Torment Saint: The Life of Elliott Smith Read Online Free

lyrics’ hideousness. But the impulse is irresistible. Smith was aware of his talent for beautiful sounds. It came too easy. It was unstoppable. So there were occasions when he undermined it. As noted before, he tried, especially in his later years, “fucking songs up.” 19 The instinct at work was most likely boredom. The urge was to do something new, something different, to make sounds that did not come naturally or easily. Photographer Diane Arbus had a similarly gory aesthetic. To her, art had to be difficult to get, even physically. She had made up her mind about an almost naively simple equation: easy was bad art, difficult was good art. When it came easily, she found ways to muck it up. 20
    That Elliott wrote beautiful songs about painful or heinous experiences is a tendency he shares with Cobain, who often did the same (as in “Rape Me” or “Lithium”). Part of the appeal
is
the incongruity, the mismatch between words and melody. But the beauty in Elliott is more pronounced, more reliable. In some mysterious way it also seems more ingrained, part of a broader mode of being in the world. Again, it was easy because it was natural.
    The music was extraordinarily accomplished. But the other part of the package was the words adorning it. Elliott was a brilliant thinker, a bona fide intellectual. He read widely and studied philosophy and modern systems of thought at Hampshire College, including poststructuralism, feminism, and feminist legal theory. He was interested in language, how words captured or failed to capture experience, their uses and limits. His sensitivity to and awareness of these matters lent his lyrics a complexity, an originality hard to categorize or compare. Songwriters like Bob Dylan—whose work Smith admired, especially the album
Blood on the Tracks
—or Joni Mitchell come to mind. But something about Elliott is
sui generis
. Parts of Dylan are nonsense. Riveting, imagistic nonsense—as in
Highway 61 Revisited
—but nonsense all the same, wordplay for the sake of wordplay, not always or principally in the service of meaning. And Mitchell could be fey, pretentiously poetical, a quality Elliott avoided entirely. 21
    Elliott certainly could be Dylanesque—abstract, symbolic, image driven. Songs like “Junk Bond Trader” and “Strung Out Again” conjure
High-
way 61
–style apocalypses, with skinny Santas, evil emperors, and parliaments of owls. He could also be Mitchellesque—delicate, attuned to subtler emotions. Yet in his core Elliott was a realist. The words have a sharp, hard edge. Most of the time he’s looking at particulars, describing something actual. It is always imbued with shades of feeling, but it’s tied to the world—situations, people, relationships. Punk-folk is one way to describe the aesthetic. There is an element of protest, of contempt, and the cultivation of an outsider viewpoint. Apocalyptic folk might be another. Never does one get the sense in Elliott’s songs that anything is going to turn out right in the long run. He was no Pollyanna. He was sadder, but he was also wiser.
    Like most good art, and all great art, Elliott’s words combine directness and clarity with essential obscurity. They are simple and incomprehensible. They make immediate sense and then, on second listen, make no sense at all. They leave listeners wanting to know more. A line like “Her momma called me a thief/and her dad called himself commander in chief” appears to reference actual sets of relationships, but it does so at one remove. The context is personal, maybe autobiographical, but the vehicle is allusion, abstraction, metaphor. The critical consensus is that Smith was exceptionally open in his songs, self-disclosing. He also hides in them. He’s there to be known, but he’s also not there. He was a realist—tied to a world of fact—and he was a magical realist, especially later in his career, concocting incredible settings and imagery in which the personal achieved