Elliott Smith's XO (3 page)

When we were working on
Either/Or,
there were times when we started to build things up more instrumentally, or talked about doing more elaborate stuff. It could have very easily gone there but this seemed to be a transitional record for Elliott. He saw what it could be but wasn’t yet comfortable with that. So it was sort of a step into the pool as opposed to jumping all the way in.

Schnapf and Tom Rothrock, who would go on to produce
XO
(and who had co-produced Heatmiser’s swan song
Mic City Sons)
also produced a good deal of
Either/Or,
mixing, overdubbing, and at times rebuilding Smith’s songs from scratch. Though it does not immediately resemble the more “hi-fi”
XO, Either/Or
is similarly rich and varied in texture and instrumentation, a remarkable balancing act between rough-edged material and precise, spacious mixing. I’ve heard some truly stellar live versions of
Either/Or
opener “Speed Trials,” but the album version (a 4-track recording of Smith’s mixed with Schnapf and Rothrock), with its tape hiss and ringing snare drum, still sounds absolutely perfect.

Smith himself was always a remarkably capable and intuitive engineer, regardless of the limited and
inconsistent equipment at his disposal. Smith had amassed a modest collection of microphones and outboard equipment at the house he shared with his bandmates in Heatmiser from the summer of 1995 to the summer of 1996, but interpersonal and creative tensions rendered it a less-than-ideal place to get work done. An extra room at JJ Gonson’s Undercover, Inc space and Smith’s own basement both served as functional places to record, but when Larry Crane opened Jackpot! Recording Studio in February of 1997, it provided Smith with a home base—a comfortable and familiar studio in which Smith could record at his own pace and hone his skill as an engineer. Crane, who had interviewed Smith for his
Tape Op
‘zine in 1996 and tracked vocals for “Pictures of Me” that same year at his home studio, recalls hearing of Smith’s wish to open a space similar to Jackpot!:

Before I started Jackpot!, [Elliott] was talking about “I’ve gotta move into a space and get a 16-track and just be able to work,” so Rebecca Gates [of the Spinanes] put us together and said, “you guys need to talk, because you’re doing the same thing.” I was like, “Oh hey, there’s no reason for us to both build studios and one of them to be empty half the time.” So he helped me find the space and move in our gear. I loved Elliott as a person—when we started off, he was just helping me build this studio and was gonna work out of there and stuff. And we became friends
out of that, and to just check everything we started recording his stuff. “Let’s test the 8-track see if that works.”

And those early things, from the first year of operation at Jackpot! were things like “Amity,” “Baby Britain,” “Cecilia/Amanda” and “Miss Misery.” I remember we did demos for a handful of songs, instrumental demos that didn’t have any vocal, where he hadn’t written the lyrics yet. Just sketching stuff out to see if the parts sat together. But I gotta admit, there was never much discussion about whether something was a demo, or if it was for a record. It was just, “hey, do you want to record something?” And I would just try to do the best job that I could. He would sneak in there and do stuff at night—“All Cleaned Out,” “I Didn’t Understand,” stuff that I didn’t even know.

Smith’s busy touring schedule in 1997 did substantially eat into the time he could use to record at Jackpot!. But, according to Crane, that did not stop Smith from continuing to meticulously demo the songs that would become
XO:

So he was on tour for weeks, months—and then he came back, threw some stuff in the back of the studio, and then went back on the road. There was little downtime—and I don’t know when and how he would’ve recorded some of these things. That’s what I mean about these
[XO]
demos. I’m sure he’d be
somewhere else, if somebody had home recording equipment or the most rudimentary anything, he’d be like “here’s my chance!”

By the time Smith was signed to DreamWorks in early 1998, he had recorded dozens of demos for the songs that would become
XO,
and had road-tested many of them as well. When Smith did not have time to demo a song in its entirety, or when the lyrics were not finished when the initial demo was recorded, he would often record two different demos of a song: one bare-bones acoustic and/or electric guitar and vocal demo, and one instrumental demo with full instrumentation. The purpose of the former was to sketch the broad outlines of the song, establishing its melody and chordal structure. The purpose of the latter was to make sure that the instrumental arrangement of each song held its own and worked properly.

