Elliott Smith Top Dozen, #2

I did one of these a while back.  I think I could write a new one every couple months, mainly because ELLIOTT SMITH WAS INCAPABLE OF WRITING A BAD SONG.  (A joke, sort of.  Actually, another post might be titled, “Worst ES Songs,” though that one would be exceedingly short….).  So, since the last top dozen, I’ve fallen in love with a batch of different tunes.  Here they are:

•Stickman.  This is an extraordinarily important song in the ES corpus.  I will have a lot to say about it in the biography.  (“Some monster off-stage killing sons”).

•Junkbond Trader.  I like the less fancy version, with the line “Night brought you to no decision but to execute every day with precision.”

•Go By.  Gorgeous.  Sometimes I hear the words as “Don’t Die.”

•Half Right.  One of Tony Lash’s favorite ES songs, by the way.

•Plainclothes Man.  Check out the video on youtube.

•Angel in the Snow.  Lovely intro that always makes me want to listen all the way through.

•True Love.  A drug song that did not make it onto Basement because it was a drug song.  Sad, painful, beautiful.

•Can’t Make a Sound.  In part about seizures.  I love how it builds.  ”The hero killed the clown.”

•Pretty Mary K.  Curiously large number of military references in Figure 8.  Perfect illustration of ES’s fascination with passing chords as he moves musically to the line “Here’s what you get, for things that haven’t happened yet.”

•LA.  Guitar rhythm sweet.  Listened to this a lot in LA two weeks ago, on Sunset.

•Mr. Goodmorning.  This “guy” shows up in 2 songs.

•Everything Means Nothing to Me.  My son’s favorite ES song.  This is the sort of number almost no other member of his cohort could have possibly written.

•Wouldn’t Mama Be Proud?  OK, it’s a baker’s dozen, but couldn’t leave this one off.  The long stemmed glasses, a movie, and a pleasant dream in mid-air.

(Picture, btw, is from the “No Confidence Man” 7-inch.  It’s an insert.  Beside Elliott is Pete Krebs).

Very First Elliott Smith-Related Vinyl?

Got this from Denny Swofford at Cavity Search.  It’s CSR2, the first Heatmiser 7-inch, on virginal white vinyl no less. What was CSR1? That’s actually a little complicated, but the simplest answer is Hazel’s J. Hell (on orange vinyl).  Hazel and Heatmiser played together frequently in Portland in the early 90s, at places like the X-Ray Cafe and Satyricon. 

Elliott Smith Biography, News & Updates

As some of you know, for the past year I’ve been working on a full-length biography of musician Elliott Smith, to be published by Bloomsbury (the publisher for my Diane Arbus book, which came out in September). So far I’ve spoken with dozens of people and conducted over 50 hours of interviews. The book is a total labor of love, I’m happy to say. My belief is that Smith was a genius songwriter and an infinitely fascinating, sympathetic person—exceptionally smart, humble, thoughtful, compassionate. The book’s focus is the music, the art; the goal is to compose an affectionate, insightful, balanced, fair account of the life, in all its wonderful complexity. To date my writing has been psychobiographical. I explore, in my other books, the subjective origins of creativity. This book is different. It is not a psychobiography. It’s straight biography, with no explicit psychological analysis (though there will be some of that, as there is in all biography). I’m excited by this shift in direction. It takes my writing down a new path, one that’s been evolving for years, I now realize. Oh, current working title:  THE REFLECTED SOUND OF EVERYTHING.

Now and then I’ll post updates here as the work progresses. I don’t want to share too many details; I prefer to hold them till the book appears. Mainly I’m excited to share the news that the book is coming along well. I think it will amount to a semi-new Elliott, or at least a fuller, richer portrait than the one presently in place. I do not pretend to “know all the answers”—no one can. But I feel I have a solid sense of who Elliott was, one that grows and changes every day. Let me know if you have thoughts or questions. I’ll do my best to answer as many as I can. —Todd

I’m on Twitter

So for all the ill-conceived soundbites you can possibly absorb, go here.

Radio Interview, on Diane Arbus and “An Emergency in Slow Motion”

I had a blast doing this with Barbara Demarco-Barrett in LA.  My segment begins at 28:30.  You can listen here.

Exceptional New Arbus Book Review

In The Telegraph, by Lucy Davies.  Read it HERE.

“An Emergency in Slow Motion: The Inner Life of Diane Arbus,” New Reviews

NPR HERE…. Booklist HERE…. The Economist HERE…. Vogue HERE…. The Telegraph HERE…. The Independent HERE…. The Advocate HERE…. Shelf Awareness HERE…. Brain Pickings HERE…. Portland Mercury HERE… AnOther Magazine HERE

A Word or Two on Psychobiography, and my Diane Arbus Book

My Arbus book is out today (“An Emergency in Slow Motion:  The Inner LIfe of Diane Arbus,” Bloomsbury).  There is an amazon link to the right, and info about the book, including many reviews, to the left.  Yesterday was the first day of my class on Psychobiography, which I teach at Pacific University.  One thing we talked about was this:  the study of lives begins and ends in mystery.  What I try to accomplish in my work is a fractional understanding, a partial illumination.  As I say on page 8-9 of the Arbus book itself:  ”It would be foolish and more than misleading to assert that psychobiography answers every question there is about a person. It doesn’t and can’t. Nothing can. Lives aren’t experiments, variables can’t be controlled and pitted against one another post hoc. No causal model emerges. Complete objectivity, if such a thing even exists in the world, is patently unachievable. But setting all such facts aside, it is possible to know Arbus better, to understand some of what she was up to and who she was, to investigate reasons behind her actions, especially her need to take pictures, and to arrive at an image—perhaps a little grainy or blurred here and there—of the whole of her psychological life. My aim in all this is to be as accurate as I possibly can be, and to show an Arbus no one has ever seen before. And if a photograph is a ‘secret about a secret,’ as Arbus famously put it, then this book is a password. It opens up secrets. It gets you in.”

“Dark Secrets”

Stellar profile of my Arbus book in the Daily Beast, by fabulous poet/journalist Olivia Cole.  Go HERE.

40 years ago today

Diane Arbus, RIP.  A very fine article at the UK Guardian that shows how and why the passion for Arbus’s art lives on.  Don’t skip the comments section.  (LINK)