From A Basement On The Hill Turns 20

There is no satisfying way to write about Elliott Smith because everything he did defied resolution. He played in deliberately ambiguous scales. His songs had no prevailing mood. He made music not to impart knowledge but to stoke a sense of constant questioning.

Inspired by the existentialist philosophy of Soren Kierkegaard — who he studied at Hampshire College — Smith was totally disinterested in determinacy of any kind. Instead, he wrote a series of koans that never resolved themselves but left his listener in perpetual inquiry. Is this Elliott Smith song sad or happy? Doesn’t matter. It’s everything and nothing, X and O, either and or, pretty and ugly all at once. His death, like his music, never came close to reaching a satisfying verdict.

When he died on October 21, 2003 of an apparent suicide, the coroner’s report included a number of suspicious details which seemed to trouble the idea of a self-afflicted death (I won’t recount them here, they’re well documented). Police never further pursued his case, and instead left his death hanging in the air — one more unresolved matter in a life full of them.

Then there was the matter of the several hours’ worth of recorded music he’d left behind on reels of recording tape. Two months after this death, around Christmastime, Smith’s family reached out to Rob Schnapf (who’d co-produced every Smith album since Either/Or) and Joanna Bolme (Smith’s former girlfriend who’d helped with the mixing of Either/Or) to recalibrate the material into a posthumous album. They found hardly any documentation of Smith’s intention for the material — no rationale behind the songs, no track sequencing, no mastering notes. But they heard in the music a mix between the intimacy of his early solo works and a range of experimental recording techniques — including ambient feedback, modulating octaves, and tape disturbance — that was reminiscent of the Beatles’ White Album. The lyrics were less oblique than any he’d written in years. The detuned and distorted music — British invasion chords meeting inbent melodies — about as stomach-churning as a ride on a broken waltzer.

Smith had himself tentatively titled the material From A Basement On The Hill after the Malibu studio his friend David McConnell owned, and where another friend had redirected Smith after he’d fallen out with occasional collaborator Jon Brion. McConnell possibly had a better idea than anyone of Smith’s intentions for the material, yet he was curiously absent from the album’s credits. For reasons unknown, Smith’s family never gave him the call.

And so — perhaps as Smith would have wanted — there is no satisfying way to write about From A Basement On The Hill. Released 20 years ago today, around a year after Smith’s death, the album isn’t the one he would have made. It is surely cleaner, sequenced more arbitrarily, as well as missing the unfortunately named (though excellent) songs “Suicide Machine” and “Abused.” The album isn’t quite him, but neither is it anywhere near enough of misstep to justify anger towards it. We cannot write the album off as a perfect swansong, nor can we find satisfaction in begrudging it. From A Basement On The Hill, like all of Smith’s work, offers no solutions and no release. “Last stop for a resolution/ End of the line, into confusion,” he sings on “Coast To Coast,” the album’s very first words.

The human mind is terrible at tolerating this kind of irresolution. Fans have fabricated their own narratives in order to divine some kind of cheap catharsis. They often refer to From A Basement On The Hill as Smith’s “suicide note,” despite the fact that Smith wrote these tracks over multiple years, and recorded them while in the healthiest emotional and physical state of his life. For the last several months of his life, he no longer ate red meat nor drank coffee. He had been sober for up to a year before his death, replacing his addictions with a monomaniacal fixation on a mixing board that the Beatles used for their last studio album — which he eventually acquired after months of dreaming about it — before discarding the machine from the ’60s, because it was, as he told McConnell, “a total piece of shit.”

Towards the end of his life, Smith was a cartoon grouch. He was also full of forgiveness and humility. He was sane, though he occasionally suffered paranoid delusions concerning DreamWorks, his former record label. He was in love. He harbored an adolescent kind of temper, which his lyrics reflected (“You disappoint me/ You people raking in on the world,” he sang on “A Distorted Reality Is Now A Necessity To Be Free”). And he had a mundane, adult sense of anger (“I saw an evil emperor wearing my clothes,” as per “Strung Out Again.”)

Even still, people today treat Elliott Smith as merely bywords for anguish and pain rather than recognizing him for his plurality. By idolizing him in this fashion we are holding him at arm’s length, the way people keep addicts at a distance. Had he lived to this day, he would have been referred to phlegmatically as a “sad boy.” Yet there isn’t a single song in his catalog, let alone on From A Basement On The Hill, that is straightforwardly sad — menacingly happy, sure, as is the particular case of “Let’s Get Lost,” but never wholly sad.

There is a great need to contain Smith, to turn him into a question with an easy answer, rather than as the koan he lived and died as. This is understandable in a way. We are treated to surely no more than 20 artists like this in our lifetime, who, like Smith, seem to grow at one with the air, their art as effortless as a birdcall, with no gap between their song and their breath.

If Smith truly did have a birdcall, I’ve long thought it would be the weakly triumphant interlude of “Twilight.” To this day, I have never heard anything that moves me more than the sounds which follow these words: “I could make you smile/ If you stayed a while/ But how long will you stay with me, baby?” A chorus of crickets and night frogs coalesce until they sound like overburdened machinery on a hot night, Smith plays a mellotron or a Rhodes organ or maybe even a theremin — I can’t quite tell — and hums a melody that ascends, then falls into entropy, which he repeats over and over.

Is it a happy or a sad melody? It’s neither. It’s simply a fond farewell to a friend.