Before entering Sunset Sound in early 1998 to commence work on
XO,
Smith compiled a Digital Audio Tape (DAT) of demo versions, labeled with the album’s earlier title:
Grand Mal.
(According to the
Big Takeover
interview, the album was originally to be called
XO,
but Smith deemed the title too close to
Either/Or
and renamed it
Grand Mal,
only to be contacted by a band with that same name and change
it back.) The tracklist for this DAT is as follows:

“Waltz #1” Demo

“Better Off Than Dead” [“Sweet Adeline”] Instrumental

“Cecilia/Amanda” Demo

“Anything Is Better Than Nothing” [“New Monkey”] Organ Intro

“Anything Is Better Than Nothing” [“New Monkey”] Instrumental

“I Didn’t Understand” Acoustic Guitar Demo

“Waltz #2” Demo [Full Band]

“Baby Britain” Instrumental

“Amity” Rough Mix

“Memory Lane” Rough Demo

“Bottle Up and Explode” Demo

“Bled White” Acoustic Guitar Demo

“Baby Britain” Acoustic Guitar Demo

“Better Off Than Dead” [“Sweet Adeline”] Acoustic Guitar Demo

Crane suggests that this DAT was likely assembled to give those involved in the making of
XO
a sense of where the songs were going. An early tracklisting for
Grand Mal,
dating from prior to the Sunset sessions, offers further insight into Smith’s original conception of the record, in which the two “Waltzes” each kick off a “side” of the record:

“Waltz #1”

“Better Off than Dead” [“Sweet Adeline”]

“Cecilia/Amanda”

“Anything Is Better Than Nothing” [“New Monkey”]

“I Didn’t Understand”

“Waltz #2”

“Baby Britain”

“Amity”

“Memory Lane”

“Bottle Up and Explode”

“Bled White”

Thus, when Smith finally entered the studio to record
XO,
he was armed not only with an extensive backlog of demo recordings, but with a clear idea of the record he intended to craft as well. Obviously, this initial tracklist changed substantially over the course of recording
XO.
As it happens, these changes were not often discussed, but rather executed intuitively by Smith over the course of the album’s recording. Crane, who has gone on to record countless bands at Jackpot!, describes how such in-studio discussions are less common than some may think:

I think one perception is that there are a lot of discussions in the studio—but I think that one thing that’s always forgotten is that certain outside factors always dictate what’s going on—and one of those is budget. So you might say, “okay, we’ve got a couple weeks in the studio,” and you have 15 songs or whatever—you just have to get down to work. You can’t sit down and
go “how’s this record gonna feel?” In general, you just kinda get to work. You’ve got a budget, you’ve got time, maybe the players are only there for a certain time. And Elliott was always good at just getting to work.

Schnapf echoes this sentiment, suggesting that many of the production choices that went into
XO
were “natural” to Smith, and were not discussed at length. Indeed, Smith’s approach to writing and recording is not written in conversations—it is written in the work itself. Part of what makes Smith’s body of work so immersive—and part of what made researching this book feel like an archaeological dig—is that the clues to his creative process lie buried in an impressive pile of demos, outtakes, and live recordings.

Smith’s reworking of
XO
continued right up until its release. On June 15, 1998, when the majority of recording for
XO
had already taken place, the album was prepared for mastering with the following tracklist:

“Tomorrow, Tomorrow”

“Waltz #2”

“Baby Britain”

“Pitseleh”

“Everybody Cares, Everybody Understands”

“Bled White”

“Waltz #1”

“Amity”

“Oh Well, Okay”

“Bottle Up and Explode”

“A Question Mark”

“Sweet Adeline”

“I Didn’t Understand”

Noticeably absent from this sequence is “Independence Day,” the result of a later session intended to produce b-sides for the record. (This session also produced
Figure 8
highlight “Happiness,” as well as the instrumental b-side “Our Thing.”)

Imagining
XO
with this tracklist speaks to how effective its final sequencing is; while “I Didn’t Understand” retains its logical place at the record’s end, “Sweet Adeline” makes little sense as the album’s penultimate track, and the epic coda of “Everybody Cares, Everybody Understands” stands to be a momentum-killer so close to the album’s start. According to Crane, Smith struggled with
XO’s
sequencing, and ultimately enlisted the help of his close friend and one-time girlfriend Joanna Bolme to finalize the album’s running order.

