“I think that’s such a popular sound now. “I feel like he definitely inspired a lot of people to just start making shit in their house,” Bridgers says. At no point did it obscure his way with graceful, pristine melody. Like his 1995 self-titled LP and 1994’s Roman Candle before it, Either/Or was recorded in various apartments in his adopted hometown of Portland, Oregon, Smith playing every instrument himself. So much of Elliott Smith’s appeal comes down to approachability. “You’ve lived it and understand it, or you haven’t and you won’t be able to.
But Smith has become secondhand for something more diffuse and difficult to define: a raw vulnerability that can translate in so many forms. If it’s Springsteen, you’re almost certain to be hit by shiplike choruses laced with sax and bells. If a young songwriter draws influence from Dylan, you’ll likely hear it in an incandescent turn of phrase, or the way they stretch and slant their voice to sound just like his. It’s not so much about signifiers, though, as it is a feeling. Everyone I know that makes music is ripping this guy off.’” “Listening to Either/Or,” Dacus says, “I’m like, ‘Oh.
He’s left an impression on a cross-section of contemporary pop that transcends genre-from the poetics of Parks and Lucy Dacus to the hushed atmospherics of Eilish, from the open-hearted hip-hop of slowthai to the ambient melancholy of Phoebe Bridgers, whose Grammy-nominated 2020 breakthrough, Punisher, takes its name from a song in which she imagines herself stalking Smith through Silver Lake, the Los Angeles neighborhood he used to haunt.
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His songs have been covered by Billie Eilish, Julien Baker, and Mac Miller, sampled by Lil B, and interpolated by Frank Ocean. Though Smith had clearly come of age studying the melodies of Lennon and McCartney, his river of influence has split and spilled outward in surprising directions, resonating worlds away from its source. Parks’ tattoo is the title of Smith’s definitive 1997 LP, a record that, 25 years later, has become both blueprint and spiritual text for a generation of artists who discovered the singer-songwriter’s work well after his death in 2003. When I'm in the studio, almost every time I’ll think of him: What would he do, or how would he approach the story I have in my head? So, I thought, ‘Why not carry him with me in some way?’” But I see him almost as this presence that follows me. “It’s funny,” the UK singer-songwriter tells Apple Music, “because I know a lot of people-a lot of artists-with Elliott Smith tattoos. It might have been more interesting had he sung "Angeles.On her 21st birthday, Arlo Parks decided to get a new tattoo-the words “Either/Or” inked on her ankle in her close friend’s handwriting. soared after he took his bow at the Oscars with Celine Dion and Trisha Yearwood. Ironically, "Angeles" was included on the Good Will Hunting soundtrack, which won Smith the acclaim of Hollywood's biggest, brightest, and best connected voting body, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences.
The lyrics are a darkly biting rejection of the hypercapitalist dream machinery of Los Angeles (it would make a great theme song for Smith's label, Kill Rock Stars). "Angeles" is equally ethereal - Smith's acoustic fingerpicking spins out notes which briskly move around a single atmospheric keyboard chord, like aural minnows swimming toward a solitary light at the surface of the water. He sings, in his endearingly limited whisper, of late-night drinking and introspection, and his subdued strumming creates a minor-key mood befitting the mysteries of self. "Between the Bars," for example, plays Smith's strengths perfectly.
The humbler arrangements are better suited to the sparse equipment. While the full-band songs are catchy and smart, Smith's recording equipment isn't quite up to the standards set by the Beatles and the Beach Boys. The most alluring numbers, however, are still his quietly melancholy acoustic ones. Several of the songs mimic the melody mastery of pop bands from 1960s. While he still plays all the instruments himself, he plays more of them. Elliott Smith's third album sees his one-man show getting a little more ambitious.