Elliott Smith
Elliott Smith
Steven Paul "Elliott" Smithwas an American singer, songwriter, and musician. Smith was born in Omaha, Nebraska, raised primarily in Texas, and lived for much of his life in Portland, Oregon, where he first gained popularity. Smith's primary instrument was the guitar, though he was also proficient with piano, clarinet, bass guitar, drums, and harmonica. Smith had a distinctive vocal style, characterized by his "whispery, spiderweb-thin delivery", and used multi-tracking to create vocal layers, textures, and harmonies...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionFolk Singer
Date of Birth6 August 1969
CityOmaha, NE
CountryUnited States of America
People can be chaos but it's hard to fit it into some creative piece that you made. It's hard.
People think they know all these things about other people, and if you ask them why they think they know that, it'd be hard for them to be convincing.
I'm just writing songs about how I feel or about how people I know feel.
It's hard to represent chaos, or like an absence of something. It's much easier to represent the presence of something or a situation.
People are so... seem so chaotic internally, but being filtered through some form, like making a record, sort of filters it down into something that can be understood.
You can't get better at things you never play.
There's always that argument to make - that you're in better company historically if people don't understand what you're doing.
I think the music business will eventually crush me, but I [smiles]... I'm ready.
I liked the idea of a self-contained, endless pursuit of perfection. But I have a problem with perfection. I don't think perfection is very artful. But there's something I liked about the image of a skater going in this endless twisted circle that doesn't have any real endpoint. So the object is not to stop or arrive anywhere; it's just to make this thing as beautiful as they can.
I don't really like New York better than Portland. It's just a different place.
I'm happy some of the time, and some of the time I'm not. But like when I see a movie, for example, that I really like, that moves me or whatever, it's usually happy and sad at the same time.
Somewhere where people aren't so mad would be nice, but I don't know if there is anywhere like that.
Everybody gets a tag. If you listen to a Velvet Underground record, you don't think, 'Godfathers of Punk.' You just think, 'This sounds great.' The tags are there in order to help try to sell something by giving it a name that's going to stick in somebody's memory. But it doesn't describe it. So 'depressing' isn't a word I would use to describe my music. But there is some sadness in it -- there has to be, so that the happiness in it will matter.
Music is worth doing just because. It doesn’t have to be justified by some political point of view, and it’s kind of insulting to the music to make it a tool for something else.