The culmination of a year-long process of writing, recording, and reworking,
XO
was released by DreamWorks Records on August 25, 1998.

Though Elliott Smith was never particularly interested in discussing his own music, he did often speak about the music he enjoyed. When interviewed about Elvis Costello for a VH1 special, Smith described him as someone who “really likes words.” In a 1998 interview with
Interview
magazine, Smith described his own songwriting process in similar terms:

[I like] music, just the sound of things. That’s my favorite thing. I love words and it’s good to love words if you are going to sing them, but the bottom line is the way something sounds. Sometimes I’ll compromise a lyric before I’ll compromise the way something sounds, even though I hate doing that.

Of course, every songwriter has a different idea of what “sounds good.” Some favor lyrics that operate smoothly and seamlessly within tightly structured songs, others favor lyrics that expand, destabilize, and rupture their musical context. Smith definitely falls into the former category, thriving within the formal constraints of pop music. The majority of actual language Smith utilizes is the bread and butter of pop songwriting: “head,” “love,” “picture,” ambiguous “you”s and “she”s, etc. Many of Smith’s lyrics are so seamless—so formally and linguistically
unobtrusive—that they easily go by unnoticed, failing to register
as
lyrics, let alone the kind that warrant any sort of analysis.

Thus, upon a cursory listen, Smith’s craft and discipline threaten to read as a simple lack of sophistication. The opposite is, in fact, true—the more outwardly unassuming Smith’s lyrics are, the more likely it is that those lyrics are the result of countless revisions and reworkings. When asked by
The Big Takeover
whether he works on making his lyrics more “song-like,” Smith responded: “More ‘song-like’ to me equals more speaking-like. I like, if possible, to write the way that people actually speak. That’s why when people bring up comparisons to poetic singer/songwriters it gets on my nerves. I don’t feel as flowery!”

Smith’s skepticism toward the “poetic singer/songwriter” figure goes beyond a simple distaste for “flowery” language. In a frequently Myspace’d May 1998 interview with a Dutch TV station, Smith described his wariness toward “manipulative” lyrics:

The thing that’s kind of a drag about the singer-songwriter tag is that it has this connotation of being super-sentimental, kinda manipulative lyrically, as if the person singing is trying to get everybody to feel just like them. But there’s a big difference between describing … I mean, you take a picture of New York and one person will look at it and think that it’s really
depressing and frightening, and another person will look at it and think of all the fun things you could do … I think songs are kind of like that.

Smith’s wish to avoid the “manipulative” tropes of singer-songwriterdom is evident throughout
XO.
Smith does not, as many singer-songwriters do, structure his songs around his own (real or fictional) life. Many songwriters evoke broad philosophical and psychological themes to explain or justify the their personal emotions; Smith (or, rather Smith-as-narrator) offers personal emotions as a jumping off point for addressing broad philosophical and psychological themes. The tone of Smith’s lyrics is generally observational, and tends to involve a multiplicity of subjectivities and perspectives.

Smith’s interest in leaving his songs open to multiple interpretations is well documented, and best expressed in his oft-stated answer to the oft-asked question of whether or not he is a “folk” singer. When asked this question during an extremely awkward interview with MTV’s Carson Daly, Smith responded: “Folk is just a style. Folk usually has one point, and it’s usually a moral. Whereas pop, a song can mean nothing or it can mean lots of things, and no one can be sure which ones they are.” Smith echoed that sentiment in an interview with
Yahoo.com
: “Folk singers usually have
a clear point to their songs … And they usually involve a moralistic point about something you ought to do, or ought not to do, or about some injustice that’s been done to somebody. I don’t write like that.”

In closely analyzing
XO
and its lyrics, my goal is not to somehow “fix” the meaning of Smith’s songs. Instead, I offer a reading of
XO
in the hopes of affixing some of the meanings that have been consistently and problematically tethered to Smith’s imagined biography. In tracing the development of the songs that became
XO,
I hope to draw attention to the remarkable process by which Smith created, honed and refined his work. In examining Smith’s lyrics, I hope to emphasize the themes and concerns that specifically run
counter
to problematic biographical interpretations of
XO.