The martyring of Elliott Smith

The indie-rock artist’s posthumous status as a “torment saint” is an ill-fitting reputation.

Photo by Phil Knott / Camera Press

When an indie musician makes it into the tabloids, it’s almost always for the wrong reasons. For me, it felt particularly weird in the case of the American indie-rock star Elliott Smith. Soon after Peaches Geldof died of an overdose on 7 April 2014, the Daily Mirror published an article linking the tragedy to her obsession with “the heroin-addict singer”. Geldof, a journalist, had been a big fan of Smith and had recently posted a list of her 25 most listened-to songs on social media. All were his. She had also described him as a “kindred spirit” and, according to the report, had quarrelled publicly with her husband about her fixation with his haunting, introspective music. Though the article stopped short of making a direct accusation, its framing was clear: Smith was somehow to blame for her death.

It was a spurious suggestion, dumb enough to be picked up by the Daily Mail, which ran its own lengthy piece on Geldof’s fascination with the Nebraska-born, Texas-raised recording artist. It was, in all likelihood, the biggest mainstream exposure that he ever received in the UK. That’s a shame because Smith was a singular talent. His decade-long solo career began with the home-recorded album Roman Candle, which marks its 30th anniversary this week; his fame peaked with the Oscar-nominated 1997 song “Miss Misery”, featured prominently in the final moments of the Gus Van Sant film Good Will Hunting as Matt Damon’s troubled genius honks down the highway to go see about a girl. Then, on 21 October 2003, he took his own life after many years of depression exacerbated by drug use. He was 34 years old. His sad end invited comparisons with Kurt Cobain, as well as a morbid sort of star worship among better-to-burn-out-than-to-fade-away bozos who found glamour and authenticity in his real-life suffering. Portrayed as a rock ’n’ roll martyr, he began his posthumous rule as indie’s “torment saint”, an ill-fitting reputation given extra weight by William Todd Schultz’s 2013 biography of that title, named after a mishearing of the words “torn mainsail” in the obscure non-album track “Go By”.

It’s ill-fitting because the tortured-artist caricature is far too narrow to encompass Smith’s achievements, let alone who he really was. Those who knew him personally were appalled by the death-cult myth-making that accompanied his suicide, and many chose to remain silent for years, shunning intrusive press enquiries. Nickolas Rossi’s 2014 documentary on the musician, Heaven Adores You, which was supported by Smith’s friends and collaborators, attempted to shift the focus to his skill as a songwriter, while also highlighting his goofy sense of humour. But by that point, he had already entered popular culture as a cypher for Gen-X ennui and self-loathing. The following year, the adult animated series Rick and Morty featured an episode in which the mad scientist Tiny Rick, drunk on power, is subdued by being forced to listen to Smith’s mournful ballad “Between the Bars”. “Oh, God, what kind of world is this?” moans Tiny Rick, as the song is pumped into his ears. “I didn’t ask to be born!”

Though it’s true that sadness in its many forms was one of Smith’s central preoccupations, neither he nor his music were defined by it. The spare waltz that defeats Tiny Rick appears on Smith’s third solo album, 1997’s Either/Or. It’s played acoustically at an unhurried pace and combines a seductive lyric about finding solace in booze with a melody that perfectly captures its quiet desperation. In the chorus, a dark E-flat minor hits you like a gut punch because your ears expect a more optimistic E-flat major, and the song returns to that unstable chord to finish, denying you any conventional harmonic resolution. It’s a masterly composition that eclipses anything by Smith’s own idols, including the Beatles or Elvis Costello – sad, yes, but too wondrous to feel strictly morose. And he didn’t write it strung out and crying into an empty glass of Jameson. It was apparently knocked into shape while he was watching the swords-and-sandals TV show Xena: Warrior Princess.

From the beginning, Smith explored misery philosophically, treating it with respect as a facet of the human experience that was worthy of deep interrogation. He approached it without fear or embarrassment and found in it the implacable grandeur of ordinary life – its sometimes ugly beauty, unbearable but precious, and as compelling as a white-hot light bulb is to a bug at night. When Smith used that image in “Condor Ave”, a brisk story song on Roman Candle about a hit-and-run death of a drunk, he suggested that sometimes a “moth gets crushed” because the “light bulb really loved him very much”. The characters he sang about saw attraction to disaster as a legitimate form of longing – an idea that he returned to in “True Love”, a posthumously released song about drug dependency. If there’s little obvious catharsis in his micronarratives, perhaps it’s because Smith’s narrators don’t want to let pain go. They are nourished by it.

You sense this impulse in Smith’s performances, too, particularly in the hush of his vocals. Lyrics that other musicians might have delivered anthemically, or at least with some force, refuse to release their tension as a whisper. When John Lennon yelled, “Mama, don’t go/Daddy come home” in his 1970 song “Mother”, he was applying the principles of the US psychotherapist Arthur Janov’s “primal therapy”, in which screaming at the top of your lungs would help you to purge yourself of your traumas. Listen to that song today, and you’ll feel sadness but also a liberation from it. The same goes for when Kurt Cobain hollered “Beat me out of me!” in Nirvana’s 1991 rocker “Aneurism”, a statement of self-loathing as explicit as any that Smith ever made. Cobain’s gutsy performance, however, renders the line a life-affirming refrain that you could plausibly dance to. It’s exhilarating.

Such moments of escape are rare on Smith’s records because getting free doesn’t seem to be the point – beyond, of course, the strange liberty of creation itself that I’m certain he enjoyed. Instead, the listener is invited to engage with misery as a vital force, capable of enriching us through the understanding that it brings. Why else begin his solo career with “Roman Candle”, an album opener and title track that approaches anger as tenderly as others might deal with love? Or quickly follow it up on the same LP with a series of songs about alienation (“No Name #1”), hopelessness (“No Name #2”) and other forms of despair, before reaching the climax that is “Last Call”, another immersion in the kind of fury only possible for those whose rage is ultimately always directed at themselves? Listen to that record from beginning to end, and you’ll vividly feel all of those lows, yet the songs give you strength. They don’t defeat you, and they don’t set out to do so. They look upon these feelings with a rare compassion.

That’s why those who feel desperate, as Geldof probably did, find so much comfort in Smith’s work. Thirty years later, his songs remain an inspiration to other musicians, most notably Phoebe Bridgers. And they continue to offer consolation to those who need it. “Depression is like a woman in black,” Carl Jung once observed. “Invite her in, offer her a seat, treat her like a guest and listen to what she wants to say.”