Elliott Smith

An Elliott Smith song can feel as if it is being sung from the next room, then a chord turns and the whole floor gives way. He built quiet music that was not soft: thumb and fingers worrying at the strings, vocal doubles tucked so close they blur, melodies sweet enough to hum after 1 listen and sour enough to make the sweetness suspicious.

Before the solo records, Smith was the bassist and a singer in Heatmiser, a Portland guitar band with distortion up front and nerves underneath. His early home-recorded songs did not reject that volume so much as fold it inward. On Elliott Smith, "Needle in the Hay" is nearly bare guitar and voice, but the attack in his right hand is hard and dry; on Either/Or, "Between the Bars" sounds tender until you notice the song is doing the persuading, not the person being persuaded.

The Beatles are the clear shadow over the chord changes, especially once the arrangements open up, but Smith did not use that language for nostalgia. He bent those clean turns into trapdoors. Big Star mattered too, less as a costume than as permission for damaged pop to stay melodic; his live cover of "Thirteen" makes the point without forcing it. When Rob Schnapf and Tom Rothrock helped shape XO, the room got larger — strings, piano, stacked backing voices — yet the songs still behave like secrets overheard through a wall.

Smith was not the porcelain figure that grew around him after his death. Friends and interviewers caught a dry, exacting musician who loved loud guitars, cheap jokes and the craft of a bridge that lands half a step away from where the ear expects. He also spoke publicly about depression and addiction, and the best writing in his catalogue does not turn pain into theatre; it catches the bargaining voice in the head, the one that sounds reasonable while leading you somewhere dangerous.

Jon Brion's keyboards and odd-coloured instrumental touches fitted the XO sessions because Smith's songs were already thinking beyond a man with a guitar. On Figure 8, "Son of Sam" bounces like piano-pop radio, while "Everything Means Nothing to Me" climbs on massed voices until it feels less triumphant than cornered. From a Basement on the Hill, assembled after Smith's death from unfinished work, lets the fuzz back in; "King's Crossing" drags itself forward with carnival menace and one of his bleakest choruses. Start anywhere and the same contradiction waits: the prettier the tune, the sharper the blade under it.