Harrowing opener “Needle in the Hay” was later chosen by film director Wes Anderson to soundtrack a suicide-attempt scene in his 2001 movie The Royal Tenenbaums.

Smith admitted in interviews that his words drew from his own experience with drug and alcohol dependencies and suicidal episodes. Lyrically, the album wallowed in depression, with hefty dashes of addiction and loneliness as seasoning. Ides Heaven.”įor the most part, Smith stuck to the instrumentation style of Roman Candle, focusing on the mix of his breathy, pained singing voice and his methodically melodic acoustic guitar playing. The album was partially recorded and mixed at Heatmiser drummer Tony Lash’s house and featured Gust’s guitar on the song “Single File” as well as guest vocals from the Spinanes’ Rebecca Gates on “St.

Smith’s second, eponymous LP was issued in 1995 on the Kill Rock Stars label and showed marked songwriting progression. But songs like “Condor Ave.” and “Last Call” showed an emotional potential that reviewers linked to Nick Drake and Bob Dylan. The songs were ostensibly home demos deemed not suitable for Heatmiser (Smith being one of the two principal songwriters in that band), evidenced by a quartet of songs being titled “No Name #1,” “#2,” etc. Roman Candle, a set of spare, acoustic songs, was released on Cavity Search Records in 1994. The band released two albums on Frontier Records - 1993’s Dead Air and 1994’s Cop and Speeder - and was signed to Virgin, which put out their final album, Mic City Sons in 1996 on subsidiary Caroline Records.īy that time, Smith was already two albums into a solo career. After graduating from Hampshire college in Amherst, Massachusetts, Smith moved back to Portland with university pal Neil Gust in 1992 and started the group Heatmiser. The Texas native, born Stephen Paul Smith, spent his teenage years in Portland, OR. Smith’s refined sense of arrangement and composition made him a singular figure among singer-songwriters and produced a stellar solo catalog until his presumed suicide in 2003. Elliott Smith emerged from the Pacific Northwest rock scene of the early 1990s, a performer soaked in both grunge’s soul-baring angst and Beatles-infused pop.

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