentary that Steve Hanft is making. He's best known for directing Beck's videos for "Loser" and "Where It's At." It's kind of half-straight documentary and half a bunch of weird stuff.
Are you into rock films?
Not really. I like Don't Look Back, I like Magical Mystery Tour. I don't like Quadrophenia or The Wall.
So you're already writing the next album?
Well, there's one song recorded. If I could put out a record every six months, I would. I mean, that's more constructive, because hopefully you can get better quicker. If you have to wait a year and a half in between records, you're playing the same songs too long.
I mean, The Beatles went from "She Loves You" to Revolver in three years... that's the amount of time a lot of bands take between albums now.
Probably part of the reason that they could was because they got to. They weren't held back simply because their last record still could be squeezed for more money. Elvis Costello used to put something out, like, every six months.
So did KISS.
Yes [laughs].
Are we going to see an Elliott Smith lunchbox sometime soon?
I don't think so. I don't even have t-shirts.
Really?
No, I can't put my own name on a t-shirt!
ENCORES
The movie referenced toward the end of the interview turned out to be the short film Strange Parallel, which was really more like one-quarter documentary, three quarters weird stuff:
There appears to be no recorded evidence of the aforementioned Horseshoe Tavern gig online, however, two months after that show, Elliott returned to Toronto to play Lee’s Palace on October 7, 1998, backed up by Quasi (a.k.a. former Heatmiser mate Sam Coomes and Sleater-Kinney drummer Janet Weiss). And miraculously, the entirety of that gig is viewable thanks to YouTube hero @heldopen (who was also responsible for uploading the ‘97-era Redd Kross footage featured in last week’s newsletter). Given that so much of the media narrative surrounding Elliott circa XO was about him levelling up to studio-auteur status, it’s a real treat to hear him play those pristine songs in punky power-trio mode:
Next week’s headliner: The Flaming Lips
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