1995: Elliott Smith, Elliott Smith

By Niko Stratis

There’s a coffee table book I keep on the shelf, a plastic shelled hardcover collection of photos by Autumn DeWilde highlighting a favourite subject of hers. In many of them, he is wearing those outfits that feel like costumes in press clippings and album covers. He’s wearing the T shirt from the Either/Or cover, or the faded grey New Balance sweater from the cover of Figure 8. Most striking of all, in many of the memories preserved here, Elliott Smith is smiling.

I wrote bad poetry when I was a teenager because that is what sad teenagers do when they are struggling with emotions that are too complex to process or fully understand. I filled ringed notebooks hidden in pockets and backpacks and white plastic Super A grocery bags half full of stolen beer cans that followed me from house party to bush party and when I got drunk and high and paranoid and sad I would sneak out of the party and walk home with my feelings and once I finally stopped to rest I’d write bad poetry as a means to understand everything that consumed and threatened to claim me. 

There’s something that happens when someone who has lived a life impacted by the weight of tragic circumstance dies in a tremendously tragic fashion. The photos of them smiling and laughing fade and lose their prominence. We want difficult lives to have meant something, and so we remember them as troubled and struggling. Icons and figureheads of emotions; they have ceased to be real people. They lived hard and paid the price for it, as there is a cost associated with falling victim to the whims of impulses you cannot control. Smith, like so many, was subjected to this. A sad songwriter writing painful songs that was never granted the grace and humanity of being capable of a wide range of emotions. 

Sad is too simple of a feeling, when, really, it contains darkness, whimsy, and hope at play as well. Smith wrote to his sadness, but also his wonder at the world around him, a historian of the Pacific Northwest as drugs and mental health struggles started to envelop the scene around him. 

I grew up in the Yukon, a quiet and lonely place that felt like it was always just up and to the left of everything else in the world. A lot of my earliest memories I struggle to find now decades later, lost to a black hole left behind from the drinking that began when I was young and the drugs I did when I got a little older than young, oh and lifelong undiagnosed ADHD, as well as the urgent and anxious depression. A sadness, surely. But I know I wasn’t just sad.

Smith’s self-titled LP, released by Kill Rock Stars in July of 1995, is a testament to what beauty can grow from dark places. It’s a masterwork of simple desires buoyed by the strength of very few tools. Smith’s voice hushed and strained and beautiful, the breaths he takes as he prepares to find the next words add life and texture to the familiar rhythms of a folk song. His guitar playing the controlled burn of a skilled craftsman, the visceral sliding sound of his hands working the breadth of a fretboard come so naturally you might feel them on your skin if your eyes are closed just right when listening. The rare harmonica to create extraneous rhythm but never too much, nothing more than is needed to say what he needs to.  

His songs lived in headphones that stayed atop my head at night as I fell asleep, staring out of the window of my basement bedroom and into the unending lights of the Yukon summer night and wondering what I might be capable of if I was to ever remove myself from this place. I had always been sad and felt alone and never fully understood why. I couldn’t voice feelings of dysphoria or queer desire because I lacked language and understanding of them and all I knew was that I felt ashamed that I felt so sad and desperate and broken.

Smith seemed broken in his work too, but offering a sadness and despair that was lived in and real. It is something to feel sadness and wonder when you might finally escape it and feel something new, but Smith seemed to know that he would never elude it and instead used it as a lens to view the world through. A curious sadness that found hope in all the corners that never got much light. 

I didn’t speak when I was young, and as I grew into my teens I tried to talk as little as possible for a long time. I liked the observation that silence offered and liked to watch the people and the world move around me and consider my place in it. Never at the center but often at the outskirts and sometimes even a participant in the machinations of its movements. 

Elliott Smith is a collection of songs that sings to this same fascination. Stark and somber music that trades in beauty about drug use and drug users, like “Alphabet Town” and “Coming Up Roses.” There are people in the worlds crafted in Smith’s work that are users and addicts, but they are real and alive, and they are all granted the grace of humanity. The narrator, Smith, sees them for they are without judgment or callous disregard. He only wants to tell their stories, because they are his stories too and the stories of the people he sees that many would rather not. 

You see me smiling and you think it’s a frown, Smith sings in “St. Ides Heaven,” and even at this early stage in his career he was trying to distance himself from the stigma of the sad and tortured artist. He saw his own work clearly; he would later call this the darkest record he ever made, but wants to convey that he is not just the sadness in his work. That he is, in fact, capable of so much joy. 

It is easily remembered as an album starkly about the onset of addiction in Smith’s life, “The White Lady Loves You More” and “Good To Go” seemingly about heroin and its grip on him––and I’m certain that it was present in his life and informing his work––but even now it feels like stories he is telling about a world he sees but is not always the center of. On the outskirts looking in. 

“The Biggest Lie,” comes in at the end of the record, and people say it’s about suicide. Because Smith eventually takes his own life––two stab wounds to the heart––and such an elaborate and dramatic death is a veneer over the work he left behind. It’s hard to not hear the end of the line in the words he wrote as he traveled a hard and difficult road, but I don’t hear “The Biggest Lie” as a suicide, but a desire for freedom. He is tired of performance and being perceived as something that doesn’t feel right and the pain caused by someone else’s actions and he just wants to get out and sometimes an easy lie is all that you need to push someone away so you can escape too. 

I told a thousand lies when I was struggling, too, and the distance you can conjure between lives feels like an easy answer to getting out. It never is, but it feels at times like the only way out is for everyone to believe a lie. I used to imagine faking my own death, and once everyone had grieved, I could slip out and start fresh and be someone who was all the things I felt I couldn’t be and I just had to tell that one, big lie and then I would be free. I never did, but I understand the desire all too well. 

Smith’s work is used as a record of his life, and his self-titled record proof that the darkness that would claim him was always haunting him. But there is so much more in the darkness here, so much life and wonder and yearning for something beyond it. It’s a beautiful, haunting record that will follow you for all your days and tell you stories of his past if you’re willing to listen without judgment and you can remember him smiling and posing in photos wearing thrift store uniforms. 

Smith is wearing a wry and disarming smile in many of the photos you will find of him, a man holding too heavy a burden to carry for too long, but nonetheless chose to find a way to tell stories about the world that moved around him with a desire to find beauty where we might not look for it. 

Niko Stratis is a culture writer based in Toronto, Ontario by way of the Yukon where she spent close to two decades working as a journeyman glazier before coming out as a trans woman in her late 30s and being forced to abandon her previous line of work.

 As a trans woman now in her 40s, Niko provides a unique voice in cultural spaces seeking to work through lifelong traumas and emotional highs and lows through her work.

She has twice been nominated for a digital publishing award for her personal essay work, is a team writer for queer outlet Autostraddle, and her work regularly appears in outlets like Spin magazine, Xtra and more. Her column in Catapult, Everyone Is Gay, was a widely read series that explored gender and sexuality in 90s music and music criticism and its impact on her as a closeted queer and trans woman in her teen years. Her newsletter, Anxiety Shark, is a self-published weekly essay collection using music to explore her relationship to themes like gender and sobriety.

Niko is working on her debut novel, GIRLS OF SUMMER, a punk rock novel about three friends spending a life-altering weekend at the Vans Warped Tour at a dusty Calgary speedway in 2002. The novel examines growing up isolated, lonely and desperate for a connective link to a perfect unknowable place that might tell you exactly who you were meant to be; about understanding your own transness through exposure to something so pure and perfect; queer love, desire and loss.

 She lives in Toronto with her fiancé, their dog Bowie and two cats Winona and Ramona. She is a former smoker and a cancer.