Elliot Smith, x/o

I�ve been working a lot of overtime lately. From my desk, if I crane my neck, I can see out the picture window of the attorney�s office directly across me. Evening comes earlier each day as summer draws to a close, and in this climate-controlled office environment�especially with the lonely atmosphere that descends on an office after normal business hours�it�s not difficult to look out on the darknening cityscape and the great lake beyond, and imagine that it�s early December, a time of year drawn with cold, barren lines and painted in bleak gray tones, whose uncompromising austerity provides a cleansing renewal in some perverse way, as our bleak and unaccomodating climate forces us to do yet another personal inventory, perhaps to be more ingenuitive and make do with what we have. ("Brother, can you spare sunshine for a brother? Old Man Winter�s in the air.")

This making-do is what I sensed Elliot Smith doing throughout his career, in songs that were often bleak but not hopeless: though his voice may often be fragile, his lyrics dejected and angry, there still seems a current of hope in his best work, as if by merely writing and recording another song, he had gained another small, hard-won victory, and staved off oblivion for yet another day. Hence his recurring and inevitably prescient theme of death and a relieved, near-miss attitude about it that leaves him appreicating �any situation where I�m better off than dead�. This is why I read his songs as optimistic rather than morbid, even given the circumstances�both known and speculated�surrounding his eventual (self-)destruction.

Either/Or is usually hailed as the zenith of Elliot Smith�s ouvre, and is brilliant in its own way, but my money�s always been on xo. Maybe it�s because I was clued in to the Elliot Smith phenomenon when it was released, and didn�t have to discover it retroactively the way I did with Either/Or. Or maybe it�s the way its tone isn�t as uniformly bleak as its predecessor�s: whereas Either/Or was all spare, subdued arrangements that only rose to a roar on a couple of occasions, xo paints with a more diverse template, and has a boisterous, chiming chorus to match every hushed, foreboding passage. The production value has been upped, sure, and there are more instruments in the mix, but not once is the core integrity of a song compromised. "Waltz #2" had "radio favorite" stamped all over it, and might have done even better commercially if it weren�t for its emotional ambivalence. �Baby Britain�, however, is the real treasure here, and joins the thin ranks of songs that are, in my estimation, absolutely perfect pop songs: nothing more can or should be done to improve it. It coasts in on a jaunty piano line and trots away three minutes later. While the music pays homage to the Beatles, the lyrics provide an endearing personification of America as a bipolar, self-destructive artistic animal�a portrait far too familiar to its creator. �Pitseleh� and especially �Tomorrow Tomorrow� are gorgeous acoustic reveries, the latter a triplet-based flurry of ethereal but articulate guitar lines beneath some of Smith�s best lyrics ever. Just as it�s blasphemous to say that I like this album better than Either/Or, I�ve found few people who agree with me that �Waltz #1� is better than �Waltz #2�, but how can you argue with lines like �Every time the day darkens down and goes away / pictures open in my head of me and you�? How can you argue with the falsetto delivery of a line like �I wish I�d never seen your face�?

It�s been six years since xo was released, four since Figure 8 supplanted xo�s fragile blueprint, and nearly one year since Smith either did or didn�t stab himself in the heart. In the days following the news, I had the following selfish and morbid thought more than once: Well, at least we got a little more out of him than we did from Jeff Buckley. For me, xo could have been his last album and I would have been satisfied. In the pessimist�s universe of diminishing returns, we�ll take whatever we can get, and no victory is too small. I made it home from work, I had dinner, I have a place to sleep tonight; how can I not be grateful? Isn�t that all we can really hope to do, is live another day?

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