Indie rock icon Elliott Smith was confirmed dead yesterday at age 34. He was discovered in the kitchen of his Los Angeles home at 12:15 p.m. on Tuesday by his unidentified live-in girlfriend and later pronounced dead at the hospital of knife wounds to the chest in an apparent suicide.
“He was perhaps his generation’s most gifted singer-songwriter,” his record label, Dreamworks, summarized on their Web site. “His enormous talent could change your life in a whisper.”
Smith was it. With a stage performance entirely lacking in showmanship or spectacle, Smith could command a room with only his presence, a guitar and a handful of 3-minute songs. One of the most powerful shows that I have seen was one of his. He played an acoustic guitar sitting on an old waiting room chair, alone in the middle of a large stage at the Town Hall in New York City. He played for about 80 minutes, until his voice started giving out, but as always the audience wanted more.
To his multitude of fans, the shock came with full 20/20 hindsight and comparisons to Kurt Cobain will be made, but not here. In numerous interviews, Smith insisted that his lyrics were not to be taken literally, not to be seen as confessional, but at this point it is difficult to separate his affecting lyrics about isolation, loss, addiction and failure from the songwriter himself (Smith had spoken in recent years about battles with alcoholism).
Beginning his career in the early ’90s in punk bands, Smith soon developed his own spare style, often compared to the likes of Nick Drake and the Beatles. His dark, introspective lyrics and stark guitar playing made Smith a favourite at campus radio throughout North America, a no-frills indie icon that put out five solo albums that received much critical acclaim but little mainstream success. That is, until his track “Miss Misery” from the Good Will Hunting soundtrack was nominated for an Oscar in 1998. Probably the public’s enduring image of Smith will be of the clearly ill-at-ease, white-suited musician awkwardly performing the song at the awards ceremony that year (he lost to Celine Dion’s Titanic theme, but hey, it was the Oscars).
Towards the end of each of his shows, Smith would inevitably ask the audience: “What do you want to hear, a fast song or a slow song? A happy song or a sad song?” With his premature passing, this is the saddest song he ever played.
