Le maudit Mo D.

maudit artist #1: elliott smith

I have selected twenty artists and do-gooders that I admire and will be writing about them in November as part of my covenant with NaBloPoMo, which I intend to take very seriously.

Most of my favorite musical artists evoke a specific time and place in my life, and hearing their music takes me back to those days. Cat Stevens takes me back to the late '70s, when my parents were still married, I wore thick-soled orthopedic shoes, and the family TV had a chunky knob on it. Nirvana is high school, mostly the night of April 8, 1994, sitting shivah in the C-Juana High parking lot. The New Pornographers is last summer, my pre-nup freak-out, crying in my car. Elliott Smith, along with a bunch of others, is my twenties, long nights alone with my headphones, letting the sweetest boy in the world sing me to sleep.

Either/Or remains, in my mind, probably the greatest album of the 1990s (Elliott and Neutral Milk Hotel can fight over that honor as far as I'm concerned). Freakin' exquisite. Elliott was one of few singer-songwriter boys who could pull of sensitive in a sincere way. He looked like he had gotten into a few too many bar fights, but that there was always some girl in a cardigan and Mary Janes lingering nearby with an ice pack. Elliott said nice things about Celine Dion even as those of us in the indie snob community spoke ill of her receiving the Oscar for Best Original Song over our beloved. Somewhere I have a cassette tape of me being a total Celine-hating snarkosaurus on the airwaves of Northampton on the night of the 1998 Oscars. I am not proud.

And so, in 2003, he died. And a few posthumous albums came out. And now, he's like Kurt and Jimi and Janis to those of us who came of age in the '90s. Oh, Elliott!

Posted by Zerd at November 1, 2007 10:39 AM