Deep Voices #92
Comfort food
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In 1995, Elliott Smith released a song called “Big Decision” about quitting heroin. I understood the meaning, but only sort of. “It’s a big decision,” he sings. “You can’t kick when you’re down.” That part, I thought, might have something to do with not kicking someone when they’re down. I was 14, maybe 15. I was immediately obsessed. His music, which I discovered on a compilation where Smith sounded like none of the artists, was dark and spare. But it was also beautiful. At the time, I was pretty miserable and channeling that by becoming a devoted listener of punk, hardcore, and Sonic Youth. There was no disharmony in Smith’s music, though, except for that routine scraping of the strings as he moved his hand up and down the fretboard. I liked that they didn’t clean up the recording.
Pretty quickly I got his first album Roman Candle on CD and I would sit on the floor playing Castlevania III while listening to it on repeat. “Last Call” was my favorite song. It’s so vicious. He sings like he’s spitting the words out of his mouth. “You’re a crisis, you’re an icicle/ You’re a tongueless talker, you don’t care what you say/ You’re a jaywalker and you just, just walk away/ And that’s all you do.” That’s just the first verse. That album, along with his next, self-titled, album, were anomalous in the dissonance between the grimness of his storytelling and the heavenliness of his delivery. Hardcore needed a lot of clamor to communicate pain; Smith did it with honey in his voice. A miracle.
In the summer of 1998, for my 16th birthday, my parents drove me and two of my friends to Boston to hang out for the day. We went to Newbury Comics and they let me buy a few records, including Smith’s new LP, XO. I’d heard he’d gone pop. But I was not prepared for what I heard: a total orchestral remodeling of his sound. I was crushed. Where was the crackle of vulnerability I’d come to rely on? Replaced by a French horn.
I came around to XO eventually, years later. It’s a brilliant, ambitious album. But my appreciation for it is more clinical than the stark debt I feel towards his early albums. I still listen to them when I feel like them, simultaneously awed and bummed by the grandeur and disappointment of life. Those first few albums channel something, while the later ones make something. I understand his desire to grow and create, but I was more in need of the pure catharsis. It’s a type of musical approach that I have not lost a desire to hear.
It’s been a tough week. My grandmother is in the hospital, again. She’s approaching 100, and for about a dozen of those years we lived together. She’s a really fiery person and she told me not to visit her until she goes home. I think she’s feeling vain about not having her [redacted] and [redacted] with her and only wants to be received when she’s looking and feeling herself. I told her that’s nonsense, but I want to respect her. For how long, I am not sure. She is okay now, but who knows for how long. When you’re 97, “how long” is relative. Other personal issues that I will not bore you with are swirling and, friends, I need a break.
My listening in the past week has reverted back to basics. Not a lot of the post-Andrew Weatherall happy noise I’ve been banging on about. I listened to “Big Decision” and “Last Call,” this new album by Frances Chang where she scrapes her finger along the fretboard. A settling sound, a familiar one. I made this week’s playlist for myself. It’s some things that I find especially easy to listen to as the day passes slowly, and without ease. It’s not all Smith-ian acoustic stuff, but it is mostly music made on a guitar. Some of it is by artists more popular than found on your average Deep Voices (a favorite early Alex G cut, Superchunk, Minutemen), but I needed some comfort food.
Chang not Wang